XKal
XKal Fitness
Product Strategy
New Venture
XKal is the app-based training journal that eliminates friction when tracking your workouts.
Using NFC tags and deeplinks, each piece of gym equipment behaves as a bookmark in your fitness story, allowing you to easily access what weight you lifted last time and track your progress this time.
XKal users simply tap on their chosen piece of equipment and the app instantly takes them to a video tutorial and all the exercises relevant to the equipment. It isn’t just generic equipment demos, XKal shows you tutorials for that exact machine, at that gym. There’s no more boring scrolling to find what machine and log your weight.
For gym owners, XKal is a cost effective way to make all of their equipment smart. The application can track utilisation and busy periods, helping owners make intelligent decisions around equipment purchase. This usage data is able to be used to predict member churn, and can help automate the retention process.
Startup Partnership
Peter Musco, CEO and founder of XKal approached us at the very start of his journey. Peter had a great vision of where his product needed to go and needed a team who would treat his product like their own.
Our first phase was product strategy, branding and development planning. We helped define the audience and designed a UX/UI that differentiated XKal from the crowd. We opted to use NFC tags, instead of QR codes to enable a friction free gym experience. It’s as simple as Tap & Train.
Once we knew what we were going to make, we helped Peter stage his development relative to his available capital.
Building what we Designed.
Our strategy and development teams are tightly connected, and we knew we needed to validate the core business hypothesis quickly in the MVP phase.
To do this we opted to build a very high fidelity MVP. It allowed us to test customer acquisition and app functionality simultaneously at In2Performance in Melbourne. We understand that speed to market and efficient use of capital is crucial to a startup's success. The entire development process from strategy to MVP was three months.
Post MVP we made adjustments to the commercial product and added support for coaches to build programs by simply tapping the NFC tags. Program retention is able to be measured as users tap the tags to complete their workout.
XKal was entirely developed in house using Flutter/Firebase to allow rapid cross platform deployment.
The Future
XKal completed a successful Series A round which Nakatomi participated in. We are currently helping Peter build his own development team, while remaining key to the future strategy and development of the application.
XKal is being tested at the Australian Institute of Sport and has begun commercial rollout across Snap, Fitness First and Anytime Fitness gyms.
