The Bright App

 The Bright App

Nerissa & James Zhang -- December 2020

A Similar Origin Story

Brian Chesky, founder of Airbnb, had a really hard time raising his first round. At the time it was unheard of for a designer to be CEO of a tech startup and people had a hard time understanding his business. Letting strangers stay in your home -- isn’t that just couch surfing & isn’t that a tiny market? Y-combinator was his last ditch effort -- he was out of money and tried everything -- even designed and made a cereal -- “Obama O’s” -- to raise funds for his company. At the end of his Y-combinator interview, just before he left, Brian pulled out a box of Obama O’s and gave it to Paul Graham. Paul Graham called him back -- Paul wasn’t impressed with Brian’s business -- but something about the effort he went through, an entrepreneur who is willing to try anything to give birth to a singular idea -- made him look twice and give Airbnb a chance. 

Ultimately, AirBnb completely disrupted the vacation rental business -- a $10B / yr business (at the time) and allowed homeowners, in a recession, to make income and keep their homes. Brian in the first year went to his customer’s homes in NYC to take photos for them -- because at the time homeowners didn't know how to take high quality photos -- and Brian needed that to make the homes more appealing to renters. Whatever it takes.

Our story and even our business is a parallel to the Airbnb story. 

The Entrepreneurs

Any investment in the seed stage is really an investment in the entrepreneurs. Paul invested in Brian, not his website. Likewise, you’ll be investing in Nerissa and James, so it’s imperative that you understand who we are. 

Nerissa started in business early. She got her CA real estate license at 19 and started multiple businesses from daycare to catering. When circumstances found her as a single mom with two young boys living in the most expensive city in America -- she became a personal trainer. She worked in Fitness SF under the Twitter building and trained executives and engineers from tech companies. Very quickly Nerissa became one of the top earning trainers at her gym (of ~50 trainers) because of her business skills. Good personal trainers, the ones that make the most revenues, are the one that know how to sell their services and keep their clients with quality service. In the heart of the startup hub of San Francisco, Nerissa saw how technology has revolutionized and disrupted entire industries -- and dreamed that one day technology would disrupt personal training and gyms too. She even tried to learn programming and quickly realized that was hard. People thought she was crazy -- no one thinks a black female trainer can create an app like The Bright App and get it to work.  

James has a gift for programming at a young age. He sold his first computer game in junior high (to his principal) and later created one of the first viral apps -- ever. He sold his first startup to Zynga at the age of 25. He went on to create one of the first iPhone games (one of the Top 10 apps in the app store at one point) and later created the first voice assistants on Android -- Skyvi -- which was downloaded over 10M times. In 2015, his third startup Joyride was acquired by Google. At Google James was on the team that built the first version of the Google Assistant (“Ok Google”) -- he built the Google Assistant’s User Interface -- which he named ChatUi and now runs on a billion Android devices. Later he went to Youtube and created offline features for the Youtube app. James spent his entire 15 year career building consumer apps - on iOS, Android and Web. 

Nerissa and James met a few days before Valentine’s day in 2017. Was it a chance encounter through OkCupid, or was it a prepared blessing arranged by the universe? We’ll let the reader decide. They fell deeply in love with one another. Six months later, they were married. In July 2018 Nerissa and James welcomed a baby boy -- Nerissa’s third and James’ first. We named him Brite but everyone calls him Ming Ming (which means bright in Chinese). He is the light of our family. 

In all this time Nerissa held on to her dream of an app that disrupts the way personal trainers do business and shared that vision with James. James saw first hand how much unpaid admin work Nerissa was doing every week to keep her clients happy -- and the struggles of a personal trainer that could easily be fixed by technology. 

In June 2019, James quit his stable job as a tech lead at Youtube and by September 2019 version 1.0 of The Bright App was released to the world simultaneously on Android and iOS. We bootstrapped this startup with our own funds -- because we knew it would be hard for investors to believe in our idea unless we had something tangible -- something real to show. Everyone has an idea for an app, few could build it and even fewer can get it to work. Real entrepreneurs don’t wait for others to catch on -- so we plunged ahead. 

