Startup Spotlight #84: Fitnescity

Fitnescity is a platform that offers a variety of lab tests for fitness, nutrition and general health.

Feb 10, 2021

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I got the chance to speak with Laila Zemrani, co-founder and CEO of Fitnescity, about what she’s working on at her startup, and any advice she has for emerging entrepreneurs.

Zemrani is the Co-founder and CEO of Fitnescity. She was born and raised in Morocco and came to the U.S. for grad school at MIT Sloan. Zemrani has been an early adopter and advocate of the Quantified Self, which led her to a series of self-experiments on how the human body reacts to changes in exercise and diet. Zemrani started using lab tests as part of that personal journey, and eventually co-founded Fitnescity to make these tests accessible to the general wellness consumer.

For most consumers, the human body is still a black box that they are trying to decode with wearables and generalized formulas like body mass index (BMI). The current healthcare system, which is primarily focused on treating disease, makes it even harder for someone to get a clear picture of their health in a preventative manner. If wearables provide a glimpse into how we live our daily lives, lab testing is like a window into our bodies. A simple lab test—coupled with a meaningful analysis of the results—can provide highly valuable insights.

Fitnescity helps people uncover valuable data about their body by offering a variety of lab tests for fitness, nutrition, and general health.

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Startup Spotlight: Fitnescity

Laila Zemrani, cofounder and CEO of Fitnescity.

Problem: Consumers lack access to crucial data about their ﬁtness, nutrition, and general health. Lab testing is like a window into our bodies; it can help people improve their weight loss, eat better, and reduce health risks. However, lab testing is outdated.

Market: Fitnescity operates in the fast-growing consumer health market. The TAM is a $300bn consumer health market and the SAM is a $100bn U.S. consumer health market.

Solution: Fitnescity makes lab testing accessible and understandable. Fitnescity partners with leading labs (e.g. Quest Diagnostics), clinics, and health systems (e.g. Mount Sinai in NY) to offer lab testing as a tech-enabled consumer product: (1) Shop in a few clicks and (2) Get results you can understand and apply.

Team: Zemrani co-founded Fitnescity with Çağatay Demiralp. Çağatay has a CS Ph.D. from Brown, along with a research background at MIT and Stanford. Jenna Parker recently joined the team. She is a former world-ranked professional athlete who started her athletic career at Harvard before transitioning to venture capital.

Recent Success:

Zemrani: Raising money from customers: Since we were familiar with the space and how big the demand was going to be, we decided to follow our intuition and use our customers as our initial source of funding. We were fulfilling our first orders as we were building the product. We thought it was going to be temporary, but we ended up raising a “customer round” of $200,000 worth of orders. Ironically, at that point, one of those orders became our first investor, but technically, that still falls under raising money from customers.

Recent Struggle:

Zemrani: Initially, we have struggled with focus. We were trying to appeal to all types of customers who arrived on our platform, and on the supply side, we offered too many lab tests too soon. When you’re starting out, there’s always this urge to seem bigger than you actually are. In some cases, it might be necessary, especially when landing a partner that’s a large health system or a lab industry giant. However, in most situations–especially internal ones–it’s better to act small when you’re building, and that means focus.

Founder Advice:

Zemrani: Spend as much time as possible learning from customers. When we started out, I picked up all customer service calls and tried to keep people on the phone as much as possible. I knew a large number of the early customers by name, if not their full story. As a team, we’re now trying to keep a similar mindset for as long as we can. In fact, we all do customer service.

This has given us a great competitive advantage as it’s quite rare for a company to have that much depth of knowledge about their customers and what drives them, especially when building something new.

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Zemrani: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Evelyn Rusli, Co-founder of Yumi: Yumi offers a science-based early childhood meal delivery program.
Anita Sharifi, Co-founder of DŌNŌ: DŌNŌ is a social gifting app that lets you instantly send a personalized eGift card to anyone.
James Waldie, Co-founder of Cape Bionics: Cape Bionics brings custom-fit biocompression technology from space to elite athletes.

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