Dan Uyemura and the art of making yourself less necessary

On January 13, 2022, Dan Uyemura announced that he had written his last line of code for PushPress. The farewell concerned a small housekeeping improvement: cancelled memberships would disappear from the default view of a member’s profile. Anyone who wanted them could still look. It was an unusually modest curtain call for a software founder. No new machine. No fireworks. Just a tidier screen.

He had once spent about 90 percent of his working time coding. Now other engineers would do the building, and he would concentrate on leading the company. For someone who loved making software, this involved giving up an immediate pleasure for a less tangible responsibility. A working feature tells you, fairly quickly, whether you have succeeded. A company takes longer to answer.

That little change offers a useful way into Uyemura’s career. He keeps returning to the work that surrounds the work: the billing around the coaching, the administration around the community, the management around the engineering. His particular interest is what happens when those surrounding jobs become easier. Sometimes progress looks like an ambitious new product. Sometimes it looks like fewer cancelled memberships cluttering a screen.

A business major learns to build

Long before PushPress, there were paper routes and baseball cards. His early business interests had the scale and immediacy of childhood commerce. A customer, something to sell, a reason to come back. Later, at the University of California, Los Angeles, those instincts met the internet, which was offering young entrepreneurs rather more space than a lemonade stand.

Uyemura studied business and economics at UCLA and started a web development business while still a student. In his account of those years, he was initially the person responsible for bringing in business; his partner, an engineering student and fraternity brother, supplied the technical expertise. Keeping the enterprise moving required each to learn something of the other’s trade. The business major became a programmer.

One early venture was Mixture.com, a web community that preceded the better-known social networks. Uyemura has described taking over the property from a client who had not paid the development firm. Mixture attracted investment, then fell with the dot-com collapse. It gave him experience of both making something people wanted and watching a business fail despite that appeal.

His subsequent engineering work took him through the Los Angeles technology scene. At Deluxe Labs, he worked on software for the storage and movement of theatrical marketing materials. At AOL’s Userplane, his work included an application programming interface through which other developers could connect to its services. He also worked at Myspace. These were practical lessons in keeping systems useful when other people depended on them.

The customer was standing beside him

The next problem was closer to home. As a gym customer, Uyemura found the management software frustrating to use. Even logging in could become a small expedition. He had worked inside internet businesses; he knew a cumbersome experience was a design choice somebody could revisit. The irritation had a business possibility attached.

Gym ownership gave him a second view of the same problem. The person paying for the software had to manage memberships, collect payments and keep the schedule running while also serving the people in the room. An awkward screen had consequences beyond the screen. It consumed the owner’s attention, and attention was already spoken for.

In 2013, Uyemura opened Torrance Training Lab with Jamie and Lexie Hagiya. Alongside Chris McConachie and Brian Aung, he was also building the foundations of PushPress. The gym and the software grew together. He has credited all four partners for their part in that early period. The origin is crowded, in the useful way real businesses often are.

That arrangement gave the software an unusually direct feedback loop. A gym owner’s complaint did not need to travel very far before reaching someone capable of changing the product. It also created an awkward division of labour for Uyemura himself. As PushPress demanded more attention, there was less of him available for the gym. In 2019, he sold his stake in Torrance Training Lab back to Jamie and Lexie.

The introvert gets the microphone

Writing software and representing a company require different kinds of exposure. In a 2024 conversation about PushPress, Uyemura described himself as mostly an introvert, someone inclined to sit alone and get on with the task. Yet the company needed a CEO willing to go outside, explain its argument and talk to the industry.

He also said the founders had each tried being CEO. The role eventually stayed with him because he considered himself the most equipped of the three for the outward-facing job the company needed. There is something pleasingly unceremonious about that explanation. A title frequently presented as destiny sounds, in his telling, rather like a responsibility that found its most workable owner.

His public presence now includes interviews, business advice and the deliberately unpolished title of his blog, Oh Shit Fitness. The name captures a recognisable moment: discovering that being good at a craft has somehow made you responsible for payroll, marketing and a software subscription. His audience consists of people who have made that discovery by opening their own doors.

By August 2024, PushPress’s growth was substantial enough for a SaaS Revolution Show appearance about reaching $13 million in annual recurring revenue. The number belongs to that interview’s moment. What makes it relevant to Uyemura’s story is the change in scale: a problem encountered inside a gym had become a software business with an audience well beyond his former premises.

“Money is an output.”

Dan Uyemura · 2024

Capital arrives with a customer attached

PushPress announced an $11 million Series A in August 2022, led by Altos Ventures with participation from Mucker Capital. Its plans included improving Core, Grow and Train, the products covering gym operations, lead engagement and workout delivery. For an owner, those categories are simply different parts of the same working day.

In his own announcement to customers, Uyemura explained the funding in terms of system stability, mobile development and more automation. He thanked Altos for an approach in which solving customer problems could make revenue a consequence. The pitch was consistent with the company’s stated help-first ethos. More money was being presented as more capacity to do the existing job.

Another $20 million followed in a Series B reported in October 2024, again led by Altos, with StepStone and Mucker participating. The intended investment included member and mobile app experiences and additional products for gym owners. Uyemura’s ambition extended to giving independent businesses access to resources they would struggle to assemble separately.

This is where his two working lives meet. A software platform can gather enough customers to build shared infrastructure; a former gym owner knows the individual businesses still have to make their own economics work. His argument depends on keeping those interests together as the platform expands. The size of the funding round, on its own, cannot demonstrate that.

A machine to leave more room for people

Uyemura had already put a name to his automation ambition in 2022: the self-driving gym. He described software handling repetitive tasks and recognising patterns that might otherwise escape a busy owner. His examples included spotting changes in member engagement and responding when a gym’s flow of new enquiries declined. These were plans for what the technology could do.

The distinction inside that proposal was about judgement. A system might notice somebody had stopped attending, but an owner could have personal context that made a routine automated message inappropriate. In Uyemura’s account, automation should sometimes prompt a person to act. The machine’s usefulness would include knowing when the human relationship needed more room.

He made the wider business logic concise in a later interview: “Money is an output.” His emphasis was on the value delivered to customers as the work a company could actually control. At a different appearance, his advice was equally direct: “Ideas are cheap, and execution means everything.” Together, the two remarks describe a demanding standard for a founder who enjoys building things.

There is an appealing temptation to treat that standard as a personality trait and leave it there. It becomes more interesting when applied to the product. A promise about automation eventually has to become a reliable action. The owner needs the bill collected, the enquiry answered or the relevant information available. A philosophical position still has to survive Monday morning.

Back to the small things

In his public reflection on 2025, Uyemura reported more than 30 million check-ins and 10 million classes across the PushPress community. He also reported 13 percent median revenue growth per gym. These are company-reported figures, useful as a view of the activity he chose to highlight. They put the customers’ daily business ahead of another account of the company’s fundraising.

His list of priorities for 2026 included AI, removing friction, saving time and helping gyms improve their revenue and profits. On his personal website, he describes building at the intersection of technology and community and writes about helping small business owners understand AI. The interest has a familiar destination: giving the local operator access to tools that might otherwise feel out of reach.

For a founder, there is a persistent attraction in doing the task you can finish yourself. Uyemura’s career makes the alternative unusually visible. He learned to code when the business needed it. He ran gyms while developing software for their owners. He sold his gym stake, and later described stepping away from the code, as the next responsibility grew.

The cancelled memberships remain a fitting detail. His chosen farewell to programming was a change customers had asked for, small enough to explain without a demonstration. It reduced the number of things an owner had to look at. Years of building had brought him to a useful question: how much of this can we take off somebody’s plate? Even, eventually, his own.