Today we’d like to introduce you to Ellie Sarmadi.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Ellie. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I’m a former Wall Street Investment Banker who shifted focus to the entrepreneurial side of business. After over a decade of working in real estate, consulting at Deloitte, MBA at Columbia Business School, Investment Banking at Morgan Stanley, and some Angel Investing, in 2018, I decided to innovate from scratch and build UBQFIT.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
So I have been around and done a few things before choosing to build a tech company from scratch. By far, building something from scratch is the hardest thing I have ever done. It’s very rewarding, yes, but by no means an easy path! You have to have real passion and an unbreakable commitment to make things work. You gotta be able to be just like a boxing bag, you get hit in the face again and again and you just come back for more and never give up.
The biggest challenge we have faced so far had to do with choosing the right tech partner. How do you know who is providing the right information? Who is making commitments and promises they can actually keep? Who is honest and would stay by your side during complex issues? Ultimately who would be the right team to deliver the best product. Since for a lean start-up, funding is always limited. You may not make the most optimal decisions. We certainly did not and it costs us time, a lot of time. We could have been out to market much earlier but instead, we were slowed down with our tech development.
As much as I pride myself with being the crazy due diligence focused CEO, where I look under every rock to make sure I have as much information as possible prior to making a decision, I made the wrong decision but really there was no way to know until you were in it. The silver lining is though that we managed to build an amazing product and get out to the market and are now experiencing great momentum and talking to amazing investors to raise our first official round of capital. But certainly not all stories with where the start-up chose the wrong tech partners at the beginning go the way ours did. Most end up not being able to go to the market.
Please tell us about UBQFIT.
UBQFIT is the only true and completely open Livestream wellness and fitness marketplace. UBQFIT is not a feature but a fully integrated platform. We have taken functions from Twitch, Uber, Airbnb, and Instagram and integrated it all into a wellness and fitness platform. Not all of this is apparent right now as you use UBQFIT as we are still building out the marketplace and creating the social dynamic in the app. We offer a full spectrum of categories from mediation and nutrition to MMA which will grow to the extent there is demand and supply for a category.
Our robust tech offers functions such as social or private sessions, 1-on-1 or class sessions, live in session chat for the “Watcher” community and gamifications. UBQFIT’s purpose in life is to accommodate the lack of motivation, time, or financial resource limitations – making fitness accessible at a whole new level to the masses.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
It was summer, we had no school and we didn’t do camp back when I was a child. Schools were going to be out for two whole months. I was in 1st grade going on to 2nd in September. I had a younger brother and sister and two cousins that were staying with us for most part of the summer – I was the oldest out of all. I remember how important it was for me to be a role model and make sure they would be learning something throughout the summer, so I designed a curriculum to keep them doing some schooling every day. I had asked my father to buy me a blackboard so that I could teach my siblings and cousins throughout the summer every day some math, writing and science. It was a blast, getting all the kids organized and sitting classroom style to see me write my lessons on the blackboard and practice. It lasted a whole two days, but I will never forget the high I was on to be in that position.
I felt like I was really contributing and adding value. Building UBQFIT brings some of those feelings up. Building from nothing, creating value, and making a difference for the people out there in the world as it concerns their health and wellbeing, it’s really rewarding and satisfying and it’s what drives me each day to make sure we make UBQFIT a significant success.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://ubqfit.com/
- Phone: 917-522-0408
- Email: info@ubqfit.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ubqfit/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ubqfit
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ubqfit
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliesarmadi/
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