1.How did the idea for FITPASS originally come together?
The idea came from lived frustration. I wanted flexibility and variety in my fitness routine, but everything available felt rigid, fixed memberships, fixed locations, fixed formats. It didn’t reflect how real life works.
At the same time, Akshay was seeing the same problem from a different angle, how fragmented access to fitness was across cities, formats, and price points. That’s when it clicked for us that this wasn’t a motivation problem. People weren’t “lazy” or “undisciplined.” The system itself was broken.
FITPASS was born from that realisation: if fitness could adapt to people’s lives instead of demanding lifestyle changes upfront, consistency would follow. Our goal was to remove friction and make movement feel doable, not daunting.
2.What problem were you most focused on solving when you started building in the fitness space?
Access and consistency.
In India, fitness was designed for a small, privileged segment, people with time, disposable income, and predictable routines. Most people genuinely wanted to move more, but the way fitness was structured made it hard to sustain.
From the beginning, we focused on making fitness affordable, flexible, and habit-friendly. Not aspirational in a glossy way, but practical enough to fit into everyday life. The real challenge wasn’t getting people to start, it was helping them continue.
3.How has your understanding of Indian fitness behaviour evolved since those early days?
One of our biggest learnings has been that Indians don’t lack intent, they lack momentum.
People often start with enthusiasm, but life intervenes: work pressure, family responsibilities, festivals, travel, or simply exhaustion. Traditional fitness models treat these interruptions as failures. We learned that adoption improves dramatically when systems acknowledge cultural realities instead of fighting them.
Fitness works better when it adapts to life, not when people are expected to rearrange their lives around fitness.
4.Why do you think consistency is the hardest part of fitness for most people?
Consistency becomes difficult when the effort required is unrealistic to sustain.
Many fitness systems are built around peak effort, long sessions, rigid streaks, extreme targets. That kind of intensity can work temporarily, but it’s rarely repeatable when real life intervenes.
Real life isn’t steady. There are high-energy weeks and low-energy weeks. Travel, deadlines, family commitments, illness, these aren’t exceptions; they’re normal patterns. The issue isn’t that people aren’t willing to try. It’s that most programmes don’t adapt when circumstances change.
Consistency breaks not because people lack intent, but because the system punishes interruption. When a missed session feels like failure, people disengage entirely.
Sustainable consistency comes from designing routines that can stretch and contract with life, where adjusting the effort doesn’t feel like quitting. When people feel they can return without guilt, repetition becomes natural rather than forced.
5.What role does behavioural science play in how you think about habit formation?
A central one. Motivation and willpower are powerful starting points, but they are inherently variable. Behavioral science helps us design systems that support people when motivation dips.
Research consistently shows that habits form through repetition, reduced friction, and positive reinforcement. Small, repeatable actions compound over time, especially when the environment makes them easy to execute and rewarding to repeat.
So the approach isn’t motivation versus systems. It’s motivation as the spark, and systems as the structure that carries it forward. The goal isn’t dramatic overhauls driven purely by willpower, but creating conditions where showing up consistently, even imperfectly, feels achievable, sustainable, and reinforcing.
6.How do incentives and rewards influence long-term lifestyle changes, in your experience?
Incentives help bridge the gap between intention and action.
They don’t replace intrinsic motivation, but they support it especially in the early stages when habits are fragile. When effort is acknowledged, people are more likely to return. Over time, the reward shifts from the incentive itself to how people feel: more energetic, more confident, more in control of their routine.
Consistency is what drives long-term change, and incentives can help people stay long enough to experience that shift.
7.How do you design for real Indian routines rather than ideal or extreme fitness lifestyles?
We build to make fitness part of life, not for fitness to disrupt life.
We design for weddings, deadlines, travel, festivals, low-energy days, and changing schedules. Whether someone works out at a gym, at home, in a park, or for twenty minutes instead of an hour, it still counts.
Flexibility isn’t a compromise for us, it’s the foundation. If a system only works on perfect days, it doesn’t really work at all.
8.What were some early assumptions about users that turned out to be wrong?
One early assumption we had was not about intensity or ambition but about how linear habit-building would be, once access was solved.
We believed that if people had flexibility, choice, and affordability, consistency would naturally follow in a steady upward curve. What we learned over time is that even with the right system, behaviour isn’t predictable. Life happens, and fitness has to adapt within that rhythm.
That insight pushed us to think beyond access alone and focus much more deeply on momentum, and re-entry. People don’t need a system that only works when they’re doing well; they need one that welcomes them back when they fall off.
The learning wasn’t that users wanted something different from what we believed, but that sustaining habits requires designing not just for motivation, but for disruption, pauses, and restarts.
9.How do you measure whether a fitness product is actually creating impact?
We look at retention, repeat behaviour, and habit longevity.
If users keep showing up across months, not just weeks, that’s a real impact. We also pay close attention to how fitness integrates into daily life. Is it becoming a natural part of someone’s routine, or does it still feel like an external obligation? We measure impact through behaviour over time. Not just workouts completed, but whether users return after pauses, adjust formats when schedules shift, and continue showing up across months. When effort survives real life and fitness becomes routine rather than an event, that’s real impact.
Short-term engagement signals intent. Long-term repeat behaviour signals impact.
10.What challenges arise when fitness, technology, and money intersect?
When fitness, technology, and money intersect, alignment becomes critical.
The moment financial incentives are introduced, users begin to question intent, is the system encouraging healthier behaviour, or is it optimising for transactions? That tension has to be managed carefully.
For us, the principle is simple: incentives should reinforce effort, not distort it. Technology should reduce friction and verify behaviour transparently, not gamify it in a way that feels manipulative. If rewards feel arbitrary or engineered, trust erodes quickly.
In wellness, credibility compounds slowly and collapses fast. So every layer — pricing, verification, data use, has to feel fair, visible, and aligned with the user’s health, not just platform growth.
11.As founders, how do you decide which ideas are worth scaling and which aren’t?
We scale ideas that reduce friction, increase consistency, and work across diverse user groups.
If something only works for highly motivated users, it doesn’t scale in India. We test ideas against real lives, not ideal personas. Impact always precedes scale for us.
12.Looking ahead, how do you see fitness adoption in India changing over the next few years?
Fitness will shift from aspiration to infrastructure.
It will increasingly be seen as preventive care, not just a lifestyle upgrade. Hybrid routines, habit-based models, and incentive-aligned systems will drive adoption especially in Tier II and III cities.
The benchmark will no longer be intensity or aesthetics, but consistency. Showing up regularly, in ways that fit real lives, will define the next phase of fitness in India.
