It’s funny a few years ago when the Apple Watch was first being rolled out, there was a lot of talk from Wall Street investment analyst about how they thought the watch was a flop. Many analyst scoughed at the very notion  that anyone would want to wear an iPhone on their arm.

Well time has certainly proven analyst wrong in a big way. The Apple Watch is now a best seller having sold 18M in 2017 alone and an estimated 30M last year. Smartwatches in general, have taken off globally and are expected to generate over $30B in sales on a yearly basis by 2023.

Put simply, a whole new product category that barely existed five years ago now plays a central role in the daily lives of millions of people globally. Having this device strapped to your arm has led to a whole host of health and wellness apps that are helping people to be more in tune with their wellbeing.

It’s a unique period in time where those that can develop value-add apps to meet our most pressing needs as athletes and frankly healthy beings can capitalize in a major way with the massive influx of users to smart watches.

By offering data visualization tools for goal setting and progress tracking, in addition to the personalization of training content and the creation of competition within social networks, fitness apps appeal to users’ wishes to improve themselves and connect with others.

One space that has been ripe for a better solution is swimming. In the world of swimming, most aspiring and competitive swimmers train on their own without a coach. In fact, the cost to hire a personal coach for swim training can range between $20 to $100 or more per hour.

These costs can leave aspiring athletes stagnant in their practice, unable to push themselves further or fully actualize their abilities.

MySwimPro, rated the #1 app on the Apple App Store in 2016 has had astounding success providing the first tailored swim coaching app solution on the market.

Swimmers can get access to their own personalized training plans, get educational videos on things like better stroke form, and track their progress with the stats collected off the watch over time. It works across both Apple and Android and is already available for download on most smart watches.

Since being founded by two former college swimmers out of a need they saw for a better personal swim coach solution, this team has been able to get over 500,000 swimmers across the globe utilizing the app and 7,000 people paying for the premium version, which should equate to around $1M in annual recurring revenue by end of year 2019.

Outside of funding from a previous Wefunder raise, this team has been able to bootstrap the business by simply building a great product that is meeting a real need in a very hot secto r of wearable tech.

Since other workout apps such as TrainingPeaks and MyFitnessPal are focused more on tracking a broader set of general athletic activities including biking, running and swimming, MySwimPro is uniquely positioned as a true swim training solution.

Larger technology incumbents, such as MyFitnessPal, also present attractive exit opportunities as MySwimPro provides a robust swim training solution that can act as an upsell to the MyFitnessPal platform down the road.

As you can see below, MySwimPro is uniquely positioned as a flexible app that can be used on almost any device, while providing an in-depth training solution, built by and for swimmers. This is what sets it apart from the other athletic training apps.

The global fitness app market is experiencing strong growth with a projected 23% CAGR from 2016 to 2023, which sets the industry on track to reach approximately $2B by 2023.

North America dominates the market, as consumers in this region have the highest awareness of health, technology and fitness apps. Everyday fitness apps like Nike+, which launched in October 2016, have pioneered much of the rapid growth in this market.

Industry reports attribute this recent trend to the modern way that fitness apps can deliver value to smartphone and wearable tech users.

MySwimPro was founded by Fares Ksebati, Adam Oxner and Michael Allon in 2015, based out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ksebati has served as CEO since its founding, bringing his background in entrepreneurship, digital marketing and coaching swimming to the intuition behind MySwimPro’s coaching tools and features. As a Fellow for the American Swim Coaches Association, Ksebati is also recognized as an emerging leader in the sport of swimming.

Oxner has served as CTO of MySwimPro since 2018, after working as iOS Lead and spearheading development, product and design since the founding of the company. Oxner brings a host of technical experience to the company coming from a background in software engineering and iOS developer work, in addition to a passion for swimming that was cultivated during his time swimming at the University of Michigan.

Allon has served as Android Lead since the company’s founding, after having served as a Senior Android Engineer at Target. Moreover, Allon’s personal weight-loss journey also serves as a testament to the potentially transformative effect of MySwimPro on health and wellness, as he attributes his success in losing 100lbs to the app.