Akshay is obsessed with building impactful products. He's built a career doing so as a Product Manager at Facebook, Microsoft, and now with Trainiac. Working out regularly and building healthy habits changed his life, and he won't stop until everyone has access to do the same. Akshay grew up in Toronto, Canada and is a lifetime Raptors fan.
Jing (Frank) Fan has 15+ years of experience in software development at Microsoft and Facebook, where all the free drinks and food took their toll on him. After finally losing over 20 pounds through exercise and diet, Frank co-founded Trainiac with Akshay as CTO, with the mission and passion of using technology to help people get into a fitness routine and stay there for a lifetime.
With over a decade of exercise programming experience, Geoff brings his passion for health and fitness to Trainiac. Over the years, he’s learned that a well-designed exercise program gets results, and that there is no room for a cookie cutter approach. Geoff spends his free time training for Ultra Marathons and lives in the small mountain town of Winthrop, Washington.
With over nine years of experience in the world of education, Aurora loves helping people learn and realize their full potential. She's thrilled to combine this with her passion for exercise and wellbeing and is excited to help people experience fitness as a lifestyle with Trainiac. Outside of the office, you'll find Aurora teaching group fitness classes around Seattle, drinking matcha, and watching The Great British Baking Show.
As busy humans, we failed to incorporate sustainable fitness into our hectic working lives on our own until we got counsel, accountability, and ongoing encouragement from a qualified, caring coach. Getting consistent with exercise changed our lives for the better, so we rallied together to help others reap the health benefits of regular exercise, too.
As a company, we first tried to solve the riddle of routine exercise with an app using an algorithm that designed and optimized personalized workouts. The app accumulated a lot of users, but that wasn't good enough for us because our users would still eventually fail to build a long-term habit.
So, we spent the following year speaking with hundreds of customers, pouring over our large data sets, and experimenting with gamification, social groups, money incentives, challenges, and more to gauge their impact on habit formation. We found that, while there are numerous ways to get excited about starting an exercise routine, people still find it incredibly difficult to break past the struggle using their own willpower day after day to make exercise stick.
The answer to us was clear: to turn exercise into a habit, people need individualized guidance with ongoing accountability and support from a professional they can trust, and they need a precise and practical workout regimen that they can do on their own time and in their own space so it’s easy to integrate into their hectic lives.
We realized that if we really wanted to help people work out consistently to live better lives, we had to build an entirely new platform to connect humans to human experts in a cost-effective and convenient way — not humans to bots, algorithms, or artificial intelligence. That’s how Trainiac came to life.
