Moxie: New Live-Streaming Fitness Marketplace by Fab Founder Jason Goldberg

With gyms and fitness centers temporarily closed globally due to the ongoing pandemic, numerous businesses have entered the rapidly expanding market for home-based fitness solutions.

Over the past fortnight, Future, a company only three years old that offers at-home clients access to highly qualified trainers, secured $24 million in Series B funding; and Playbook, a fitness platform nearly five years in operation that facilitates personal trainers in streaming and monetizing their content, obtained $9.3 million in Series A funding.

Now, Jason Goldberg, an experienced entrepreneur with a track record of launching venture-backed companies, is unveiling another platform centered around live streaming and a marketplace concept. Named Moxie, this New York-based company connects fitness instructors across various disciplines with both current and prospective students, allowing them to offer classes on a subscription model and retain 85% of the generated revenue.

Goldberg explains that the platform is considerably more advanced than it appears. In fact, Moxie’s team of 45 employees was initially focused on a different venture until the emergence of COVID-19 in the United States prompted a complete shift in direction. Since then, they have been rigorously testing and refining the Moxie platform.

This presents a compelling opportunity, particularly as other startup founders are also pursuing similar concepts. Just a year ago, fitness instructors dedicated 90% of their time to in-person studio sessions, but now they spend 90% of their time teaching online, creating a significant need for robust and effective tools.

Initially, many instructors relied on platforms like Zoom, sharing class links via email and processing payments through services like Venmo, which proved to be an inconvenient experience for all parties involved.

According to Goldberg, Moxie empowers instructors to broadcast both live and pre-recorded classes, utilize pre-licensed playlists with adjustable volume controls to avoid interference during instruction, and leverage integrated customer relationship management (CRM) tools for streamlined student tracking, communication, and automated payment collection.

Goldberg reports that these advantages are proving attractive. By proactively reaching out to instructors on Instagram, Moxie has already onboarded over 2,000 instructors specializing in yoga, pilates, barre, and other disciplines, who are currently delivering more than 6,500 classes with pricing determined by the instructors themselves.

The average class price is reportedly between $5 and $10, and Goldberg notes that customers are spending an average of $60 per month on the platform over the last four weeks. (Moxie utilizes Stripe for payment processing and AWS for video storage and streaming.)

Investors such as Howard Morgan, Geoff Prentice, and Allen Morgan, who have consistently supported Goldberg’s ventures, recognize the potential of this idea. Alongside Tencent and Vectr, they have provided Moxie with $2.1 million in seed funding, and Goldberg anticipates seeking additional capital in the near future.

Whether prospective investors will be convinced that Moxie is the definitive solution remains to be seen, considering Goldberg’s entrepreneurial background.

As those familiar with the industry may recall, Goldberg began his career as a startup founder with Jobster, a recruitment platform that raised approximately $50 million before undergoing staff reductions and ultimately being sold to Recruiting.com for an undisclosed sum.

He subsequently founded Social Median, a news aggregation service acquired by XING, a German competitor to LinkedIn, for an undisclosed amount; Fabulis, a social network for the LGBT community that transitioned into a daily-deals website (and later ceased operations after receiving $1 million in seed funding); and, most notably, Fab.com, a design-centric e-commerce site that reached a peak valuation of $900 million before eventually closing down.

Despite these experiences, in late 2016, Goldberg launched Pepo, a messaging application that allowed users to create and participate in live messaging communities, securing around $3 million in investment, including funding from Tencent. It was a revised version of Pepo that Goldberg and his team ultimately decided to discontinue in March to focus on Moxie.

His diverse range of ventures clearly demonstrates Goldberg’s resilience and, one might say, his considerable determination. To many investors, this quality is paramount when evaluating a young company. Goldberg himself expresses confidence in the fitness startup’s future, stating, “We have no shortage of interest from investors wanting to be involved with Moxie,” during a recent conversation.