Empowering Fitness Entrepreneurs

Our Story

My journey to StudioGrowth started long before I knew the intricacies of the fitness industry.

I graduated with an engineering degree from RVCE, one of India's top universities, and began my career as a software developer. I have always been fascinated with the process of building businesses. This interest led me to give up my software engineering career and pursue an MBA from IESE Business School in Barcelona, where I focused on entrepreneurship and startups.

In 2011, I moved to London with big dreams and two month's rent. I dove into the startup world when it was still finding its feet in London. I became the first sales hire at several London based start-ups and one of them was OpenSignal, a telecom technology company. I watched it grow from a small team to a successful exit. The exit from OpenSignal gave me the financial resources to fund the initial development of StudioGrowth without relying on outside investors.

During my time working in the London start-up scene I saw venture capital backed businesses exit for millions while founders and early employees walked away with nothing. I worked for private equity backed companies where the focus was always on cost cutting and squeezing every penny from customers. This shaped how I think about operating businesses today.

I watched companies prioritize investor returns over customer success, cut support teams to boost margins, and raise prices simply because they could. Those experiences became the blueprint for what I didn't want StudioGrowth to become.

The fitness software industry is dominated by a few large private equity groups that have created exactly this environment. Little innovation, high prices, and customers treated as revenue numbers rather than real people building real small businesses.

That's why StudioGrowth is different by design. We're bootstrapped and profit first, which means our success depends entirely on our customers' success. We don't have investors demanding we squeeze more revenue from existing customers or cut corners on support. Every decision we make is guided by one question: does this help studio owners build better businesses? When you're not beholden to external investors, you can actually build something that serves the people who use it.

During my startup years, I experimented with side projects. One was a wellness marketplace where I worked with 40-50 wellness professionals, helping them manage bookings and availability with an app I had built. That's where I first encountered the fitness industry's software problem. The existing solutions were expensive, bloated, and frankly terrible to use. When professionals on our marketplace kept asking where we built our booking system, something clicked.

Around this time, I also started practicing Sivananda yoga. It was not just about fitness for me, it became a way of life. This personal connection to the wellness world made the industry's problems feel personal.

The early days of StudioGrowth were tough. We were bootstrapping everything, building from our own savings. Our very first customer was Ali, a studio owner who was using Mindbody. I am not sure what she saw in us but decided to give us a shot. Then came Daya Yoga and Baby Cobra Yoga. These weren't just customers, they became partners in building something that actually worked for studio owners.

What's amazing is that Daya Yoga, Baby Cobra, and many of our early customers are still with us today. They've grown their businesses, to multiple locations, alongside ours.

We officially count 2022 as our starting point, and since then we've grown to serve hundreds of customers with our small but mighty team of four spread across London, Germany, India, and Pakistan. We've never taken outside funding, and we never plan to. This isn't about building something to sell, it's about building something that lasts.

I'm particularly proud that we've never had an employee leave us. We're all aligned in our mission. Our customers often comment that they know us by name, not as ticket numbers in a system.

That's our story so far, and honestly, we're just getting started. I'm not sitting in some corporate office making decisions about software I never used. I'm building this business the same way you are building yours, one day at a time, focused on what really matters.