Uplunch
Matt Verlach spent about ten years as a career firefighter and paramedic before he left the department. His co-founder Jake met him at the firehouse. Jake had opened a CrossFit gym in his hometown of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and needed help with his website and marketing. Matt, who had done some web design on the side, built it for him. Over coffee after their shifts, the two sketched a sprawling plan that covered web design, business mentoring, copywriting, and e-learning. They quickly realized that plan was unworkable, and they narrowed their focus to marketing automation for gyms.
The first tests were manual. Matt and Jake gave away content and then offered an automation build for about $100. They sold 10, then 20, then 60. At the same time they pre-sold 60 subscriptions to a larger software product at $150 a month, charging cards without building the product yet. Matt later admitted they "didn't really know what the hell we were doing," but the purchases proved people would pay. Early on they built on other people's software, and one client setup ran through a 250-step checklist. That pain pushed them to build their own platform. Matt enrolled in the Firehose Project bootcamp, where he found a future CTO, and they spent six or seven months building an MVP.
The first dollars came from the podcast promo and the pre-sales. Word of mouth did most of the early work. Because Uplunch started with a narrow niche, the CrossFit market of roughly 12,000 gyms, Jake's credibility as a successful gym owner helped him run sales calls that spoke directly to the problems prospects faced. Pricing began at $150 a month, rose to $200, and then to $300 when they moved to a partner model.
The company grew quickly at first, then plateaued at around $18,000 in MRR for about a year. The cause was a partner-based marketplace strategy that depended on repeating a partner onboarding process again and again, which never happened. The team acquired that partner's company, brought sales back in-house, and went back to what they knew: founder-led sales of their own software. Matt credited mentor Kevin Kirkland with the reality check: after four and a half months of trying, he said "Try something else tomorrow." Growth resumed after the pivot. Matt's main lesson was that relationships with early customers kept the company alive, and that a product must be a painkiller, not a vitamin.
Uplunch is bootstrapped and now reports over $65,000 a month in revenue, with a growing team that Matt describes as a major source of satisfaction.
- •Building from a founder's own daily pain in gym marketing gave Uplunch a sharp, credible problem to solve before writing any code.
- •Pre-selling subscriptions and charging for an early automation tested real purchase intent rather than polite enthusiasm.
- •Jake's position as a successful gym owner made the sales conversations credible, which mattered in a market where buyers judged the seller as a person.
- •The plateau showed that scaling a partner-led model required repeatable execution, and returning to founder-led sales on their own product turned growth back on.
- •Treating early customers as a relationship rather than a transaction built loyalty that carried the company through a rough product period.
- 1.Start with a narrow niche whose problems you have personally lived, such as one type of business you have operated or worked with.
- 2.Before building the full product, sell a small, manually delivered version of the service and ask for a credit card to confirm real demand.
- 3.Pre-sell the planned subscription with a card authorization to validate pricing and commitment before development begins.
- 4.Use early customers as an active advisory group, talking with them often and asking what to build next.
- 5.Set a time limit for any strategy that is not gaining traction, and when it fails, return to the channel that already works.
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