In praise of Raja
The unsung hero who scrubs every piece of our kit each week with a 3M pad and coconut oil — and why, if you'll own equipment for decades, stainless steel pays for itself.
Posts tagged business
Measure fifty times, cut once
Building four cable stations from scratch meant three weeks of quiet thinking and nine design decisions — because with equipment, unlike coaching, you get to weld only once.
Pricing power in the fitness industry
Cult today is cheaper, inflation-adjusted, than Talwalkars was in 2008 — what that says about pricing power, where gym money actually goes, and the pizza business.
The terrible economics of gyms
Where gyms overspend and screw up — AC bills, all-day hours, wasted floor space, discounting, and treating coaches as a cost rather than the product — and the one number our space is built around.
How to retain clients
Lawyer Srinath Sridevan's six cardinal principles for keeping clients — reposted with permission — plus a coach's addendum on excellence and the fee.
Why we won't chase you
Most gyms are built to chase you. We're not. Our three-strike rule, why conviction beats persuasion, and who our coaching is actually for.
Details matter
The hand-laid knurling on our bars, and the machinist who has been laying it down, by hand, since 2016.
I cannot run my gym for ₹18,000 a year
The business of gyms rewards absentees. The business of coaching needs you to show up. They are not the same.
Why we make our own equipment
The question we get asked most: why not just buy it? Control, cost, proportions, durability, and fun.
Why gyms quietly die
Rents, poor retention, coaches who leave with clients. Why I'll never open a second space, and the model we flipped.
An adult sandpit
Not every business wants to change the world. Mine is just somewhere fun to work while paying the bills.
Two events cured me of networking
In 2015 I needed clients, so I went to the parties. Two was all it took to send me back to just coaching.
A reluctant entrepreneur
From a terrified salaried man to a twelve-year-old gym, via one prototype pull-up bar and a well-timed nudge.
The infinite monkey bar, start to finish
A long, honest build log of one machine. 'Made in India' is never quite made in India. Everything is made on Earth.
The most unlikely advantages for a gym
Punctuality, maintenance, pride, no quick bucks. The boring things that quietly turn into a moat.
Mistakes
Sixteen ways I've been conned or screwed up in twelve years of building a gym. We powered through anyway.
Coaching is the only moat
Gyms are fungible — equipment, space and price can all be copied. The one thing that can't be: the coaching relationship.
The idiot index, applied to barbells
Musk's cost lesson, borrowed for a gym: why I make a stainless barbell for ₹7,500 instead of buying one.