Local Win Lifts UT Team to Regional Startup Competition

»Editor's note: (Dec. 18, 2015) The LiftSync team was named the winner of the Global Startup Battle (GSB)’s Disruptors and Big Ideas Track.

Mariner Cheney ’17 likes to work out, but what he doesn’t enjoy is the tedious task of tracking his workout. There are plenty of applications he can use on his phone for cardio, but he hadn’t found anything for weight lifting.

“I thought if I had an automatic way to log my workouts it’d be so much easier to track,” said Cheney, an international business major, of Blue Hill, ME.

So he created one. Cheney connected with Matt Phillips ’17 and Patrick Schroeder ’17, all friends from Spartan Climbers, and signed up for Startup Weekend Tampa Bay, hosted Nov. 13–15 at UT's John P. Lowth Entrepreneurship Center.

Throughout the 54-hour weekend event, groups of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more pitched ideas for new startup companies, formed teams around those ideas and worked to develop a working prototype.

During the intense weekend, the guys found their fourth member, Derek Flores ’16, and they brought an idea to fruition.

“I never thought staying up for three days straight to go from an idea to a validated business would go by so fast,” said Flores, a management major from Bow, NH. “The knowledgeable mentors provided critical feedback and made our business possible. If I were to describe the weekend in four words they would be energetic, creative, rewarding and amazing experience.”

LiftSync is a wearable product that electronically tracks weights and repetitions during a gym workout. The team’s business-to-business model helps gyms increase retention and helps the consumer by removing the tracking responsibility.

Competing against 37 other ideas pitched, LiftSync won first place, advancing them and two other top local winners to the regional round of the Global Startup Battle, which is partially fought through an online voting campaign. Voting can be done once every 24 hours and up until Dec. 4. Half of the competition is based on the online votes and half on the opinion from a panel of judges.

Adam Cummings ’17 is a member of the third place winners, Flip Style, which designed an adjustable sports bra that can carry a phone.

At the local startup event, the LiftSync team won $750, three free hours of legal advice and three months of free office space at Tampa Bay Wave and have found the networking and workshops helpful there. They have also applied for space within the Lowth Entrepreneurship Center in the Spartan Accelerator as well.

Schroeder, a philosophy major from Buffalo, NY, is working with an engineering firm on the prototype, which he hopes to have ready by February. They have three letters of intent from gyms (including the Tampa Metropolitan Area YMCA) interested in helping the team pilot the prototype. Regardless of the outcome of the Dec. 4 competition, the team is planning to move forward.

“A successful entrepreneur has to be willing to focus all of their free time and effort, as well as anything else necessary to their project,” said Phillips, an entrepreneurship major from Tampa. “They also have to be able to look at problems from multiple facets. While their idea might start at point A, it very well could end at point Z.”

Flores said the key to being a successful entrepreneur is to have passion, momentum and a great team.

“Passion in your business is crucial to remaining motivated in order to make the idea happen; the amount of work required in a startup business requires more energy than you ever could imagine,” Flores said. “The nice part about having passion for the business is that you can surround yourself with equally motivated individuals, and that’s when the magic happens.”

Have a story idea? Contact Jamie Pilarczyk, Web Writer
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