The CoachCube Story

Founding Narrative

I’ve always wanted to build companies that make the world a better place. At Tough Mudder, we built something that genuinely changed people’s lives - 5 million participants, $100M in revenue, events across three continents. Over 20,000 people got our logo tattooed on their bodies. You don’t do that for a brand. You do it for something that meant something to you. CoachCube comes from

the same place - a belief that fitness technology should serve people, not just sell to them.

But there was a number at Tough Mudder that always nagged at me: 20% of people who signed up never even showed up on race day.

These weren’t casual drop-offs. These were people who’d paid good money, told their friends, bought the kit. And yet, somewhere between sign-up and start line, life - or something resembling it - got in the way.

We heard every excuse imaginable. A 56-year-old car mechanic from Pennsylvania claimed he’d been deployed on a classified military operation. He proactively advised us not to bother contacting the Pentagon - they would, he assured us, deny all knowledge. Someone insisted their brain was being used for unauthorised science experiments without their permission. My personal favourite: a participant who couldn’t make it because their dog had been impregnated by their cat.

Behind the comedy, though, there was a real problem. Most of these people hadn’t trained. They’d downloaded a plan, pinned it to the fridge, and quietly abandoned it within a fortnight. Not because they were lazy - because static training plans don’t adapt, don’t motivate, and don’t hold you accountable. A PDF doesn’t care if you skip leg day.

The fitness industry has known the solution for decades: personal training. A good coach adjusts, encourages, and keeps you honest. But here’s the thing - we live in an era of driverless taxis, AI that writes code, and robots performing surgery. And yet the best solution the fitness industry can offer is paying someone £80 an hour to watch you do push-ups. It doesn’t scale, and the people who need coaching most are the ones who can least afford it.

There’s another side to this too. Not everyone feels comfortable on a gym floor. Introverts, many women, people returning to fitness after years away - for them, the open gym can be genuinely intimidating. The last thing they want is a stranger correcting their form in front of twenty people. They deserve a space that feels semi-private, supportive, and judgement-free.

And then there’s the gym operators themselves, sitting on a problem they’ve never been able to solve: they churn their entire membership base roughly every two years. That’s not a marketing problem - it’s a results problem. People leave because they stop seeing progress. Any tool that genuinely improves retention has to start by actually delivering results.

Why This Matters More Than People Think

Here’s a fact we all know but choose to ignore on a daily basis: from the age of 30, the human body loses 3-5% of its muscle mass every decade. After 60, the decline accelerates sharply. By the time most people notice, they’ve already lost a significant portion of the strength they need for basic independence - getting out of a chair, carrying shopping, playing with grandchildren. The medical community calls it sarcopenia, and it affects up to half of all adults over 80.

The consequences are brutal. People with significant muscle loss are more than twice as likely to suffer a low-trauma fracture from a fall. Falls are the leading cause of injury-related death in older adults. This isn’t an obscure medical footnote - it’s one of the biggest predictors of whether someone lives their later years with independence and dignity, or doesn’t.

The good news is that strength training is extraordinarily effective at fighting back. A major meta-analysis of over 115,000 adults found that combining strength training twice a week with regular aerobic exercise reduced the risk of dying from any cause by 30%. Separate research across ten studies showed that any amount of resistance training reduced all-cause mortality by 15%, cardiovascular mortality by 19%, and cancer mortality by 14%. Just 60 minutes a week delivered the maximum benefit - a 27% reduction in mortality risk.

And the benefits aren’t just physical. A meta-analysis of 33 clinical trials found that resistance training produced significant reductions in depressive symptoms - regardless of age, gender, or whether participants actually got stronger. The act of showing up and training was enough. Other research has shown comparable effects to antidepressant medication. In a world where mental health is rightly front of mind, strength training is one of the most underused tools we have.

This is what CoachCube is really about. It’s not just helping twenty-something gym rats get bigger biceps. It’s helping a 70-year-old grandmother stay strong enough to get down on the floor and play with her grandchildren. It’s giving someone the confidence to walk into a gym for the first time in a decade. It’s the self-esteem that comes from seeing real, measurable progress in your own body. We know all of this. The science is overwhelming and unambiguous. We just choose to ignore it - on a daily basis, at enormous collective cost.

The Solution

These threads came together to form CoachCube. An autonomous AI coaching system built into a semi-private space within commercial gyms - one that sees you train, adapts your programme in real time, and gives you the accountability and expertise of a great personal trainer without the cost or the self-consciousness.

It’s also a return to my roots. After years in boardrooms and pitch meetings, I wanted to get back to the thing that started it all - helping people get fitter. Though I’ll confess the motivation partly came from personal experience. I’m in my mid-forties now, and I’d grown rather tired of twenty-something PTs calling me “bro.” I pointed out that “dad” was probably more appropriate.

No wearables. No app fatigue. Just walk in, train, and get coached.

Because the problem was never motivation at sign-up. It was support through the messy middle. And that’s exactly where CoachCube lives.

Will Dean, Founder & CEO