Embrace the Grind: 15 Years of Building Jefit
The Start of Something I Didn't Expect to Last 15 Years
Fifteen years ago, Jefit wasn't a company. It wasn't even a business idea.
It was just a project I started in my dad's living room in North Carolina, fresh out of college, working from my own laptop.
I was broke and unsure about the future, frustrated by how hard it was to track workouts. There was no easy way to stay consistent or see real progress. I wasn't chasing a startup dream, just building something to keep me accountable.
I borrowed a few thousand dollars from friends to cover basic expenses, food, gas, nothing fancy. I was young and had little to lose. If this project helped me stay on track, maybe it could help someone else too.
What I didn't realize was that once I started building, I'd be committing the next 15 years of my life to it. After a few months of coding, something clicked. I started hearing from others, people like me, who wanted structure, progress, and accountability. That's when I began taking it seriously.
This wasn't just about tracking sets and reps. It was about motivation. Consistency. Long-term commitment. That's when the idea of a social workout platform took shape, something to help people stay on track, together.
On July 15, 2010, I officially incorporated Jefit. I was still working 18 to 19 hours a day, coding, fixing bugs, and dreaming. A few months later, real users started showing up, and for the first time, I made just enough to repay the small loan from my friend. I even hired my first full-time teammate. He didn't have a car, so I drove him to my dad's house every morning. It wasn't glamorous, but it felt like the beginning of something real.
Building With What We Had
For six years, I built with a tiny, bootstrapped team, hiring one person at a time. We had no funding or PR, just belief. Belief that people who train with purpose deserved better tools.
Eventually, I knew we needed to grow. But to do that, I had to take a big risk.
I was raising a two-year-old son with my wife. My team in North Carolina didn't want to relocate. If I moved, I'd be starting from scratch, with no team, no network, and just a fragile startup.
Still, I believed if I could find the right people, people who shared our values, we could build something lasting. So I moved my company and family to Silicon Valley.
Starting over wasn't instant or easy. It took two years to regroup and start hiring the kind of teammates this vision needed, while I kept building with a few remote teammates. It was slow. It was hard. But step by step, things came together.
Looking back, it was worth every step.
Discipline Starts With the Team
Today our team is still small, but incredibly capable, a tight-knit group of people who came from across the country to join this mission.
Many share the same traits that started Jefit: a love for training, an obsession with quality, and the discipline to build something meaningful.
Daily workouts. Dogfooding our own product. Reading user comments together. That's just how we operate, regardless of title. Everyone participates. Everyone trains. Everyone cares.
Our walls are lined with live metrics, NPS reviews, and feedback. Because we don't just build for users, we build with them.
It's the culture I always dreamed of. And the move to Silicon Valley made it possible.
Learning the Hard Way
This journey hasn't been easy. I've made mistakes, some small, some nearly fatal.
During the COVID lockdowns, we lost over half our users overnight. But we didn't panic. We adapted, and even grew the team.
More than 50 VC firms passed on us, even with 20-30% year-over-year growth. We weren't seen as a "sexy" deal. So we kept building our way.
I made product mistakes too, chasing features while neglecting quality. That led to product and engineering debt.
One of the hardest things to hear was, "That's just Jefit being Jefit." It meant bugs or quirks we hadn't fixed. I knew it came from frustration, but also something deeper: loyalty.
People stuck with us. And that's exactly why we're raising the bar now.
What's Next
As we mark Jefit's 15-year anniversary, we're not just looking back, we're building forward.
We've modernized the platform from the inside out:
- A refreshed mobile app interface
- Faster, frictionless logging and log management
- Reorganized progress reports and charting
- New goal-setting and tracking tools
- Smarter machine-generated workouts
Behind the scenes, we've upgraded our backend infrastructure, delivering faster network response, more secure syncing, and a stronger foundation for AI-driven features.
Whether you build your own plans or prefer a guided path, your experience will feel more seamless, responsive, and personalized.
And through it all, quality control will stay at the center of everything we do.
To Everyone on This Journey
Whether you logged your first workout yesterday or your thousandth last year, thank you for choosing Jefit.
This platform has been shaped by your consistency, your patience, and your belief in what we're building. Some of you have logged thousands of workouts. Others stayed with us through growing pains. A few of you have been here for over a decade. That kind of loyalty is rare, and we never take it for granted.
At Jefit, we believe discipline isn't something you're born with, it's something you build. And we know our users believe the same. You show up when no one's watching. You train through setbacks. You chase progress, not perfection. That's what we admire. That's what we're building for.
But this isn't just for lifters.
Maybe you're a coach, a builder, an investor, or simply someone who believes in showing up every day. However you found us, if you believe in the power of long-term effort, you're already part of this movement.
We've come this far by staying focused, listening to our community, and growing with the people who believe in us.
Today, that community includes over 13 million users, and it's still growing.
And we're just getting started.
Here's to 15 years. To every rep, every lesson, and everything still ahead.
Let's embrace the grind, together.
- Ying
