Fütness
$500K of a seed round closed on the prototype and pitch deck we designed, eight weeks after Fütness was still only a training method with no product attached.
Twenty sessions with real users. One MVP.
A method with a following, and nothing to carry it past the field.
Fütness is a training methodology that fuses football drills with fitness training in a high-intensity interval format, built around what its founder calls mentalidad campeona, a champion’s mentality. It runs on three pillars: fitness, using the ball to build strength and condition; wellness, with partner and team exercises plus meditation aimed at sporting mindset; and community, which is what turns a workout into a reason to come back.
Founder Ramón Jesurún built it out of his own turnaround, from overweight and unmotivated to a method he has since taught across Latin America. “The ball,” as he puts it, “was my recovery tool.” More than 2,500 people had trained on it across LatAm, CONMEBOL certified its first cohort of 19 Fütness mentors in Paraguay in 2022, and sessions run today in Barranquilla, Colombia and Aventura, Florida.
What it did not have was a product. Fütness existed wherever a mentor and a ball happened to be in the same place, which capped it at the size of a room. It came to WANDR through Boostart Venture Studio, the Bogotá venture studio that had partnered with WANDR to build MVPs across its portfolio.
A method that only worked when everyone was in the same room.
Fütness had a proven in-person method, a founder story, and real regional traction. Taking it digital meant solving the three problems the workshop named outright, plus five more that the research and the build surfaced underneath them.
The first stated challenge. Fütness was asking people to add an app to a phone that already had one, or to start a habit they had failed to start before. Nothing about a new logo in an app store solves that.
The second. A methodology that works because a coach is watching and a group is sweating alongside you has no obvious retention mechanic once it becomes a video on a screen at home.
The third stated challenge was competing in a saturated fitness market against platforms funded through Series D and E with users in the millions. The harder version of it was that none of them did what Fütness does. There was no direct competitor to study, so there was no proven pattern for combining football drills with fitness training on a phone.
Nothing else in the category trained with a football, which was the whole advantage. It was also a barrier: the exercises need a ball and the space to use one, and the name risked reading as football-only to the much larger audience that just wants to get fit.
Everything that made a Fütness session work, the correction of technique, the energy of training together, the mentor’s read on the room, lived in the room. None of it had been translated into something a person could open alone, and the virtual class was the only place a screen had to do the coach’s job.
Ten in-depth interviews, then ten moderated testing sessions on the prototype. Participants split between people who already trained on the Fütness method and people who had never heard of it, so every finding could be read two ways: does this hold for the community, and does it hold for a stranger?
The competitive study found no product combining football drills with fitness training in the way the method does. Fütness was first. That meant nothing on the market could show what the product should be, so the study changed job: instead of hunting a gap, it went looking for convention. How do fitness apps organize classes, how do people filter them, how are levels handled, and what actually makes someone open the app again tomorrow?
Ten out of ten agreed that desafíos were an attractive way to break the monotony of training. Five said competition between users made them more motivated, and four wanted to see their position on the leaderboard. As one non-user put it: everyone who likes football likes competing, and that makes you want to be in the top three. Competition, not content volume, was the retention mechanic.
Participants described routinely leaving their fitness app for YouTube to find stretching, breathing, and meditation content. Having it inside one tool was the single most valued addition. That moved wellness out of the nice-to-have column and into the MVP alongside the workouts.
Trains to improve technique, performance, and match fitness, plays on a team, and uses cardio and strength work to avoid injury. Usually trains under a coach, values the community of the in-person class, and mostly does not use digital tools to train.
Trains for physical and mental health, alone or in a group. Wants routines matched to their current level and available time, progress they can actually see, and a reason not to skip a day.
On the supplying side of the assessment, asked to upload the same evidence into multiple platforms multiple times, with no visibility into what happens to it next.
Underwriting risk across the same supply chain and reading the same data for an entirely different purpose: comparability across a portfolio
The biggest call of the engagement. Sold as football training, Fütness inherited a niche. Framed as a versatile fitness method that happens to use a ball, it could reach people who want to get in shape without any interest in the sport, and the interviews confirmed that framing landed with both groups.
The ball was the differentiator and the barrier at once. Copy and imagery had to state plainly that Fütness is not only about football, and the marketplace turned the equipment requirement into a revenue line by selling the branded ball inside the app.
After the pandemic, people went back to training in person specifically for belonging, group motivation, and competitive spirit. Communities, live sessions, team workouts, and event notifications went into the MVP so the thing people actually came back for had somewhere to live.
The competitive study came back close to empty. Nothing on the market paired football drills with fitness training the way the method does, which reads at first like an open field. Then the interviews explained why the field being open did not help. After the pandemic, people had deliberately gone back to training in person, and they said exactly why: community, a sense of belonging to a group, the motivation of a coach in the room, and the competitive edge of training beside someone else. Virtual training was described, consistently, as a complement or a fallback for the days you cannot get there, never as the main event.
That is a hard finding for a company about to build an app, and it is the one that made the product work. Fütness was not fighting Nike Training Club for screen time. It was fighting its own Tuesday-night class, and on content alone it was going to lose. So the digital product was built to carry the room instead: the coach’s voice and constant motivation in the videos, the group in communities and live sessions, the competitive edge in challenges and leaderboards, and the coach’s eye in the post-workout body scan. Every one of those sits in the MVP alongside the workouts rather than behind them, because without them the product is a video library, and the class already beat that.
Fütness started the engagement as an in-person method with regional traction and no product. It finished with a tested prototype, a live launch surface, a marketing plan its own team could run, a roadmap for what comes after the MVP, and the investor materials that carried it into a raise.
WANDR always motivates our customers and our internal team to think big. They push the expectations, and they take AI and technologies as far and as ambitious as possible, with a more strategic and visionary mindset.
