The storyHow they got there
Eran Galperin was a BJJ practitioner and software engineer who watched his local gym owner manage memberships in spreadsheets and lose money to no-shows. He built Gymdesk — originally called Martial Arts on Rails — after a three-month build phase interviewing local BJJ gym managers in person.
The first ten paying customers came from cold emails Eran sent to martial arts gym owners, leveraging domain knowledge from his own BJJ practice. The first hundred came from vertical SEO pages for each gym niche, plus Capterra/G2 directory listings that put the product in front of gym owners actively shopping for software.
At maturity, the channel mix: SEO for "gym management software", "martial arts software", and per-niche pages (~50%), direct outreach and demos to gym owners (~25%), word-of-mouth and referrals from existing gyms (~15%), and Capterra/G2 directories (~10%). Generic Facebook ads were killed. Vertical-specific SEO and onboarding-as-sales were doubled down on.
Unit economics: ACV of $1–3K/year, LTV of $5–15K with high stickiness (gyms don't switch software), CAC of $200–500, and monthly churn of 1–2%. TinySeed investment in Fall 2021 provided mentorship and $120K for roughly 10% equity — no growth-at-all-costs pressure. A decade of compounding: $32.5M exit to Five Elms Capital in 2024 with 2,000+ gyms across 34 countries.
Channel MixWhere the growth actually came from
Most case studies hand-wave channels. Here's the rough allocation — not in dollars spent, but in users acquired — across the routes that actually mattered.