it started on the mats, not in a spreadsheet
i walked in as a student
this one didn't begin as a business plan. i started training at exitasia in Freiburg and got pulled in by the thing you can't fake — the community. the coaching was world-class, the room was alive, and i kept coming back. that's where i met nils and leo. the company came later; the belief came first.
the gym behind it all
exitasia is the real thing — three gyms around Freiburg, since 2006, 1,500+ people every month, one of the biggest martial-arts schools in Germany. the trainers aren't influencers: an iska world champion, a k1 world champion, a state-recognised physiotherapist, 20+ years on the mats between them. but all that experience lived in one city — nobody in hamburg or vienna could train with these people. that gap is the whole reason Hey Coach exists.
exitasia gym tour · click to play
from one course to a whole company
there was already one kickboxing course taking shape — and that was the spark: if one works, we can build a line. so we did it properly. i co-founded Hey Coach Production GmbH (Germany, 2025 — Freiburg local court, HRB 732729) with nils and leo. my seat: co-founder & production lead — strategy, product, marketing, funnels, the site, operations. nils brought the brand, the capital and the champions; i turned a gym into a product company. operating from the inside, not advising from the outside.
twelve course pages, a catalogue like netflix
five courses became a library. today heycoachproduction.de carries twelve course pages: the kickboxing complete course (126 lessons, 7 belt levels), the seven belt levels on their own (white belt free, from €24.99), kickboxing basics, the muay thai complete course (85 lessons, 8 modules), the 7-day fitstart, 11 days back fit — and the second wave: four new physio courses with elsa, the physio bundle with all five, and “kämpfen wie chris wunn”. as of october 2026: eleven courses buyable right now, six courses and the bundle land in october. pay once, 24 months of access, no subscription, a certificate of participation.
i rebuilt the homepage for it — as a course library in rows, one area per row: belt system, muay thai, physio training, top fighters, coming soon. plus its own catalogue page with filters (available now · from october · soon), so nobody has to scroll the whole site to find their course. the rows sit in static html — google and the ai bots see them without javascript.
one block, two cameras, course and marketing in one day
we shoot in blocks, not appointments. a course and its marketing come out of the same session: first the lessons, then trailers, short videos and photos — same location, same light, one outfit. we shot chris wunn on 11 august 2026 at exitasia in Freiburg: start at 9 a.m., three cameras, six modules, a partner for the techniques, every key line in two versions back to back so the edit has a choice. elsa in the studio: two cameras at once, 16:9 and 9:16 — the vertical version isn't reshot, it comes out of the same take. and on the physio check one rule has no exceptions: between the two takes neither tripod nor zoom nor light moves — otherwise there's no “same check” moment.
my jobs on set: pre-production — shooting plan, shot list, scripts the trainer signs off in advance, legal guardrails (no healing promises, no third-party brands in frame); on the day, directing at the monitor, a hook bank of 15–20 opening lines, disclaimer takes, the colour chart for the grade; afterwards edit, covers, platform. leo and our camera team run camera and sound, nils opens the gym and brings the trainers. the chris block gave us 146 photos, elsa's 410 — course, trailer, covers and the photos for the site out of one day.
56 covers, one system — the ai does the light, i do the type
a catalogue needs faces. i built a cover system in which every course reads as a hey coach course at a glance: dark ground, golden light, the person on the right, the big title on the left, the wordmark at the bottom. 56 covers in twelve sections — belt system, muay thai, physio, mma, bjj, referees, training science, b2b for gyms — printed as an a0 catalogue for the gym and filed as a package for the editors.
the rule that saved everything: the model only makes the scene. type, umlauts, logo and the real faces come afterwards as their own layer from html and chrome — that's why every cover looks like it came from one hand, and a new typeface doesn't cost a new generation. for the live courses we went one step further in october: real photos of the trainers instead of ai faces — nils and jana on basics, elsa on all five physio covers — ai only for background and clothing.
✗ titles, umlauts and logo straight from the model
✓ the model only makes the scene — type, logo and faces as their own layer
✗ ai faces for the trainers
✓ real photos — nils and jana, elsa; ai only for background and clothing
a brand that sits in every video
six old youtube videos from 2021 — 1 hour 20 minutes — became the kickboxing basics course. not reshot but remastered: sound to −16 lufs, colour warmed, the third-party 15-second opener cut. in its place came our intro sting: four seconds, the footage ai-generated, the logo placed afterwards frame-accurate in brand colours — because no video model writes a logo cleanly.
