❓ Problem

The gym industry is one of the great legal cons of modern life, and it works because you agree to it every month.

Start with the classic study. DellaVigna and Malmendier tracked 7,752 members across three US health clubs and found that people on flat monthly contracts of $70+ attended 4.3 times a month and paid over $17 per visit, when a 10-visit pass would have cost them $10 a session. The kicker is the line underneath: members predicted nine visits a month and made four. Not four because they are lazy. Four because they are human, and humans are catastrophically bad at forecasting their own future behaviour.

Twenty years on, nothing has improved. The average member now visits 1.5 times a week, down from 2.1 in 2019, half of new members quit within six months, and Americans burn an estimated $1.3 billion a year on memberships they never use. The gym doesn't mind. It's priced in. Every member is worth around $517 a year whether they show up or not, and the ones who don't show up are the profitable ones.

Here's the real problem, though. You are already paying money to not exercise. The £40 leaves your account whether you go twenty times or zero, which means the payment carries no information and applies no pressure. It's a sunk cost you renew monthly. The money is pointed in the wrong direction.

✅ Solution

A fitness app where you set a workout goal, add a card, and get charged when you miss.

• You set the commitment. Three sessions a week, thirty minutes minimum, whatever the goal is. You pick the stake per missed session, from a fiver to genuinely uncomfortable.
• Verification is passive, not manual. Connect Strava, Apple Health, Garmin or Whoop and the app reads the workout rather than asking you to prove it. Optional geofence at your gym for the purists.
• Miss a session, get charged. The money doesn't go to the app. It goes to a charity, a friend, or (the fun one) an organisation you actively despise.
• The stake escalates. Miss again and it goes up. The point isn't to bleed you, it's to find the number at which your brain finally takes the commitment seriously.

The wedge is deliberately narrow: one person, one recurring habit, one number that hurts. The platform underneath, passive verification plus consented conditional charging plus stake routing, extends to any habit you can measure.

📊 Key Numbers

Market size

• TAM: the global fitness market was worth $131.31 billion in 2025. In the US alone, a record 77 million people hold a gym membership at an average $69 a month, which is roughly $64 billion a year in memberships that mostly go unused.
• SAM: the people who need this are the ones already failing. Half of all new members quit inside six months and annual retention sits at 66.4%. Call the addressable slice the 10% of US members who are anxious enough about their own consistency to pay for a fix: roughly 7.7 million people.
• SOM: the proof this segment exists is that competitors already found it. StepBet ran 72,974 unique participants through deposit challenges between 2015 and 2020. stickK has 465,000 commitment contracts and $42 million staked. Nobody has won this category, they've just proved people turn up for it.

ARR potential