The Profile
Jack Gardner
He sells a person, not an app. The trainer is the product - the phone is just how you reach them.
Founder & CEO, Kickoff · NASM-certified trainer · New York
He sells a person, not an app. The trainer is the product - the phone is just how you reach them.
Most fitness founders start with a gadget. Jack Gardner started with his mother. He's NASM-certified, so he did the obvious thing a certified trainer does when someone he loves wants to get in shape - he coached her. What he noticed was less obvious: the workout wasn't the hard part. The showing-up was. The accountability was. A human being on the other end, checking in, was worth more than any algorithm.
That observation became Kickoff, the New York wellness platform he founded in 2019 and still runs as CEO. The pitch is almost stubbornly simple. Pair an ordinary person with a real, certified personal trainer. Deliver the whole relationship over text, video and an app. Charge around $95 a month for something a Manhattan trainer might bill at $3,000. Then do it 20,000 coaches deep.
Gardner looked at the fitness market and saw the same thing everywhere - polished tools built for people who were already fit and already wealthy. "Solutions for high-income, fairly fit people," as he put it, and "nothing for people who want to go from nothing to something." Kickoff is his answer to that gap, and the gap is the whole point.
Role: Founder & CEO, Kickoff
Based: New York, NY
Field: Wellness, fitness, future of work
Schooling: Columbia (BA), Tuck / Dartmouth (MBA)
Before this: Bain & Company, BuildZoom SVP
Also: An NASM-certified trainer who still trains
Figures from company statements and reporting around Kickoff's 2022 seed round.
Social accountability to another human being is the most effective way to overcome the motivation gap.
Gardner frames the problem with the cool detachment of the consultant he used to be. There are two gaps, he says, and most fitness products only pretend to solve the first.
The knowledge gap is what to do - drowned out by information overload, conflicting advice and routines that need to change as you change. Easy enough to patch with content. The motivation gap is harder. Behavioral economics, Gardner notes, shows our intuitive brain overrides the logical one exactly when it counts: when we're tired, stressed or hungry. No PDF fixes that. A person who's expecting you might.
So Kickoff's real product isn't a workout library. It's a relationship - research-backed programs wrapped around a coach who checks in daily, monitors progress and answers around the clock. The technology exists to make that human affordable at scale, not to replace them.
You don't know what actually works. Too much noise, too little signal, and the right answer keeps moving as your body and goals change.
Even when you know, you don't do. Gardner's fix isn't willpower - it's a human being who's counting on you to show up.
Bars are illustrative of trajectory, not exact financials. Revenue figure per GetLatka.
On paper, Gardner's resume reads like someone destined for a corner office, not a coaching app. He studied economics and American history at Columbia, then earned an MBA at Dartmouth's Tuck School. He cut his teeth at Monitor Group, advanced to Bain & Company, and spent four years at BuildZoom climbing to Senior Vice President, where he managed a team of 65.
All of that turned out to be training for a different sport. The strategist's instinct - find the underserved market, name the real constraint, then build the cheapest thing that solves it - is exactly what Kickoff is. He just pointed it at his mother's living room instead of a Fortune 500 deck.
By 2023 the company had grown to roughly a 300-person team and around $15M in revenue. And Gardner's proudest metric isn't his own - it's theirs. "We've paid out more than $5 million to extraordinary, hard-working coaches," he says, describing a platform that has carried people "from minimum wage to six-figure incomes." Kickoff lives, he likes to say, at the intersection of the future of work and the future of wellness.
"Kickoff is a wellness coaching platform at the intersection of the future of work and the future of wellness."
"We've paid out more than $5 million to extraordinary, hard-working coaches."
"The most successful people don't excel on the easy days - they push hard on the hard days."
"We use Notion for absolutely everything. It's our bug ticketing, it's our product Kanban, it's our CRM and ATS."
"Once you learn Notion, you can make everything."
"I just hired a fractional CFO, which I do recommend. I wish I'd done that way sooner."
Ask most founders for their stack and you'll get a slide of logos. Gardner gives you a shrug and a confession: it's mostly Notion. Bug tickets, product Kanban, the CRM, the applicant tracking - all of it. "We've tried all the fanciest ATSs, we've tried all the fanciest Kanbans," he says, "and Notion is better." He insists product and process conversations stay there rather than vanish into Slack, where context goes to die. Slack he keeps for alarms - if something breaks, the whole team sees it instantly. Metabase, he says flatly, "powers our whole business." It is an unfashionable answer, and he means it as a brag.
The company's brain. Tickets, roadmap, CRM and hiring all in one place - chosen over every fancier tool he tried.
The alarm system and the home for a community of thousands of coaches. If it breaks, they see it.
The dashboard that, in his words, powers the whole business - no custom internal tools required.
Elite coaching shouldn't require an elite bank account.
That's the whole aspiration, and Gardner repeats it in different words every chance he gets. He wants a personal trainer to be as ordinary as a gym membership - affordable, accessible, and where possible, covered by health insurance as preventative care. The future he's building toward isn't more sophisticated software. It's the radical idea that the thing rich people already buy - a human in your corner - should belong to everyone else too.