✗ the third-party 15-second opener
✓ our sting, four seconds
✗ the logo from the video model
✓ the logo placed afterwards, frame-accurate in brand colours
plus 22 title cards and an end card in the same navy-gold as the covers, rendered from html with the site's fonts — the cover layer now lives in the video too. it all sits ready as a package for the editors: sting, cards, templates, scripts, so every new lesson gets the same signature in minutes. the new courses with elsa and chris are in the edit right now — they get the same signature.
news in 24 hours, posters instead of stock photos, shorts from the same session
at Hey Coach social media isn't a channel you “post to” — it's the content system behind every channel. the core: a blog with 14 articles, two evergreens a week and GLORY and UFC news within 24 hours of the event, because in this niche speed ranks before a backlink exists. every card gets a poster in a light editorial style instead of a stock photo — the same posters run as images on linkedin and instagram. it's run from a content command centre with four channels (website, linkedin company page, instagram, youtube), a fixed beat tuesday to thursday at 7:30 and one rule that overrides everything: the event beats the plan. google search console confirmed it: from a standing start, 5,670 impressions, 119 clicks, position 7.8 — €0 on ads (july 2026).
for short video we wrote the script into the shoot: for chris 14 videos in three layers — five trailers for the course page and youtube, four longer films, five 30-second verticals with one “aha” moment per clip; for elsa a hero film, ten shorts and six mobility checks to follow along — all from the one 4.5-hour block, two cameras, no reshoots. the ad that carries it all is a case of its own: cast entirely with ai. and honestly, where it stands: instagram and tiktok are set up, reach today comes through search and the gym's channel — that's the next stage.
heycoachproduction.de 2.0 — 44 pages, 99 out of 100
we outgrew the first version. on 1 october 2026 the second went live: a new homepage with a hero video from the gym (shot by leo, cut by me into a seamless loop), the course library in rows, the catalogue, seven new course pages, two new trainer pages, “über uns” and “kontakt” — 44 pages, still custom html / css / js without a cms on github pages + cloudflare.
before the push i had the site checked like a product: four reviewers for German, healthcare advertising law, competition law and seo, a crawler over 42 pages (0 errors), lighthouse mobile. result: homepage from 76 to 99, load time from 7.1 to 2.1 seconds, every course page 97–100. the day after, the polish for phones: a 64 px header on every page, a new menu, no text under 12 px, 45 pages on iphone and android without a single error. the search layer grew along: course, faq and organization schema, llms.txt, and the numbers sit in the html instead of javascript.
community, funnel, refund, dashboard
before we scaled courses, we built a place to belong: the member community on gohighlevel — courses, discussion, announcements, one login at app.heycoachproduction.de. not a video you buy and forget, but trainers, a community, a path. the trailer says exactly that:
the community trailer · click to play
then the operator layer. a €9 entry → a 7-day email sequence → the upsell to the €99 / €129 course, all wired in gohighlevel — funnels, checkouts, automations, dsgvo-clean (avv signed; datenschutz, impressum, agb, widerruf). the lever: with zpp §20 sgb v certification (in progress with dr. weerda), German health insurers refund up to €300. i run every step from a dashboard i built.
the real asset is who's on the mats
Hey Coach is three managing directors, nine trainers and experts, plus editors and freelancers — backed by exitasia and its 1,500+ people who train offline every month with our trainers. the line-up: nils (exitasia co-founder, 5th dan), jana (iska world champion), mohsen (k1 world champion iska), heiko (exitasia co-founder, 3rd dan), marlon tröscher (co-founder of t1 kampfsportzentrum), new: chris wunn (GLORY fighter, head coach at golden gloves 76 bruchsal), elsa (state-recognised physiotherapist, five courses), medical lead dr. weerda, leo (trainer). everyone on fair contractor agreements — ip clauses, revenue share. the moat isn't the funnel; it's the people the camera points at.
we keep shipping — the course line grows, the site grows, the content grows. idea, product, site, covers, video, funnel, search: i don't hand a founder a plan, i hand them a running company. that's the operator i am.