With 3 young boys in tow, Nerissa and James created the app and the company. When we started we had no idea that a global pandemic would close gyms and furlough trainers the world over. In May 2020, when we saw the damage this pandemic has done to gyms and trainers, we quickly added a Marketplace feature to The Bright App -- allowing clients to find and contact trainers directly for remote training over video chat. 

Over the course of 2020 -- we invested all of our liquid funds into The Bright App. We put our bones in this business -- we even cashed out all of our 401k -- everything. And we got our MVP from 0 to 1 - we’re making recurring revenues with our early adopters! We figured out the best way to market & grow - all we need to do now is to iterate.

The Business

Personal training is a $10B / year business in the United States. There are over 350k personal trainers in the US and 1-on-1 training is their bread and butter. Personal training pays the most -- client pays between $80 to $150+ an hour and usually the gym takes 50% off the top.

Trainers hold the customer relationship and creates value -- they are the ones doing the work to help their clients lose weight, get stronger, and reach their health goals. Gyms provide trainers with facilities and lead gen -- most clients who want to train go to the nearest gym -- whether it be Equinox or 24-hr Fitness. Gyms also provide trainers with billing and scheduling support -- although the software they use is extremely inefficient and all gyms require expensive staff to deal exclusively with client billing and scheduling. Nerissa has written extensively on the subject of training and fitness here, here, and here. 

Our biggest competition is physical gyms -- where most trainers work and do 1-on-1 training. The Pandemic has completely disrupted physical gyms -- almost half of all gyms in the US are closed permanently. Trainers everywhere are furloughed and struggling. This is a classic market dislocation - that we are perfectly positioned to solve.

There are many fitness apps -- that are either content or AI. None of them really help the trainer with a business solution. Trainers need help with lead gen, scheduling and billing. Only a small percentage of trainers do well selling content -- those who do are good actors and look the part on camera. Trainers who actually help clients lose weight -- must know their clients deeply & personally -- and these trainers prefer to have 10 to 20 clients that they see regularly and paid by the hour. 

Our vision for The Bright App is to make it the world’s largest online training gym. Where trainers can make a living -- just like they would at a physical gym. Clients can find quality instructors for any type of training from weightlifting to yoga, swimming to running, tennis to soccer -- either remotely or in person -- with seamless billing, scheduling, reviewed and recommended. There currently is nothing on the market that does this.   

Our Accomplishments

We have accomplished a lot in the last 15 months. Here’s a quick overview:

There is literally nothing that we won’t do to fight for this company. We spent every last dime of our own funds on this company -- because the app works and our team works! 

We Want a Partner!

This is Nerissa’s first year as a tech startup CEO. She has proven to be bold and a fast learner, and needs a mentor -- as well as a believer -- to back her vision. She already got the MVP from 0 to 1 - she wants help scaling it. 

James has proven again and again that he can build and release products that work -- he needs a team to keep iterating so the MVP can be improved into a mass market product.

Together we have shown that we work extremely well together -- and fully committed to the vision. We spent our last dime and then some on our vision -- you know we will see it to fruition -- if only we are given enough time and runway.  

Our ask is simple: be our partner, be our mentor, and give us capital to keep going.

Capital Plan

$100k Angel Round -- Immediately to keep our current team 

$100k Convertible Note at $2.5M valuation cap ← 3.2% equity at Series A (estimated)

$1M Seed -- Q1 2021 -- SAFE, Equity or Convertible Note

$1M will allow us to keep going for the next 12 months

This will get us to 5k trainers and 25k clients making us the biggest online gym in the world. This will guarantee us a Series A (with 5k trainers - no other app will have this).

$4M Series A -- Q4 2021 -- Equity Round 

We will get here 8-10 months after Seed at ~4x valuation of Seed round - after demonstrating 2 product iterations and with 5k+ trainers - we’ll be the world’s largest online training gym. 

$4M will allow us to spend more for ads & user acquisition, as ads are the biggest cost making sure we become a household name. We need help to get The Bright App in front of more people. Taking full advantage of the current situation with the market dislocation of training and recession for physical gyms -- we can acquire trainers world-wide quickly.