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, running since 2006, 1,500+ members every month, one of the biggest martial-arts schools in Germany. the trainers aren't influencers: iska european & world champions, a k1 world champion, a state-certified 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.
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, 2024) with nils and the team. 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.
we built a home, not just a checkout
before scaling courses, we built a place to actually belong. the member community runs on gohighlevel — courses, discussion, announcements, one login at app.heycoachproduction.de. it mattered to us that this isn't a video you buy and forget: it's trainers, a community, a path. we cut a trailer to say exactly that:
five courses, taught by champions
the line grew course by course — each one filmed on location with the real trainer, lifetime access and a signed certificate. the whole catalogue, from the €9 door-opener to the full komplettkurse:
a course factory, not a one-off
the courses aren't the finish line — they're the format. we built a repeatable way to take a champion and a discipline and turn it into a finished, sellable course. the plan is a growing catalogue across everything exitasia teaches — striking, muay thai, grappling, conditioning, recovery — each a new champion on camera, the same machine behind it.
heycoachproduction.de — built end to end, by me
the entire site is mine, hand-built — 31 live pages, custom html / css / js, no cms, deployed on github pages + cloudflare. home, every course page, eight trainer profiles, a 12-page “perspektive” blog, and the full German legal stack (impressum, agb, datenschutz, widerruf). it looks clean on purpose — under the hood it's dense. full schema.org (course, faqpage, person for every trainer, organization with a 4.9 / 680 rating, breadcrumbs), plus a real geo / ai-search layer: llms.txt and explicit opt-in for claudebot, gptbot, perplexitybot — so an llm can quote Hey Coach when someone asks it for a kampfsport course. (the first prototype we built, we outgrew — this is the rebuild.)
the blog is already ranking
we didn't just say “seo” — we started publishing seo blogs on purpose, and google search console backs it up. from a standing start, €0 on ads, in about 45 days:
two search layers, built on purpose — and worth showing apart:
5.67k impressions, a ~7.8 average position — page one from zero, on the blog and the schema alone. no ad spend.
built to be quoted by ai: llms.txt, faqpage schema, and explicit opt-in for claudebot, gptbot, perplexitybot — the next search surface, ready early.
the funnel, the refund, the dashboard
then the operator layer. a €9 entry → a 7-day email nurture → the upsell to the €99 / €129 course, all wired in gohighlevel — funnels, landing pages, automations, dsgvo-clean (avv signed; datenschutz, impressum, agb, widerruf). the clever hook: with zpp §20 sgb v certification (in progress with dr. weerda), German health insurers refund up to €300 — the course can pay for itself. i run every step from a dashboard i built.
the real asset is who's on the mats
Hey Coach is three geschäftsführer, eight trainers, plus editors and freelancers — all backed by exitasia and its 1,500+ monthly members. the roster: nils (iska europameister, 5th dan), jana (iska weltmeisterin), mohsen (k1 weltmeister), heiko (3rd dan, exitasia co-founder), marlon tröscher, physio elsa, and medical lead dr. weerda. 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 blog grows, the community grows. idea, product, site, funnel, content, search, ad: i don't hand a founder a plan, i hand them a live company. that's the operator i am.