Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with John Keh, Founder of Impakt Inc., located in El Cerrito, CA, USA.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
Impakt is a Web3 fitness app that uses computer vision to recognize your body movements. It explores a new category, FitFi, where players perform exercises and complete physical challenges to earn tokens on the Ethereum network. By providing a variety of social workouts, tournaments, and challenges, Impakt appeals to people of all fitness levels and encourages a new calorie-burning activity that is fun and profitable – Burn-And-Earn. Impakt’s proprietary technology allows people to exercise from anywhere at any time by analyzing their movements with computer vision. With just your smartphone camera or computer webcam, your exercises can be validated by Impakt’s computer vision (Proof-of-Workout) to earn crypto. No additional expensive hardware is required. Impakt turns body movements into tokens of calorie burn into profit. In the Impakt universe, your body is your crypto-mine.
As an online multiplayer fitness app, Impakt allows people to compete against each other in various exercise competitions, including social workouts, weekly leaderboards, tournaments, and challenges. Impakt is Free-To-Play in order to appeal to a wide audience and give everyone an opportunity to earn. On the weekly leaderboard, top-ranked players will earn proportionally more tokens. Tournaments allow people to compete in a mid-sized participant pool, with the tournament prizes awarded to the winners. Even those inexperienced with exercise are able to earn tokens through their own exercise consistency and personal improvement. Impakt encourages physical exercise in a fun, social metaverse for everyone.
Our vision is to build the world’s most popular fitness app where millions of players can build healthy habits while earning real assets. We are on a journey to disrupt the crypto and fitness industries by building Burn-And-Earn and spearheading FitFi. A metaverse where people can earn rewards and improve their physical health.
Tell us about yourself
I graduated with a double major in political science and economy. I was going to go into finance, but during that time, it was the recession, and banking wasn’t exactly the most appealing option. So I decided to take my family’s advice and joined the military instead. They recruited me to become an intelligence analyst. I got assigned to Korea for two years during an awfully tense time as the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, had passed away. Then, I went to Germany and operated air assets in the Middle East and North Africa— it was the least to say I was used to jumping into the fire.
I started a Y combinator company which started as a wholesale restaurant company; then, I pivoted to virtual events after COVID-19 hit. However, I passed off being CEO to my co-founder because virtual events were what he was passionate about, where I was less. From there, one of my co-founders introduced me to the current co-founder of my crypto company, and he was very interested in creating a social-online fitness application so people could work out and socialize during the pandemic. We’ve built some great computer vision technology to aid people in their fitness journeys and to be able to recognize body movements and gestures. But we realized that as the pandemic was waning, people didn’t want to work out with coaches online because they preferred in-person interaction. Around this time, our CTO began making small games with the computer vision tech.
These games were super fun, especially for us as a remote team, as they brought back childhood memories like playing Wi Sports and X-Box Kinnect. We realized this could be a good way to get people up and moving again, engaged, and even earning money. It would be healthy for the body and good for the wallet. From there, we picked up speed, and now we have a gamified application for fitness out now in Beta (community beta).
You may also read more information on this link - https://businessner.com/from-scaling-successful-food-ventures-to-innovating-on-the-crypto-fitness-scene-john-kehs-unconventional-journey-to-creating-impakt/
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
Revenue-wise, selling Caviar to Block (Square) for $100M.
What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?
Finding product market fit.
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
- Find a problem worth solving.
- Listen to your users.
- Optimize for speed.
I would love to share this file with everyone.
Where can people find you and your business?
Website: https://impakt.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/impaktlife
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-keh/
If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.
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