*Picture | Demo evening at CrossFit MaxOn – First box secured outside of CrossFit Buxton* –  back when I still had more brown hair than grey! 🤣🤣

Back in 2015, CrossFit had only really just ‘started’ where I live in Buxton. Up to that point, it was either you went to the local gym and lifted weights, you had a sport or you didn’t train- simple as that! 🤣

I was working developing websites for local businesses alongside my 9-5 and got interested in what CrossFit was all about when the first box opened up. After chatting to the coaches, I exchanged some website services for a foundation course – one session in and I was completely hooked!

Shortly after starting, CrossFit Buxton owners Adam and Shaun asked if I was able to create an online login to their website so that people could book classes and record their WOD scores.

The platform started off as a basic online portal for members to login and record scores. Straight away all the members (myself included) loved being able to access a record of past lifts and scores to see how much we were progressing. We did away with our paper notebooks and created an element of friendly competition within the box! Then, I guess something just clicked.

 

 

I asked myself…why am I not making this accessible to all CrossFit boxes?

So, BoxMate was born!

I started researching and speaking to box owners and their members near my local area about their current methods for logging their scores. There was a general frustration for members who were just using pen and paper, and for the coaches it seemed that the general feeling surrounding the existing CrossFit apps was that they were too overloaded with features which put athletes off using them. Another biggie was that the support often wasn’t great (with bigger companies being located outside of the UK and taking a long time to respond). I wanted to create something that would give all the best features for coaches and members but still be easy to use. My slogan from the start was to create “Simple Performance Tracking“.

In 2016, BoxMate v1 was rolled out to CrossFit Buxton and CrossFit MaxOn (my first paying box!) and the initial feedback was great. Both gyms at that point were using the built in basic timetable for class bookings I’d made, as I started to approach new gyms I quickly learned that there was already a big player in the class booking/membership management game and that was TeamUp.

After chatting with the guys at TeamUp, we set out to work together so that gyms that were already using TeamUp could also have BoxMate. Members could follow programming, record scores, interact with each other, and now book classes all from the same application.

Fast forward to 2020.

Five years on, and wow…what a journey it has been. I’ve met (and continue to meet) so many amazing box owners, have given up my old day job to take BoxMate full time and this January, I took on my first full time employee!

Since our humble simple start we’ve added so many features to our app, from BoxMate Live , to the ability to send an instant poll or notification to all members, to the activity feed and high 5s, and the fully comprehensive coaches’ platform that let’s coaches easily view all member progress.

I am incredibly proud to now look after 15,000 users in over 100 + gyms across the U.K, New Zealand, Vietnam and beyond.

I still sometimes pinch myself that this many CrossFitters choose to use our platform every day to keep on top of their training, and that box owners and coaches put their trust in us to help them do what they do best. Because of this, we are always striving to offer the best possible service we can for our coaches, so that they can give their members the best training experience.

We are constantly rolling out updates to the platforms based on feedback provided from our users and will always continue to innovate. We are always praised on our support and how we work with our coaches to give them what they actually need and want, don’t just take our word for it though – you can see our testimonials here.

Thanks for reading our story so far – happy tracking! 💪

Regards Danny (Owner & Developer)