Gymdesk
👤 Eran Galperin (A BJJ black belt, training since 2006, and a career CTO: his own customer who knew exactly what martial-arts schools hated.)🌐 siteerangalperin.com𝕏LinkedIn
A BJJ black belt built the gym CRM he wished existed — flat pricing, zero upsells — then sold control for $32.5M.
Will it work? · our read
Insider's advantage. But gym software is a knife fight — MindBody, Zen Planner, Wodify and indies chase the same owners. Flat pricing is a wedge, not a moat; the real edge was eight years of patience.
01How the money moves
Gym owner fed up with MindBody's fees
→
Switches to Gymdesk, imports members
→
Pays $75-200/mo flat, all features in
02The numbers
about $3MStatedARR before 2024 exit
2023
the sentence on the page
and the burnout kept growing, I set a goal for myself to seriously explore a potential sale once we reach $3M in ARR. It was the revenue milestone at which most of the larger firms seem to start…
Four years to reach $12k MRR, then revenue roughly doubled every year to exit. Eran Galperin blog
about $3M ARR before the 2024 sale — essentially bootstrapped
🔒
You have the verdict. Members get the work behind it.
- The CENTS scorecard — where it's strong, where it's soft
- The founder's key move, and the counter-move
- How it could die — the evidence, and how sure we are
- The case against our own call
- A 🚀 launchpad prompt — the case, as a plan for your business
We rate our own confidence — and argue against ourselves. Nobody else in this category does.
Sources always public on all 560 cases · cancel anytime · 14-day refund
See a full teardown, free → ImportYetiSourcesSources last checked 25 August 2026
Eran Galperin: How I bootstrapped a B2B SaaS to 7-figure ARR — founder blog, MRR/ARR milestonesGymdesk founder story — BJJ background, incumbents were "so awful"Startups For the Rest of Us #728 — $32.5M majority sale to Five Elms (2024)Latka: Martial Arts on Rails — early bootstrapped revenue ($60K ARR, 2020)Gymdesk pricing — flat $75-200/mo by member count
Revenue is first-party: Eran disclosed MRR/ARR milestones on his own blog (about $3M ARR by 2023, from a near-bootstrapped 2016 start). Essentially bootstrapped: he took $120K from TinySeed (2021) near $500K ARR but says he never used it. The $32.5M is the deal value for the majority sale to Five Elms (2024) — Galperin kept a minority stake and an eight-figure cash-out, not the full $32.5M — and is reported on Startups For the Rest of Us with Eran on the mic, so it is treated as STATED, not estimated. Rival prices are model descriptors, not exact quotes — MindBody's pricing is genuinely quote-only. No drama invented: this won on insider fit, transparent pricing and eight years of patience. We never score you.