Why we built Nerro

We train four or five times a week. We also write software. Nerro came out of the overlap, and for a long time it was not meant to be anything.

The first thing we built was the check-in code, because the cards in our own wallets had annoyed us for years. Cards get lent to friends. They keep working long after a membership has lapsed. They get reprinted every time somebody loses one, and somewhere in every gym there is a drawer full of them belonging to people who left.

The gyms that moved on went to fingerprint scanners, which trade one problem for a worse one. A reader mounted by the door of a gym spends all day collecting sweat, chalk and hand cream. It stops recognising people, so somebody on your staff is wiping it down between members, and everybody who uses it presses a thumb where two hundred other thumbs have been that week.

Meanwhile, in most of the world, people had been walking into gyms with their phones for years. Nobody had bothered to bring that here.

The second thing we built was purely selfish.

None of us likes training in rush hour. We wanted to know, before leaving the house, whether it was worth the trip. So we built something that reads a gym’s own check-ins hour by hour and answers that question honestly.

We assumed it was a feature for us. It turned out gym owners wanted it more than members did, because a crowd that spreads itself out is a crowd that stops complaining about seven o’clock.

Everything after that came from showing it to people who run gyms, and from noticing which parts they leaned forward at.

The retention scoring exists because of one conversation in particular. An owner told us he usually finds out a member has left when the payment does not arrive. Not before. He had two hundred people on his books and no way of knowing which of them had quietly stopped coming, and it clearly bothered him more than he wanted to let on.

That is the thing we would want you to take from this page. Nobody cancels a gym membership. They come three times a week, then twice, then once a fortnight, then not at all, and the first anyone notices is a renewal that never happens. Everything in Nerro that watches members and scores outreach was built for that gap.

Nerro started as a hobby project. It is not one now, but we would rather you heard that from us than worked it out later.

It also means Nerro is small, and that is the trade. You will not get an account manager or a ticket queue in another timezone. If something is wrong, you will be talking to the people who wrote it, in your own working hours.