Guernsey Venture Challenge 2024 Spotlight: Trainerfy Limited
The Guernsey Venture Challenge kick-starts innovative startups on the island. Our competition provides a launchpad for aspiring entrepreneurs to showcase their ideas, receive expert guidance, and a chance to secure funding at the Pitch Night Final at the end of the programme.
As a participant in the Guernsey Venture Challenge, Trainerfy Limited is among the promising ventures shaping the future of Guernsey's tech ecosystem in 2024's cohort.
Pictured: Viviane & Niall Kamworth, Founders of Trainerfy Limited
In today's fast-paced world, finding a personal trainer who aligns with your fitness goals and lifestyle can be a daunting task. That's where Trainerfy comes in.
Trainerfy's mission is to make personalised fitness accessible to everyone. By leveraging technology, the platform streamlines the process of finding a suitable trainer, allowing clients to search based on location, expertise, and availability. Additionally, Trainerfy offers a comprehensive Software as a Service (SaaS) solution for personal trainers, providing them with the tools they need to grow their freelance businesses and earn a sustainable living.
With Trainerfy, clients can easily discover and book personalised training sessions with trainers who share their fitness aspirations. Trainers, on the other hand, benefit from a platform that simplifies client management, scheduling, and payment processing.
How have you enjoyed the Guernsey Venture Challenge?
We thoroughly enjoyed the learning experience from the Guernsey Venture Challenge. The Challenge is more than just a pitch at the end. It is a carefully considered structured and guided business accelerator programme that includes a few hours of mentorship and two technical masterclasses.
We were privileged enough to be paired with a mentor that we have lots in common with. This allowed for our discussions to be really open and honest. As such, our business idea has evolved since the first session. From our experience of the Startup Academy sessions, we have noticed that our understanding of how to apply theoretical knowledge in practice has elevated. Therefore, we felt well-equipped to take on this challenge as a natural progression from the Startup Academy to the Guernsey Venture Challenge.
What were your most valuable learnings from the mentoring sessions?
What were some of the challenges you faced before the programme? is the programme helping you overcome them?
One clear challenge was how to articulate our value proposition clearly. Our mentor was able to translate our idea into a real-life business canvas by clearly stating our customers, what we offer differently to our competitors and what value we add. Another challenge was how to launch our business to the market, focusing on acquiring a large network of Personal Trainers (PTs) first, before looking to market for clients looking for PTs. He clearly understood our problem and came up with realistic examples, such as the partnership route to expand quickly. Due to the mentorship element of the Guernsey Venture Challenge, we have been able to tackle our existing challenges and move forward towards creating an agile business.
What were you most excited about as you prepared for the pitch competition?
We were most excited about bringing together everything we’ve learnt since being part of the Digital Greenhouse and Blenheim Chalcot community and showcasing how far our business has come from idea to reality.
Thanks to the incredible mentoring, we were able to build a presentation focused on why we began this journey in the first place and how we can add real value to the customer's service in the form of a marketplace for clients to search for their best-suited PT and a Software as a System for PTs to run their own business off. Therefore, when preparing our pitch for the Guernsey Venture Challenge, we were looking forward to showcasing our deeper understanding of our business due to market research and applying the technical knowledge we’ve accumulated over the years, for feedback from the judges
What are your plans for your business after the competition?
After the Guernsey Venture Challenge, we want to find a software development company to work closely with to turn our marketplace and SaaS designs into reality. Once we have a live system to show our customers, we’d like to establish long-lasting partnerships to start building our network of PTs in Guernsey and beyond. With enough traction, we would like to continue growing our number of clients and PT users.
What advice would you give to businesses considering applying for the Guernsey Venture Challenge next year?
Firstly, we would strongly recommend completing the Startup Academy accelerator run by the Digital Greenhouse and Blenheim Chalcot because this would provide exposure to specific topics first-hand in a group environment where you can learn from your peers. As a result, upgrading to a one-to-one mentorship will allow you to deep dive into topics you’ve already been previously introduced to, and means you can maximise your limited mentoring hours more effectively. Secondly, go into the competition open-minded with clear goals to achieve, but willing to listen to others, especially those with expertise in a particular field, so you can best take advantage of the learnings you’ll experience to evolve your company.
Lastly, enjoy this unique opportunity to obtain invaluable free mentoring that will change how you view your own business for the better. It truly is a special experience, as there’s nothing else available like this on the Island. We cannot recommend this competition enough! Thank you.
