Boston Startup: CoachUp An Online Marketplace For Personal Coaches

A new startup has launched out of Cambridge Massachusetts this week called CoachUp. The premise is simple, in fact it’s surprising that no one had attempted this before. CoachUp connects personal coaches with athletes for any sport.

Co-Founders Jordan Fliegel has been a professional, personal basketball coach for the last five years. In an interview with nibletz.com he told us that before CoachUp personal coaches relied on Craigslist, word of mouth and ads in Ice Cream Shops. Some personal coaches have the advantage of being team coaches at the same time and can offer their services as a personal coach on the side. The same way some teachers tutor.

“For athletes (or the parents of young athletes), it is really hard to find a good private coach in their sport, in their area, at a price they can afford, at a time that works for them. After all, most private coaches don’t have websites.  Even if you can find a coach through a referral, it is very hard to compare that coach with others, even harder to verify the accuracy of that coach’s reviews (if they have any), and impossible to know if there may have been a closer, cheaper or better matched option elsewhere.”

The market for personal coaches is more lucrative than some may think. Kids, especially teenagers and high school students often use their sport of choice as a vehicle to get scholarships and go onto higher education. They sometimes rely on the use of a personal coach or athletic trainer to refine their sport and better their skills.

Because a lot of their clientele are parents looking for a coach for their kid Fliegel and co-founder Arian Radmand take vetting coaches very seriously. Right now, while the service is launching in the Boston area, coaches go through a phone interview, and if parents want to run more extensive background checks CoachUp has an affiliate relationship with a background company.

More after the break



The interface on CoachUp is intuitive and very easy to use. The user can look up a coach by sport and then sort

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CoachUp co-founder and coach Jordan Fliegel in his college days (photo: Bowdoin College)

them by distance from your home or child’s school as well as price. The user can then decide if they want to purchase one introductory session with a coach or session packs of five or ten sessions with that coach.  CoachUp takes a small percentage off the transaction to keep the lights on.

The coaches on CoachUp have a variety of backgrounds. Some are former professional athletes, college athletes or coaches for their sport at local high schools or colleges.  The pricing is set up by the coach. All the payments are handled online for a number of reasons as Fliegel explains:

“Collecting payments in person is stressful – often clients don’t show up with the right amount of money, or coaches have to deposit a check, which requires a separate trip to the bank. More importantly, coaches bond with their young clients during training sessions, and find it very awkward to accept payment from a parent in front of a child after the session is complete. Paying in advance through CoachUp eliminates these concerns”

As the CoachUp community grows coaches will also have ratings from their clientele along with feedback so that future clients have a better idea of what the coach is like before they start working with them. Of course there’s also the option of doing one session before going back and booking more.

After earning his MBA Fliegel worked at Zintro Inc an online marketplace for information sourcing. He realized that he could create a similar online market place for personal coaches, which until now, didn’t have one.

CoachUp is currently serving the greater Boston area but Fliegel has plans for rapid expansion, opening up the platform across the country.

CoachUp also offers a 100% money back guarantee.

Linkage:

Check out CoachUp here

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