In December 2022, Koya challenged himself to work out consistently for an entire year.
It was a personal fitness goal, not the beginning of a technology company. But as he became more consistent, people around him started asking how he managed to maintain the routine. He would explain what he was doing, but getting others to follow through was another problem.
That experience eventually gave him an idea: what if technology could help people stay accountable with their fitness goals?
By 2025, Koya had started building an application around that idea. He was a software engineer with roughly two to three years of professional experience, having started in frontend development before expanding into backend engineering and DevOps.
The first implementation was built with Angular and Capacitor.
Angular was familiar territory because it was what he used at work. Capacitor allowed the team to package its web application into a mobile experience without immediately adopting a separate native development stack.
The backend ran on Node.js and Express, with MongoDB handling data storage.
It was a practical architecture for a small team trying to validate an idea. They could work with technologies they already understood, build the product and get it into users’ hands.
Eventually, the application attracted approximately 200 users. Some beta testers reported that it helped them become more consistent with their workouts.
There was just one problem: nobody was paying for it.
200 users and a business model that wasn’t working
FirstRep initially considered monetising the consumer application through premium features and subscriptions.
But the founders encountered a familiar problem in consumer software: users saying they would pay for something did not necessarily translate into actual subscriptions.
As Koya explained, willingness to pay and actual payment were two different things.
The team had built something people found useful, but usefulness alone wasn’t producing revenue.
By November and December 2025, the founders began reconsidering the business.
Rather than immediately discarding everything they had built, Koya started looking at the wider fitness industry, particularly the businesses that helped people achieve their fitness goals.
His own gym used management software. That experience made him curious about how other gyms handled their operations.
His research revealed an opportunity.
Many gyms in Nigeria were still managing memberships, attendance, payments and customer records using notebooks and spreadsheets.
The problem wasn’t necessarily that people needed another fitness application. The businesses serving those people needed better software.
That observation changed FirstRep’s direction.
The founders called more than 500 gyms before rebuilding the product
In December 2025, Koya began researching gyms across Nigeria.
He created a spreadsheet containing gyms across different states and started reaching out to them. The team eventually called more than 500 gyms.
The objective wasn’t simply to sell a product. They needed to establish whether the operational problems they had identified were real and whether gym owners would pay to solve them.
Koya had come across Alex Hormozi’s Rule of 100, which influenced the team’s approach to customer acquisition.
The first calls weren’t particularly effective. They had to learn how to communicate the product’s value, understand the problems gym owners experienced and refine their pitch.
This process also influenced what FirstRep would eventually build.
A gym-management product has considerably different requirements from a consumer fitness application.
The customer is no longer just someone tracking workouts. There is a business administrator responsible for membership plans, payments, attendance and member records. There are also gym members who need a convenient way to interact with the business.
FirstRep therefore developed around two connected experiences: an administrative platform for gym owners and a mobile application for their members.
Gym owners can manage their operations, membership plans and members from the platform. Members can use the mobile application to interact with their gyms and, where supported by the gym, pay for their memberships.
Interestingly, FirstRep doesn’t force every gym to use its payment functionality. Some businesses prefer to maintain their existing payment relationships with customers.
That flexibility matters in a market where software adoption often depends on how well a product accommodates existing business processes.
Why FirstRep replaced Angular and Capacitor with React Native
The transition from a consumer fitness application to a gym-management platform also exposed limitations in the original mobile implementation.
The team wanted a more conventional mobile experience and better infrastructure for supporting multiple applications, particularly white-labelled applications for individual gyms.
Rather than rewrite the entire system, FirstRep retained most of its existing backend and rebuilt the frontend with a new design.
The mobile application moved from Angular and Capacitor to React Native.
This was a deliberate engineering decision. The backend already handled much of the business logic and data management, so replacing everything would have introduced additional development work without necessarily delivering equivalent value.
By retaining the backend and concentrating on the frontend, the team could improve the mobile experience while preserving infrastructure that was already working.
The rebuild also introduced a new development workflow.
Koya said the design process took some time, while the actual coding took approximately two weeks. The overall project lasted around a month.
OpenAI Codex played a significant role in the implementation.
The team used AI-assisted development heavily to accelerate the rebuild, although the work still required decisions about application structure, product requirements and the experience they wanted to deliver.
For a relatively small engineering team, this approach helped compress implementation time without requiring a complete rewrite of the existing backend.
Turning one gym-management platform into multiple branded applications
One of FirstRep’s more interesting technical offerings is its white-label application.
Some gyms don’t necessarily want their members using an application branded FirstRep. They want a digital product that carries their own business identity.
FirstRep can provide that experience using its underlying platform, allowing gyms to have branded mobile applications without independently developing and maintaining their own software.
The higher-end offering can also include customised websites and integrations with systems such as door-access infrastructure.
This introduces another architectural consideration.
The platform must support different gym identities and configurations while maintaining a shared underlying technology base. Otherwise, every new customer requiring a branded application could become a separate development project.
The commercial opportunity is also different from selling a standard gym-management subscription.
FirstRep can serve businesses that need more customised digital infrastructure and are willing to pay for it.
It is effectively moving from selling access to software towards providing a broader technology layer for gym operations.
Jamila: An AI chatbot designed to bring inactive gym members back
FirstRep has also introduced an AI-powered feature called Jamila.
Rather than building an AI assistant that simply answers general fitness questions, the team focused on a specific operational problem: members who stop attending the gym.
Jamila lives inside the member-facing mobile application and interacts with gym members who have become inactive.
If a member hasn’t visited the gym for some time, the chatbot can reach out, start a conversation and try to understand what is happening.
A member might explain that they have been busy or are experiencing a particular challenge. That information can then help the gym understand why the person has stopped attending.
