Show HN: I built an app that personalizes home workouts

[IvanG96]

Hey HN,

I’ve built and bootstrapped PARIAN. It designs personalized workouts so you reach your fitness goal quickly and efficiently. By training only with goal-specific exercises tailored to your experience level and preferred equipment (or just bodyweight), you skip the wasted time, effort, and disappointment. No more doom scrolling exercises, being overwhelmed by how to plan them, and being bombarded by noise from all the fitfluencers. You workout with confidence knowing each exercise is intentional and each session is moving you forward. Plus, you have the freedom to customize your program at any moment, ensuring the training is enjoyable - thus ensuring consistency.

I believe fitness is not a lifestyle, but a core part of life and wanted to create something that will assist this pursuit of going after your fitness potential. And instill the excitement of all the new doors that will open up - bouldering, boxing, breakdancing, you name it. Being non technical I naturally leaned towards no-code platforms. Started building on Bubble in 2022 and launched the demo that December. I got some assistance from friends with html, css, and js along the way and officially launched the MVP in Feb 2023.

The fitness app space is crowded, and ones that tailor workouts already exist—so why build this? Saturation is demand, and it’s easier to stand out in a crowd than to create your own market. When you break it down, most of the apps aren't personalized. Majority are workout trackers/loggers or just have a selection of pre-made workouts.

The few apps that do personalize workouts create subpar programs with surface level tutorials and lack support, guidance, and customization.

Additionally, even the most popular apps in this space have: — Questionable exercise selection — Exercise redundancy in the workouts — Excessive training volume — Require constant input throughout workouts

The gap between 0 support and minimal structure (youtube/pdf plans), and hiring a personal trainer at a gym for hundreds of dollars is huge. While both have their time and place, I believe most would actually benefit working out with an app. Training from home, with bodyweight/available equipment is the fastest way to start that fitness journey - leveraging the device you spend the most time with. PARIAN is more than a workout tracker & planner - it’s a savvy training partner that guides you through personalized workouts and expedites your fitness journey.

Just shipped an update, try a demo workout here — https://parianlabs.com/demo-workouts

Follow our journey — @parianlabs on insta

Feedback and support is much appreciated!

[dotBen]

It's a bit frustrating to go through all of the intake form and account creation only to discover that to view anything I need to pay $10.

[IvanG96]

You can check out Demo Workouts here: https://parianlabs.com/demo-workouts

And the Stretch Lab here: https://parianlabs.com/stretch-lab

They're both free and don't even require a sign up

[dotBen]

That wasn't the point I was making

[nevon]

Deleting accounts doesn't seem to work. Pressing the delete account button does nothing.

Quite frustrating to go through the whole signup process and then being asked to pay before seeing anything to justify the purchase. I would have though you'd be able to at least generate some plans or plans that are limited in some way, to evaluate whether it's any better than what i already use.

[nevon]

Nevermind about the deletion being broken. It does work. There's just no UI feedback until you try again and get an error.

[IvanG96]

Thank you for the feedback. Will implement a success notification in a bit.

Regarding the programs, there are 3 demo workouts to try out that I linked in the post and all over the landing page. I understand you want to check the exercise lists prior to paying so you can compare, but just reading them wouldn't provide much unless you have context. That's why they are not available. I actually previously implemented a trial period in a prior update but it didn't yield success also became easy to just keep churning so I removed it.

If you have an alternative to this, please let me know your suggestion/s.

[nevon]

I can't say what will convert better, but what I can say is that the value proposition seems to be centered around personalization, but a demo workout list doesn't showcase personalization in any way, so it doesn't show me what the value of the app is. Every workout app obviously has a list of exercises.

My dream would be an app where I can share information about myself and my goals, as well as what equipment I have access to, and then get back a workout plan that I can easily tweak by adding or removing exercises, and the app adjusting the plan so that it remains balanced and in support of my goals. For example, say the app suggests deadlifts as part of a plan in order to strengthen the glutes, but I don't feel comfortable doing deadlifts, I could remove it from the plan and the app would instead suggest hip thrusts or something. That kind of functionality, or something in the same vein of personalization, isn't really demonstrated with a static demo. An alternative could be to only let me add or remove a certain number of exercises before I have to pay, or to only pull exercises from a limited set, or gate the whole personalization behind a paywall but let me see that it exists before I pay. Right now the value proposition is really unspecific.

[IvanG96]

This is great feedback! You're 100% right that the value proposition is personalization and it's crucial to effectively communicate this to users in a tangible way.

I'm actually now going to implement a $1 1-day trial. Prior to discovering YC I was initially was going to have the webapp free, but as they often preach free products mute signs if you're actually hitting the PMF. The trial will act as a filter between those who are genuinely curious about the product, and those who are just browsing and probably wouldn't have ever paid.

