A Video Conversation with Jonathan Maxim, CEO of Vea Fitness - Part III

4/24/17

By Brian Neary, Newmark Grubb Knight Frank

Jonathan Maxim

Click here for Part IPart II

Vea Fitness founder Jonathan Maxim has worn many hats in the past, that of an app designer, growth hacker, digital marketer and more. Now he is summoning all that knowledge and skills to build his young startup.

Headquartered in Philadelphia, Maxim’s startup has built a powerful app that works on platforms such as Fitbit and Apple Watch, and is finding creative ways to inspire people to work out, among them financial rewards. Vea has partnered with the City of Philadelphia and Snap Kitchen, among others, to promote the concept, while tweaking its business model to create a winning model.


“The essence of Vea is helping people find their motivation to work out and then providing them different…incentives and motivators,” Maxim, who previously worked in a Fortune 50 firm, told Brian Neary in an interview.

“…down the road there is a very high likelihood that we could become acquired by one of those large brands, but for now we’re really focused on building up the consumer experience, making the app truly motivational and flying on the experience,” said Maxim, who studied graphic design and user interface, besides earning an MBA at San Diego State University.

EDWIN WARFIELD: What is the funding outlook for Vea?

JONATHAN MAXIM: Today, we have some angel funding. I initially built the project myself with my own capital and that’s when I started doing the software development. I’m a designer by profession, so I designed the experience and I paid a developer to build it. And so my partner and co-founder, Dhakshina, comes from the healthcare sector. He has worked with companies like Independence Blue Cross building software products for them, and he brought a lot of great experience as well as capital into the picture. So he came on as a very close partner and cofounder of mine, and so that got us through building up the beta and moving to a product market fit which is where we’re closer to now and now we’re going to be moving into a funding round, for seed funding in Q1 of this year.

So I’m very excited about that, connecting especially with the people at Microsoft, they’ve enabled us in many ways with venture capitalists and different introductions and so we’re really excited for Q1 and Q2 of 17 from a capital perspective. We’re going to be seeking outside investment.

BRIAN NEARY: At this point, what are Vea’s major milestones?

JONATHAN MAXIM: In terms of benchmarking and growth, we launched in the City of Philadelphia in September and that brought us just over 2,000 downloads and that was about four or five months ago and since then we’ve had a nice steady growth rate. Our engagement rate has continued to stay positive, which is around 20-30% based on what time of day of week it is, but there’s also the fact that when we get press or when we have milestones we watch engagement go up. So it’s interesting.

You would think that just people knowing about the app they would use it a certain amount, but popularity has had an effect on that, so that was interesting for us to see. And so we watched the engagement go up a lot. People were using the app on a daily basis when it was in the news, when it was popular, so they have reminders and cues and so we’re definitely very excited about the result of the Philly Free Streets and the upcoming free events. I think it will set a lot of new growth milestones and really set us up for success as far as gaining investment and spreading to other cities like New York and DC.

BRIAN NEARY: What is the future for Vea Fitness in the next 12-24 months? Where do you see Vea in three years?

JONATHAN MAXIM: I see Vea Fitness in three years, really in a national presence…in all the big cities, providing people with access to all their favorite brands through rewards, but really, a kind of viral or a really shareable motivational experience, so people are inspired to share Vea.

I think that we are going to be still growing at that phase. I don’t anticipate that we will sell to a buyer by that point because I want to put all of our focus into building an awesome product. And so, that’s really where we’re focused and I think over the next year we’ll gain investment and we’ll grow in a much more rapid way and then expand nationally.

Connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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