Sweat equity – With a new app for exercising and eating right, B.R. startup Fitnotix brings technology to the body

There are a lot of challenges to wooing a prospective web developer via Skype from a car parked outside of a Baton Rouge gas station while the larger, more established firms of Manhattan wine and dine him across his native New York City, but the popular coffee chain’s early closing time was probably the least insurmountable.

Turns out, Skype or no, Ken Anderson was intrigued enough by the pitch from local entrepreneurs Drew Langhart and Justin Waller to agree to fly down to the Red Stick for more.

After he arrived in Baton Rouge, an all-day brainstorming session in a hotel room they dubbed the “Tiger Den” was all Anderson needed to sign on with the company they decided then and there to name Fitnotix.

After more than a year of development, design and testing, last June the group released its first product, a free app that is part GPS-fueled route-map and part performance tracker for runners.

One early adopter in Baton Rouge was Unglesby Law Firm paralegal Callie Gorman, a daily runner and no stranger to competing in half- and full marathons.

Gorman has been using the free app since last summer—”and I’ve tried them all,” she says—when she first jogged the streets of Guatemala City on a mission trip to an orphanage. “Even if I wasn’t exercising, it would be cool to use it as a guide in a new city. But I think the way it tracks your pace per mile and gives direction really speaks to runners—especially beginners, because it’s so straightforward.”

The Fitnotix founders stress that their running app is only the beginning. Soon they will roll out the real reason Waller first shared his fitness-meets-technology vision with Langhart: an expansive mobile app and subscription service focused more on comprehensive, accountability-based lifestyle management and positive habit formation than simply on the routine grunt of reps and sets and repeat.

The projected launch date is March.

“We’re all most vulnerable to a bad experience with exercise when we first start,” says Waller, a former footballer at UL-Monroe “30 pounds ago,” as the tall, brawny senior VP describes it.

“So many people associate working out with pain, failure and embarrassment, and it just doesn’t have to be that way.”

Users of the Virtual Lifestyle Coaching app will not only be talked (and encouraged) through fitness routines inside and outside of the gym—an exerciser’s music volume will duck lower when the coach’s voice comes through—but will also receive consistent assistance with managing their food intake.

As soon as a Fitnotix subscriber walks into a Tex-Mex restaurant, for example, the healthiest ordering options for that cuisine will pop up in the app.

For eating in, Fitnotix subscribers can receive goodies from Freshology, the Los Angeles-based healthy food service that ships complete meals across the country, counts Chrysler founder Lee Iacocca among its seed investors, and is endorsed by celebrities like Modern Family‘s Sofia Vergara.

Freshology delivers health-conscious dishes like Goat Cheese & Oven Dried Tomato Frittata and Miso Mustard Glazed Flat Iron Beef in temperature-controlled boxes twice weekly.

The deal with Fitnotix is the first of its kind for Freshology founder and CEO Todd DeMann.

“I like their app and their approach a lot,” DeMann says. “This is the future of the market, and it’ll allow Freshology to deliver our product directly to the homes of people who want to eat healthy. It helps that they are nice guys, but we want to align ourselves with platforms like Fitnotix.”

Langhart says flexibility is an important component to the app, so a “detached meal” option allows users to vary from the scheduled meal plan and cook on their own with the aid of Fitnotix’s instructional video series.

“The main reason people cheat on their diet is because they don’t have good food on hand,” Waller says. “So we’re going to teach them how to cook.”

When users’ goals are reached, Fitnotix will give them what Langhart calls “social media high-fives” for encouragement and, since all of their friends can see, accountability.

Langhart envisions a global reach for the Fitnotix brand, with Baton Rouge as a hub, and he and his partner see the potential for opening tech-driven fitness facilities and a line of workout clothing in future phases of their business.

As Millennials look toward technology for help with achieving fitness goals, Langhart and Waller are engineering Fitnotix to be more than just extraneous noise added into a culture that can seem close to exercise information overload.

“Our app is interactive,” Langhart says. “That’s the difference. It works for you. It walks with you every day.” fitnotix.com