Our platform found instant success: Jitendra Chouksey, founder, Squats

THE IDEA: A fitness and wellness platform

EUREKA MOMENT: In 2015, Chouksey, a fitness enthusiast, started coaching some friends through WhatsApp. The results were great, winning him a loyal following. Soon, he was flooded with training requests and queries from people he didn’t know. “I was working as an IT professional with a firm at the time, so I was not too keen to coach so many people. But I still wanted to help,” he said. “I thought of sharing my knowledge, which would enable them to do things on their own.”


Chouksey created a community on Facebook and posted a small booklet called ‘Get Shredded’, basically FAQs on health and fitness. “I thought I had solved the problem by giving free tips, but people still wanted me to train them. They wanted a personal touch and accountability. That’s when I realised I had an idea on my hand.”

EARLY DAYS: “When I shared the idea of SQUATS with my friends and family, they weren’t fully convinced, but supported me nevertheless. I discussed the topic with the earliest members of my Facebook community, and they were on board. We created a small group of six founding members, who made an investment of ?5,000 each to start the company,” Chouksey said. “With that money, my developer and I created and hosted squats.in, which allowed people to enrol with personal coaches, who guided them online for all fitnessrelated services.”

SQUATS was launched in 2016. “It was an instant success, registering business worth ?10 lakh in the first month, after which there was no looking back. None of us knew how to run a business, but every day, we would focus on things that needed to be done while also learning on the job,” the entrepreneur said.

BIGGEST CHALLENGE:
Compared to some other firms, SQUATS fared better in the initial days.

“Maybe we had it easy or it was too much fun to call it difficult. We loved every bit of what we were doing: we were making people fit and we were running a profitable business,” he said. “I think the biggest challenge was to constantly stay on our toes and learn at every stage. I didn’t know what the term P&L [profit and loss] meant three years ago, but today, I can make every decision of the business.”

WHERE THE STARTUP IS NOW:

It has done business of nearly ?70 crore in the past three years, with a customer base in various corners of the world. “We are clocking revenue of roughly ?3 crore a month by serving close to 3,000 clients. We help many more for free on our community of close to half a million people,” he said. The firm aims to “transform” lives of 50 million.

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