Bialik alumni score funding from AfterPay CEO
Two ex-Bialik students have introduced a new fitness app that has been designed to make finding the right workouts easy and accessible.
IN November 2020, as 22-year-old former Bialik student Cara Davies was finishing her university studies for the year, it dawned on her that she was following a particular path, one that she describes as “well trodden and a bit boring”.
The college’s 2017 dux, she had won just about every academic award there was to win in high school and at university, including the Premier’s Top All Rounder VCE High Achievers award and a spot on the Dean’s Honours List for Engineering at Monash University in 2020 where she had been accepted into her software engineering course with a scholarship for excellence after finishing year 12.
Reflecting on how her life was unfolding, she said, “I did really well at school, I’ll do really well at uni, I’ll get a really good job and I’ll work really, really hard and I’ll work ridiculous hours. I’ll probably be working on problems that are interesting, but not something I’m really passionate about.”
Wanting to wake up excited for work every day, she thought, “There had to be more that I could do.”
While Davies was also an athletic teenager, she recalled, “I always found that when I was going to the gym I had no idea what to do and I was frustrated with the gym experience.”
After speaking with friends, she realised this was a common issue and one that had left a gap in the competitive fitness market.
“Young people feel lost in the gym,” she commented.
This is when Davies came up with the idea for Steppen – a new fitness app designed to make finding the right workouts easy and accessible through a feed of video user-generated content.
“I think everyone thinks with start-ups that it’s a lightbulb moment, but for me it was kind of the opposite,” said Davies. “It was just something that was in the back of my head for a while.”
Steppen is described as “TikTok meets Spotify, but for fitness”, offering “workouts made by your friends, fitness influencers, PT’s and athletes”.
Seeing her post about the idea online, 21-year-old school friend and computer science and commerce student Jake Carp jumped on board as co-founder in February, working with Davies and a development team to get the app running.
Realising they needed a tech expert, the duo approached Dave Slutzkin whose software engineering skills and longtime experience working on start-ups made him the perfect fellow-founder.
Next, the team needed funding. After her internship at AfterPay in January this year, Davies took CEO of the tech giant, Jewish Australian billionaire Anthony Eisen, for a ‘thank you’ coffee where she anxiously pitched him the idea for Steppen.
“I was very nervous,” she said, “but it’s okay to be nervous. People have all these fallacies about start-up people, they think they’re super confident all the time and that’s not really the case.”
Eisen, impressed with the idea, decided to invest in the up-and-coming tech start-up, bumping up the team’s crowdfunding efforts to $536,000.
With funding rolling in and the pair throwing all their time and energy at the app, which recently peaked at number 14 in the health and fitness app charts, Davies and Carp decided to defer their courses earlier this year – unsure if they’ll ever return.
The pair, who also both worked at the ARK Centre, Hawthorn back in the day, reflected on how the Bialik community had helped them along the way, remembering when they were mentors at the school’s Entrepreneurship Week earlier this year, where they had the chance to meet and learn from the founders of some of Australia’s most successful start-ups.
“It was an awesome experience for us as mentors, maybe even more so than the year 9s,” said Carp.
The team thanked the Jewish community for their support during the early stages of the app, telling The AJN that those who tested the app at the beginning were predominantly from the community.
As for the future, Slutzkin said, “Every day we solve one problem for people and uncover six more. There is so much more that we can do,” while Davies added there will be plenty more features to come.
For more information, visit steppen.fit
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