Hey, Rathes here, one of the Co-Founders of Maxout. I want to give you a brief explanation about Maxout and what our idea for this app is.
Earlier this year, in April 2020, the pandemic hit my current employer, and together with most of my colleagues, I got furloughed for the entire month. My manager suggests that I should explore new things that could benefit my developer career in the long-term.
At the same time, someone on Twitter starts the Burpril challenge. 100 burpees every day. I decide to participate, but instead of just doing the burpees, I try to integrate them into my daily workouts.
From pen & paper to an app
At that time, I was still working with a pen and paper. I would collect lots of sheets of paper with different workouts on them with different results. Pretty chaotic.
For the challenge, I want to be a bit more organized. So I am searching for an app. Previously, I had used note-taking apps, but I fell back to pen and paper at that was a lot easier. This time, I was looking for an app that focussed on planning and tracking of workouts.
There were a few of them. But all of those apps were either complicated to use with too many options that I didn't need. Or they were just ugly. I wanted something clean and minimalistic.
So I decided to use my extra free time in April to design and build an app myself. For the first two weeks, I worked in the simplest way possible: I added all my workouts to a JSON file of my website and rendered them all in a list. And when you clicked on one of these workouts, you would see the details.
This concept worked but adding the workouts by hand became annoying. So I decided to create an independent app so that I can add my exercises from my phone.
Up until mid-May, the data was all stored on the local storage of a device. But this started to get annoying. Switching devices would mean that the data wasn't there anymore.
That's when my brother offered to help me out. He wanted to learn to code in Python, so I convince him to set up a simple API using Flask and MongoDB.
Maxout was born
We were both building the app during our evenings and weekends (we still do) but I was the only one using it. From time to time, I would post pictures of the app on Instagram Stories or Strava, and people started to reach out, asking what app I was using.
It became clear to us that this app could be useful to more than just me. So the idea of Maxout was born.
Maxout is there to simplify how we plan our workout schedule. We achieve that by coming up with a minimalistic and beautiful user interface that makes creating and planning workouts ridiculously easy and fast.
In the first few versions, we focus on workouts only. We focus on creating, adapting, and scheduling them. Once that part is at an optimal stage, we want to go further and provide the best way to track your progress towards your fitness goals.
We want to help you to plan the path to become the best version of yourself! Join the waiting list now!