Ongo Labs

The product problem

Health and fitness creators with large audiences were building businesses on rented land. Marketplace apps took big revenue cuts, owned the customer relationship, and buried creators in someone else's brand. Hiring an agency to build a custom app cost six figures and left creators with unmaintained code.

Ongo's answer was a no-code platform that gives a creator their own branded iOS and Android app. Content management, subscription billing, community, and analytics built in. Creators keep 70%+ of subscription revenue and own their brand and audience.

What we built

I ran this hands-on. I designed the system architecture, wrote production code across the stack, and led engineering from zero to $1.2M ARR.

A platform that turns one codebase into many branded apps. Creators customize design, manage video/audio/image/text content through a CMS, publish follow-along workouts with TV casting, track progressive overload with RPE guidance, and run their own in-app community. Under the hood: native mobile apps, subscription billing, analytics, and API integrations. A non-technical creator runs the whole thing in under an hour a week.

Trade-offs & lessons

Running the same product for eight years as founder/CTO meant owning every trade-off end to end:

• Platform vs. agency. Every feature had to work for all creators, not one. Saying no to lucrative one-off customizations kept the platform maintainable by a small team.
• 0 → 1, then 1 → n. Finding product-market fit and scaling revenue past $1.2M ARR are different jobs. The first rewards speed and customer conversations. The second rewards reliability and operational leverage.
• Hiring and mentoring. I hired, mentored, and managed the engineering team. The highest-leverage work I did was rarely the code I wrote myself.