About PATO
It started with one member.
Not a market analysis. One person, trying to get back to the gym.
PATO started as an app Esty built for his wife. They’d just had their first baby, and everything designed to help assumed she had time, headspace and a routine. She had none of the three.
So he built something that knew what she ate, what she should train, and noticed when she’d gone quiet. Built for exactly one person.
Then her friends asked for it.
The problem wasn’t personal. It was structural — nobody had built this for the people actually doing the training.
Why gyms, and not another fitness app
Esty, our founder and director, had done a run of episodes with gym owners and fitness leaders on his podcast, The Melding Muse, about why training matters for mental health as much as physical. Every conversation arrived at the same place.
Getting members is hard. Keeping them is harder. People join in January, drift in March, and cancel in June — long after anything could have been done about it.
That’s the same problem his wife had, seen from the other side of the counter. She wasn’t unmotivated; she was unsupported between sessions, which is where the drift starts.
So the app for one person became a system for gyms.
We started from the member
We’re human-centred designers by profession. That training starts in the same place every time: who actually uses this, and what’s happening in their life when they do?
Ask that about gym software and the answer is uncomfortable. Every platform here is built for the person who signs the cheque — the owner gets the considered experience, the member gets a booking screen.
But the member is who keeps the lights on. A gym doesn’t lose revenue because its admin panel lacked a filter. It loses revenue because someone stopped showing up in March and nobody noticed.
We’re not a big software company
We’re a small group of designers, engineers and fitness people, building in Aotearoa New Zealand.
There’s no sales floor and no offshore support queue. When you email us you get one of the people who built the thing — which is either a good sign or a terrible one, depending on how the product’s going. We think it’s a good sign.
Being small is why we can do things the incumbents can’t. We don’t take a commission on your members’ payments, because we don’t have a revenue model that depends on it. We don’t lock features behind bigger plans, because we don’t have a sales team whose targets require it.
The job underneath the job
We build software for gyms. That’s the business.
The reason any of us are interested is simpler than that: physical fitness is one of the few things that reliably changes a life. Getting someone back in the gym and keeping them there is worth doing regardless of who’s paying for the software.
So every feature gets the same test the first version got, when it had exactly one user:
Did this actually help someone train?
If it doesn’t survive that question, it doesn’t ship.
Meet PATO.
PATO in his headband
He’s the duck in the app and the reason people remember us. He talks to your members — logs their food, builds their plans, notices when they’ve gone quiet. He talks to you too, in a different register: faster, more operational, still recognisably him.
His health is your consistency. He thrives when you train and visibly doesn’t when you don’t. A daft mechanic that works embarrassingly well — the accountability sits with the duck, so nobody has to be nagged by a person.
Good at
- Remembering what you ate on Tuesday
- Working out what you should train today
- Noticing a 12-day streak, and mentioning it
- Knowing that rest days count
Will not do
- Tell you whether to train on a sore shoulder
- Pretend to know a number he doesn’t
- Say “Amazing job, superstar!”
- Guilt-trip you for missing a week
Built for the person who has to show up
Everything in PATO exists because of a decision we made about your members before we made one about you. Fourteen days with all of it switched on, no card.
- 14 days, everything on
- No card required
- Cancel any time
PATOPass