We’re thrilled to launch the second season of our Remarkable Accelerator Founder Stories Series.
This series was brought to life with the help of Clothesline Content and showcases our 2022 startup founders and the story behind their startups.
We’re excited to share the first episode featuring Accessercise, which is the first complete fitness app created specifically for the disability community. Check out their story below!
Transcript
[00:08 – 00:38] Ali Jawad
Winning silver at the Paralympic Games was the dream come true. Ever since I was six years old, I’ve always had aspirations to medal at the Paralympic Games. So fast forward 20 years of sacrifice, grit, determination, and I finally achieved my dreams.
My name’s Ali Jawad, a Paralympic silver medalist from Rio and the co-founder of Accessercise app. Our vision is to make sure that we change the way accessibility is for disabled community when it comes to fitness.
[00:38 – 00:48] Yulia Kyrpa
The app is designed to empower, educate and remove barriers for the disabled community to exercise and stay active.
[00:48 – 01:47] Ali Jawad
In fact, it could be the first ever complete fitness app that is truly catered to the disabled community. Now it aims to do this through three key features. One, our unique library of exercises. Two, our social hub where users get to like, share and comment on other uses progress and three, the explore section where users can rate the accessibility of gyms and sporting facilities in the local area.
Growing up in a gym environment was quite tough because I found that I was the only disabled person in the gym, there were not many people like me.
Now, during COVID, I started searching for fitness apps that catered towards my disability. There are over 70,000 health and fitness apps on the market but none catered for disabled people like me. And I realised that with over one billion disabled people globally that haven’t got access to exercise like everyone else, and I thought that really had to change.
[01:45 – 02:05] Yulia Kyrpa
Since launching the app, we now have an MVP version available in the UK market with over three thousand downloads. We also have better than the industry standard user economics achieved in over three months and the app was selected to represent the UK sports and technology at Paris Global Sports Week.
[02:06 – 02:23] Ali Jawad
Being part of the remarkable community has been incredible for us. Not only are we with people that like minded, but people that really put inclusion and accessibility at the heart of everything that we do. And for that means that we can transform the world in terms of accessibility, and we are here to do that.
