Problems and opportunities in online coaching

The COVID-19 pandemic had a negative impact on personal coaches and people who trained in gyms, but it also paved the way for online coaching. This meant that users could get access to a personal coach even though the lack of access to a gym.

The virtual fitness market is also expected to grow 30,1 percentage in the upcoming years (Market Research Future, 2021). As a result, there exist many opportunities in the online coaching industry right now, but there are also many problems that need to be faced.

Opportunities in online coaching

At this moment, there exist many opportunities in the online coaching industry since it's such a new market, and it's expected to grow much in the upcoming years. Many different coaching platforms have started to develop, such as TrueCoach, Peloton and Trainerize.

Compared to traditional coaching, these coaching platforms come with many benefits such as equal access to trainers for everyone and asynchronous communication. Asynchronous communication has many benefits and can lead to better control of your time and better planning since you don’t need to be in the gym at a specific time.

The challenge with a two-sided platform

Developing an online coaching platform also comes with challenges. Firstly, the platform would be two-sided which means that it needs to attract both users and trainers.

The challenge with a two-sided platform is that both of the sides need each other, which means that if there exist no users on the platform, no trainers want to join since they get no value and vice versa. This is a problem that all two-sided platforms need to solve. However, the solution is often to start with the supply, since no users would want to join otherwise.

For a coaching platform, this would mean that it's important to start with the trainers and offer products to users such as training programs, since no users would want to join if the platform was empty.

Network effects in online coaching

An online coaching platform would also have network effects, which means that the value of the platform would increase with the number of users (Henfridsson, 2020).

If we have more users on the platform, it would increase the value for trainers, since it would mean more clients. At the same time, if we would have more trainers, it would increase the value for the users, since it would mean a higher chance of finding a good coach.

For an online coaching platform, there is also the possibility to connect to different types of fitness devices such as sports watches. The data could then be used by coaches to guide their clients and evaluate the progress that the clients make.

Many people also have a fitness device today, but not everyone knows how they should interpret the data and use it in their training, which is something that a trainer could help them with.

The importance of data in training

The data is also of high importance in training, and the reason why many athletes track their activities with sports trackers. For example, in the paper (Tholander & Nylander, 2015) they interviewed 10 different athletes and 9 of them used sport trackers to support and enhance the sport experience in their training.

There is also a possibility that the activity tracking would play another larger role for online coaching, since coaches and clients need something that can be discussed during their meetings. The data for the activities, in regards to how the client is feeling, could be used for planning upcoming workouts.

The health data is also something that would have value of its own, since it could be used to develop other types of products for the platform. If we study other companies such as Fitbit and pharmacies like Walgreens we can also see that the health data is extremely valuable.

These companies are all launching their own health platforms, and since they already have the data they have an advantage (Astyne et al. 2016). Many of these actors also already have an ecosystem with large data sets, hardware devices platforms, which can make it difficult for new actors to compete in the market.

How can new actors grow in a competitive market?

Although it can be difficult for new actors to grow, there are many ways to scale and grow in a competitive market, and the best way is often to focus on a specific target customer.

For example, this is something that the company Discord managed to do by focusing on gamers as their target customer (Raz, 2022). For an online coaching platform, one target customer could for example be runners or people with a very specific goal, such as losing weight.

By focusing on a specific target customer and identifying their problems you can create a product and a platform with a higher value proposition in regards to competitors. You could also focus on creating higher value for the coaches, by for example developing products that help them create training programs etc.

Is the social aspect the biggest challenge?

One of the biggest challenges with online coaching could be the social aspect, and that many social dimensions disappear when an activity transfers to the digital world. Many of us probably experienced this during the pandemic, when meetings and lectures played out online instead.

Many people may choose to work with a coach because of the accountability and the intrinsic motivation that a coach gives (Gaesser et al., 2020). The accountability would probably still work well in the online format, but it's unclear if the motivation would be as high, since most coaches motivate their clients during the workout.

Even though online coaching wouldn’t offer the motivation during training, there is still the possibility of offering other motivation elements. Online coaching could offer other elements that could increase the motivation for the users.

For example, an online coaching platform could implement different gamification elements such as points, training streaks, achievements and leaderboard to increase motivation. These gamification elements could also have the benefits of keeping users engaged on the platform (Bitrián et al., 2021).

Regarding the case that the clients don’t get motivated during training there are solutions that exist such as Peloton, which in essence are recorded online workouts that you could do at home. This is also a possibility that an online coaching platform could explore to give clients motivation during the workout. For example, a platform could offer coaches the possibility to develop and publish their own online workouts.

Summary

The virtual fitness market is expected to grow 30.1 % in the upcoming years and there are many opportunities that exist in online coaching, but there are also challenges that need to be faced.

New actors could have difficulties entering the market and competing with existing actors with a working ecosystem, but the best way to do this is probably to focus on a specific target customer.

There is also the challenge of the social and motivational aspect. However, there are also many opportunities and if a platform succeeds to scale there are a lot to gain.

References:

Astyne, M.W., Parker, G.G., & Choudary, S.P. (2016). Pipelines, platforms, and the new rules of strategy. Harvard Business Review, 94, 16.

Bitrián, P., Buil, I. & Catalán, S. (2021). Enhancing user engagement: The role of gamification in mobile apps, Journal of Business Research, 170-185. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.04.028.

Gaesser, V. J., Maakestad, W. M., Hayes, E. S., & Snyder, S. J. (2020). Motivational Coaching Improves Intrinsic Motivation in Adult Fitness Program Participants. International journal of exercise science, 13(5), 1167–1178.

Henfridsson, O. (2020). Scaling digital enterprises. Handbook of Digital Innovation. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. doi: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788119986.00019.

Market Research Future. (2021) Virtual Fitness Market Research Report. Source: https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/virtual-fitness-market-9988.

Raz, G. (Host). (2022) How I Built This. Discord: Jason Citron. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/discord-jason-citron/id1150510297?i=1000552968584.

Tholander, J. & Nylander, S. (2015). Snot, Sweat, Pain, Mud, and Snow. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702482.