Coach Sheet started with 138 Reddit posts.
We were planning a different product. A SaaS for online coaches. Trainerize-but-cheaper. Then we read 138 posts on r/personaltraining, r/Fitness, r/loseit, and r/online_coaching, and the plan changed.
What coaches said
A few examples, edited for length:
“I have 22 clients and Trainerize costs me $180 a month. I use maybe 20% of the features. Half my time is in Google Sheets anyway because the templates are bad.” — r/personaltraining, 2026-01
“I switched to TrueCoach. I switched back. The exercise library was ‘better’ but my clients hated the app and three of them left because of the friction. I lost more in churn than I saved in admin time.” — r/online_coaching, 2025-11
“Sunday I spend 5 hours updating sheets. Monday I send programs. By Tuesday someone changes their schedule and the sheets are wrong. I want my Sundays back.” — r/personaltraining, 2025-09
The pattern wasn’t “the tools are missing features.” It was the opposite: too many features, features the coach didn’t need, features that pulled the coach away from their actual work.
The features paradox
Trainerize has 70+ features. So does TrueCoach. So does HubFit. The features compete for the coach’s attention, the client’s attention, and the screen real estate. Each feature was added because some customer asked for it. None of them were added because removing the previous five features would have been better.
The result: tools that do everything badly, instead of doing the few things that matter well.
We counted what coaches use:
- Workout logging
- A place to track progress over time
- A way to share programs with the client
- Quick bodyweight and strength stat lookups
- Habit tracking, sometimes
- Photo check-ins, sometimes
- Body measurements, sometimes
That’s it. Seven categories. Most platforms wrap these in 70 features and 8 dashboards and a mobile app and a community forum. The math stops working at 12 clients.
Why Google Sheets
We started prototyping in Sheets because it was the fastest way to test ideas. Then we realized something: the prototype was already what coaches were using.
The most successful coaches we talked to were the ones who’d quit Trainerize and built their own templates. The least successful were the ones who’d bought a SaaS and were waiting for it to make their business work.
So we asked: what if Sheets was the product?
Sheets isn’t a hack. It’s a stable, free, ubiquitous, programmable spreadsheet platform that millions of coaches already use. It has built-in collaboration, version history, and a real extensibility model (Apps Script). It runs on every device. The data is portable.
The question stopped being “how do we build a SaaS to replace Sheets” and became “how do we make Sheets a great coaching tool.”
What Coach Sheet is
Coach Sheet is a coach-tenanted Google Sheets template plus an Apps Script backend plus a mobile-friendly client view. Twelve features, not seventy. The data lives in the coach’s Google Drive. The coach owns it. We don’t run a multi-tenant database.
The pricing is $15 per coach per month, regardless of client count. A coach with 30 clients pays $15. A coach with 5 clients pays $15. (For comparison: Trainerize at 30 clients is $89. HubFit is $59. TrueCoach is $58.)
We make money when coaches pay for the Apps Script integration and the maintained template. We don’t make money on per-client fees. So we don’t push features that drive client growth above features that improve coaching quality.
What we don’t have
We don’t have an AI workout generator. We don’t have a built-in payment processor. We don’t have whitelabeled mobile apps. We don’t have a community forum. We don’t have wearable integrations.
Some of these we may add. Some we won’t. The default answer to “should we add feature X” is “no, unless removing two existing features for it would be a net win.”
Who Coach Sheet is for
You’re an online coach. You have between 5 and 50 clients. You charge $50-$300 per client per month. You’re either currently paying $40-$180/month for a tool you partly use, or you’ve quit those tools and are using your own Google Sheets templates.
You think methodology matters. RPE, autoregulation, periodization. You read Greg Nuckols, you’ve heard of Mike Israetel, you respect Mike Tuchscherer.
You don’t want a fancy app. You want your Sundays back.
That’s our audience. If that’s you, we’d like to hear from you.
What’s next
Coach Sheet launches in stages: solo coaches first, then a small alpha cohort for feedback, then a public release. We’re documenting decisions in a public manifesto and detailed comparisons against current tools.
The thesis is simple: smaller is better when the small thing is the actual job.