What a week it has been. I just landed back home from a trip to Berlin – to attend selection days for a Lead – Sports Accelerator.
Needless to say it was intense which is one of the reasons I am just writing this update now. The event started with pitches and then went on to a speed-dating style interview.
The event started with pitches and then went on to a speed-dating style interview. Over 30 tables, at each table different

The Movement Athlete – Founder Aga Nazaruk Pitching
mentors and investors and we had 20min per table. After 20 min we switch and go to the next table. 2 days of just that. My voice gave up at the end and I could hardly talk.
The format although intense has been great in terms of meeting as many folks as possible and getting a fireside-style feedback on what we are doing.
I made some great connections, both potential mentors, advisors, investors and partnerships, and of course friends for life in other startups.
After 2 days the jury out of 40 selected 19 startups that got into the accelerator and will be heading to Berlin from September. But only after 1 month there is a final decision whether you get awarded a small investment (25k for 8% of the company).

The Movement Athlete getting into 19 top Startups to enter Lead Sports Accelerator
It is a small amount for where we are at but any money would be great to push the product development.
I will start with main takeaways and lessons learnt and then move onto how it will affect our strategy going forward.
Main takeaways:
- We are in a great, vastly underserved & growing market and have an opportunity to emerge as an authority if we do it well.
- Building a strong brand that stands for something, with a worldwide community is the KEY
- Our brand & a company should be aiming to become a lifestyle brand – tech is just one product we offer and eventually, we will have offline events, clothing brand and maybe even a physical location
- Part of the vision of building our community is collaborating with trainers and athletes from all over the world to promote the movement and bodyweight disciplines and promote them- these relationships are extremely important and we will be putting systems this month to start nurturing the current ones and developing new ones.
- Our product needs to be great, easy to use and flow with optimisation for social aspect
On the tech side there was a lot of suggestions. Some of the things which come up over and over again was incorporating video analysis to give folks immediate feedback
FOCUS AREAS FOR NEXT 60 DAYS SPRINT.
Next 3 months our focus needs to be on building a brand, a worldwide movement and a community of folks – athletes, trainers, and average Joes – who believe in what we believe – that moving should not be a chore.
Among many projects planned we are putting a content marketing machine in place, regular email updates to our list and customers, affiliate program, presale, Instagram marketing, new version of the ebook coming out and building relationships with trainers and athletes – from which some of them will join our core team.
Along with that we will be perfecting the product and we want to start the app development mid August. From multiple conversations I had it become obvious that getting the product to the market should be our number 1 priority.
We have been pushing it forward as financially it will be really straining to make it happen.
Nevertheless, we made a decision to do whatever it takes to bring it to the market before Christmas.

The Movement Athlete App coming at the end of the year
To fund it we will do a presale promo to our community which will cover part of the cost. We are also considering equity crowdfunding or taking on a small loan to finish it – but it means that we will have very limited amount of cash to put towards marketing for next few months until the release. We are trying to address this issue but it’s literally the last, most important milestone for us to get through. I know that we can do this.
I am so excited for releasing the product- it still will be an MVP version so won’t include a lot of features we would love to see but one we have that out there – everything gets easier and we can keep on putting money into development. We will aim to have the product redy before Christmas and do a big product launch during that time.
I am extremely grateful for the support of each and every one of you as we are making headways on this journey.
I truly believe we can build something with a global impact and change lives of many people.