The idea is to give gym owners more context about member inactivity instead of treating it as just another record in their database.
The team also explored a more ambitious approach involving AI-powered voice calls.
Koya said they experimented with the ElevenLabs API to make automated calls to members and have conversations with them.
However, the economics didn’t make sense.
The cost of implementing voice interactions was too high for the company’s current stage.
It was a practical decision: just because something is technically possible doesn’t mean it is commercially viable.
For FirstRep, AI is an additional capability within the product. The central value proposition remains gym management.
Building around how African gyms actually collect payments
There are already international gym-management platforms serving the fitness industry. FirstRep’s argument is that software built for other markets doesn’t always account for the way African gyms operate.
Koya pointed to differences in payment behaviour.
Some international platforms are designed around class-pass systems and recurring card payments. But many gyms in Nigeria still collect membership fees through bank transfers.
Not every gym wants to connect a card or depend on automatic recurring subscriptions.
FirstRep tries to accommodate these existing workflows rather than force businesses to change how they operate before they can use the software.
Pricing is another consideration.
International products charging in dollars or euros can become expensive for local gyms. FirstRep instead prices its platform according to the number of active members a gym manages.
Its starter plan covers gyms with up to 300 members, while larger businesses pay more depending on their membership base.
Members whose subscriptions expired more than 60 days earlier are considered dormant and excluded from the billing calculation.
The model connects the cost of the software to the size of the business using it.
Local support is another part of the proposition. When a gym encounters a problem, it matters that someone can respond quickly and understand the operating environment.
The onboarding problem wasn’t the software. It was getting the data.
Even with a product designed around gym operations, FirstRep encountered another obstacle: getting businesses to start using it.
Initially, onboarding required gyms to upload their existing member lists and configure their accounts.
The team discovered that this created friction.
Gym owners were slow to provide their data, and prospects could lose interest while waiting for the setup process to be completed.
FirstRep changed the workflow.
After a sales call, the team moves the gym into a WhatsApp group and requests basic information, including the gym’s name and membership plans.
The team then creates the gym internally through an administrative tool, generates its login details and shares three or four short onboarding videos.
More important or complex customers can still receive onboarding calls.
Members are added gradually when they visit the gym.
The gym creates their accounts through its administrative portal using their email address or phone number, after which they can sign in to the mobile application.
This removed the requirement for gyms to prepare and upload their entire membership database before they could begin using the platform.
It is a relatively small change in the onboarding process, but it addresses a significant product adoption problem.
The team discovered that reducing the work required from customers could be just as important as adding another feature.
From 500 cold calls to almost 6,000 users
FirstRep’s commercial progress eventually began reflecting the change in its product strategy.
By the time of the interview, the company had more than 20 paying gyms and almost 6,000 users on its application.
It had engaged nearly 100 gyms and had customers across Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ondo, Edo, Kaduna and Ghana.
Its first paying customer was Shape Up Fitness in Ondo State, which converted in April 2026.
Customer acquisition has also evolved.
The early approach relied heavily on founder-led cold calling and follow-ups. The company now combines advertising, an SDR responsible for cold calls and direct founder involvement in sales.
Koya still handles sales calls, while his co-founder manages advertising.
The progression is significant. The founders initially had to convince people to try a consumer fitness application. They are now selling operational software to businesses with an identifiable need and willingness to pay.
Expansion introduces a different kind of problem
Nigeria remains FirstRep’s primary market, but the company has started exploring other African markets, including South Africa. It already has a customer in Ghana.
However, expanding beyond Nigeria has exposed a challenge that isn’t necessarily related to the product itself.
Koya described situations where prospects became hesitant after discovering that the company was Nigerian or seeing its +234 phone number.
In some cases, an SDR could have a productive conversation with a prospect, only for the conversation to change once the company’s location became apparent.
FirstRep has since registered a company in the UK and is working towards obtaining a UK phone number to address some of these concerns.
It is a reminder that international expansion requires more than software localisation. Trust, company positioning and the perception of the business can influence adoption just as much as product functionality.
Why FirstRep is bootstrapping instead of raising money
Despite its progress, FirstRep has not raised external funding.
The company is currently bootstrapping, and Koya doesn’t believe fundraising should happen simply because an opportunity exists.
He wants the founders to understand the business better, validate their current approach and identify exactly what additional capital would be used for.
There have been opportunities to speak with interested investors, but the company isn’t rushing to raise.
For now, the focus is on growing its customer base, improving the product and understanding the market.
The engineering lesson behind FirstRep’s pivot
FirstRep’s evolution is interesting because the company didn’t solve its initial revenue problem by simply adding more features to its fitness application.
It reconsidered who the customer was.
The original product was built for individuals who wanted to become more consistent with their workouts. The new direction focused on the businesses responsible for managing those individuals.
That change influenced almost every part of the product.
The company moved from Angular and Capacitor to React Native, retained its existing Node.js backend, introduced white-labelled applications, built an administrative platform for gym operations and added Jamila to help gyms understand member inactivity.
It also changed how customers were onboarded, how the product was priced and how the company approached sales.
For founders building technology products, the distinction between having users and having a business is important.
FirstRep had approximately 200 users, but that wasn’t enough to establish a sustainable revenue model. Its eventual progress came from identifying a customer with a more immediate operational problem and building around that need.
Koya’s advice to founders facing a similar situation is straightforward:
“Pivot, pivot or change the idea, or stay the course. It depends.”
The important thing, he explained, is to look at the business metrics and understand whether the company is getting closer to its vision.
Sometimes, a pivot doesn’t mean abandoning the original idea. It could mean changing the person who pays for the product, the target customer or the way the business approaches the market.
For FirstRep, the fitness application was the starting point. Understanding the infrastructure behind the fitness industry became the business.