For many individuals, fitness is simply a daily part of their lives. For CEO and co-founder of the Spot social fitness app, Jeremy Suh, it’s his lifestyle. Whether he’s doing calf-raises in a Chipotle line or a 3-hour chest workout, Jeremy lives to exercise. By combining this love for exercise with a passion for software programming in his daily life, Jeremy stumbled upon an idea to enhance his weightlifting experience. Spot is a student-founded social fitness platform that encourages and bolsters fitness accountability, as well as fosters community connectivity through photo sharing, workout logging, and social networking.
Weightlifting is often seen as a solo activity. While people are together in gyms, they are most often working out and lifting alone, which doesn’t provide peer reinforcement and accountability in the “community,” which are two things Jeremy saw lacking from his gym experience. The idea for Spot formed when Jeremy realized he had difficulty even remembering the names of people at his gym. Was the familiar face over by the squat rack Juan? Or was it Jacob? Maybe Jason? The sense of a community amongst so many like-minded and similarly focused individuals was totally getting overlooked. Where was the peer-to-peer system for weightlifting?
In addition to getting to know other people concurrently working out with him, Jeremy also realized there must be a better way to tracking his workouts. According to Jeremy’s friend, Aditya Kumar, who would soon join him in developing an application, “Many current weightlifting apps are very good at what they do functionality wise, but most have an outdated user interface and none offer an even remotely robust set of social features.”
With determination to tackle this problem head-on, he contacted highschool friend Aditya Kumar, a relatively new, but passionate gym-goer. Aditya and Jeremy previously worked on a variety of projects together, ranging from science fairs to selling fidget spinners, in highschool, and their friendship grew as they both entered UVA as first year students in 2020. At UVA, Jeremy introduced Aditya to weightlifting, and meeting at the gym became a regular ritual for the pair. With Jeremy’s epiphany, they aligned around the apparent need to bring together avid gym-goers, and they began digging deeper into this void in the weightlifting community. While researching closely related weightlifting issues with no streamlined solutions, Aditya, who stepped into the COO role at Spot, recognized that the majority of current workout-logging apps were outdated and costly. The weightlifting community needed more than just a functioning “gym-Instagram,” it needed a feature-specific platform. Jeremy and Aditya began creating their minimal viable product with friends being their initial users.
Over the summer of 2022, Spot evolved from an initial simple social media sharing to the application the weightlifting community needs, including specific features that have proven to help strengthen community, such as workout-logging and group challenges. Spot is a platform focused on weightlifting- and fitness-related content, with an emphasis on interacting with your local gym. This system helps users find others that are nearby while also incentivizing accountability through connections with the local gym community. Spot intends to build more immersive local weightlifting communities while being a one-stop fitness profile.
As a longtime weightlifter, Jeremy has seen and experienced the importance of using community as a way to improve fitness accountability. In making Spot, Aditya and Jeremy hope to spread this inclusivity to others as they start to build a passion for weightlifting, this time with a little help from veteran weightlifters within their community who have been in their shoes.
To join the Spot community, click here to download the iOS app. Furthermore, if you are interested in being a brand ambassador, please contact 571-758-8340.