Your dream app literally sounds like PARIAN after the next update. The app currently does most of what you've listed:

- personalized plan based on profile, custom goals and equipment - easily customizable workout plan that you can add/remove exercises from - comparable exercise suggestions (coming soon)

The idea I have for this comparable exercise suggestion is you will be able to do it in just a few seconds with a feature called "Swap" right in the workout page

Say you're in a gym and the bench press is taken, you will be able to tap on the Swap button and see a pop up where you can swap out either the equipment (the bench press) for something comparable like dumbbells + bench, or an entirely different exercise that still targets the chest like cable chest flyes

These exercises will also be ranked from most comparable to least, and you will have all the freedom to swap out to any you like.

Same for if you have sore glutes and don't want to do RDLs, just pull up the swap feature and swap the RDLs out for Hip Thrusts, Hip Extensions, etc.

[nevon]

If that's what you're going for, I will definitely keep an eye on your app for the future. I'm literally typing this from the gym, and there's 2 benches available for 4 people that all want to use them (me being one of them)

[Karupan]

This looks great! StretchLab looks like exactly the kind of app I’ve had in mind for a while (thought of using recorded video, but your generated ones are better). Awesome work, you probably have another subscriber.

[IvanG96]

I appreciate it! We're going to have videos (and audio tutorials) in the coming update.

[MrJohz]

It looks like there's slightly too much padding and it doesn't quite fit on my phone's screen - it seems designed for a tablet-sized device, but everything I see on the screen would fit very well on a phone screen. Indeed, if I zoom out, everything does fit on the screen properly, it's just that the default zoom means I have to scroll to get around.

But the idea looks useful, and the idea of having it on the device you're always using anyway is sensible.

[IvanG96]

Thanks for the feedback! Yea our devices are insanely capable and pretty much an extension of us now. The goal is to make this screen time productive and healthy.

Do you remember which specific page or element looked like it had a bit too much padding and wasn't fitting correctly on your phone? That would be super helpful.

If anything else comes to mind, please don't hesitate to reach out. Always happy to hear from users and improve the experience any way I can.

[MrJohz]

It's specifically when I click on the demo workouts link in your post - when I click the main link to your site, everything seems to work fine (although I haven't finished the onboarding process).

When I click on that on my phone (Moto G5+, Firefox), most of the page is cut off, and I need to scroll around to see anything. It's like the page is designed for a device about twice the size of my one, and my browser has zoomed into the upper-left corner.

I'm on my phone so I can't explore further, but my guess is that the viewport settings aren't right for that page specifically, or there's some element with a min-width that's making the page wider than it needs to be. I get the same effect on mobile Chrome so I assume it's more about the display size then the browser.

[IvanG96]

Oh, good catch! I saw it too. Was a slip up with recent tweaks.

Please check again now.

[MrJohz]

Looks good now!

[IvanG96]

Check out the Stretch Lab too, it saves lives!

[mr_machine]

I like the idea and wouldn't mind paying to use it. That doesn't seem possible without allowing scripts from Google, Facebook, and Youtube, though, and I'm not interested in doing that. I don't need fancy video or graphics even; just a personalized training plan would be worth money.

[IvanG96]

Thank you! With the launch of the AI chatbots, I want to separate PARIAN and provide a comprehensive and super easy experience - beyond just a good list of workouts for a goal.

Email me [e-mail] and let me know what program you created, and I'll send you the workouts. Would love to hear about how you're progressing with the program and your results.

[tobeagram]

Lovely app Ivan, also great job with the landing page.

One minor comment, I found the nav bar too squashed up at the top on desktop, maybe increase the padding, font-size and then also the Get Started button and you might increase conversion as well! Keep it up :)

[IvanG96]

Thank you! I think you're right, not the first time I heard that haha. Will change it today.

[4b11b4]

Wow, stretch lab might have just saved my life.

[IvanG96]

Hell yea! What did you like most about it?

We're actually working right now on adding real videos and audio to the tutorials. Should ship in a few months.

[hierophantic]

"Everyone else is doing it wrong!"

From 30+ years of working out this seems to be the absolute standard line when it comes to fitness.

I just think the idea of $10 a month is a delusional value proposition when I pay $20 a month for chatGPT4o.

[IvanG96]

Hey, I appreciate you checking out the app and providing the feedback. If you download the top 20 personal fitness apps in any of the app stores you would see a stark difference. I know because I researched over a 100 apps and websites myself. This difference is not so much in the "standard features", though most lack support and customization capabilities - (PARIAN is still in a very early stage of development and has both), but the major difference is in the quality of workouts - what actually matters. I've spent almost two years researching and refining the PARIAN workout model, and as someone with 11+ years with domain experience - can clearly tell the difference. I can tell you now not only is PARIAN the best personalized workouts builder, but will significantly improve in the coming updates.

Regarding GPT4o, while it's amazing tech that only keeps getting better, PARIAN is an entire comprehensive platform that makes training seamless. To get something comparable out of ChatGPT, you would have to know exactly what you want and spend time prompting it (but if you have the expertise to prompt you're probably not the target dem), and periodically make sure it's not hallucinating. Additionally, we provide workout video tutorials and keep track of your workouts and progress along the way. ChatGPT does not. The $10 PARIAN Plan you mentioned is also a one time payment for the personalized workout program, and is half the price of ChatGPT monthly.