This episode of The Next Biz Thing looks at TheBean, an AI fitness coaching platform built by a small team in Lithuania and used by people around the world. Markus J. Diplama explores why most fitness apps track everything and still leave people stuck, and how TheBean answers the simpler question of what to do next by adapting the plan as life gets in the way. The episode covers the free calculators and exercise database, the company values, and what this approach signals about where consumer AI is heading. Well worth a listen.
Here is a question I keep coming back to. Why is it that the single most valuable thing a personal trainer gives you is almost never the workout itself, but the sentence that comes right before it? Not the sets, not the reps, not the clever exercise you have never heard of. Just four ordinary words. Today we are doing this. That is the thing people are actually paying for, and for most of the history of the fitness industry, it has been the one thing you could not buy unless you could afford somebody standing next to you in a gym.
Welcome back to The Next Biz Thing. I am Markus J. Diplama, and if you have listened before, you know the deal. Every episode I go looking for a company that is quietly solving a problem most of us have simply learned to live with, and I try to work out what they saw that everybody else walked past. Today we are heading to Lithuania, to a small team building something called TheBean, and I want to talk about what happens when you stop treating fitness as a data problem and start treating it as a decision problem.
Let me set the scene, because I think a lot of you are going to recognise yourselves in it. You download a fitness app. It is beautiful. It has charts. It logs your sets, it tracks your body weight, it draws a nice little line showing your bench press over twelve weeks. And after about three weeks, you stop opening it. Not because it broke. Not because it lied to you. Because on a Tuesday evening when you are tired and you have forty minutes and you are standing in the doorway of the gym, the app tells you everything about what you did and nothing about what you should do next. You are holding a very sophisticated mirror when what you needed was a map.
TheBean's founders put this more bluntly than I would dare. Their whole positioning is built around one line, and I want to read it to you the way they wrote it, because the confidence of it tells you something about the company. Most fitness apps give everyone the same plan. Bean thinks that's stupid. That is the entire thesis in two sentences. And the product name for what they do is even simpler. Just tell me what to do.
So what is it, concretely? TheBean is an AI fitness coach. You bring your goals, your schedule, your experience level, your equipment, and it builds a training plan that belongs to you specifically. Then, and this is the part that actually matters, it keeps rebuilding it. You log your session and the plan responds. You miss a week because work exploded and life happened, and the plan does not sit there frozen in judgement waiting for you to catch up on a schedule that no longer exists. It adapts. It meets you where you actually are on the day you actually showed up.
That distinction sounds small when you say it out loud. It is not. Anyone who has trained for any length of time knows that the plans do not fail on the days you feel great. They fail on the ordinary bad Tuesday, and the difference between a system that punishes you for that and a system that absorbs it is more or less the entire difference between people who train for years and people who train for a month. The team behind TheBean say it directly on their site. When life gets busy, routines fall apart and progress gets harder to see. They built the product around that sentence rather than around the highlight reel.
Now let me talk about the niche for a second, because I think the context matters. The fitness app market has spent about fifteen years getting very good at measurement. We can count steps, estimate heart rate variability, calculate recovery scores, log every rep. It is genuinely impressive engineering. But somewhere in that boom, a lot of products quietly assumed that if you gave people enough data, the right behaviour would fall out of it automatically. It mostly does not. Data tells you where you are. It does not tell you what to do about it, and for a beginner, or for anyone who is busy and slightly overwhelmed, the gap between those two things is enormous and lonely.
Personal trainers close that gap. They are also expensive, they require scheduling, and they exist in one geography. TheBean's team frame their mission around exactly that unfairness. Great fitness coaching shouldn't be reserved for elite athletes or people who can afford a personal trainer. That is a democratisation argument, and I find it a persuasive one, because the people who most need somebody to say today we are doing this are precisely the people least likely to have that person in their life.
What I like about how this company operates is the tone. Take a look at their values, which are five short phrases, and none of them are the usual corporate wallpaper. Have fun, which they explain as taking your training seriously but yourself lightly. Be smart, which is the data and AI piece. Be human, which is their acknowledgment that fitness is deeply personal. Be better, which is about continuously improving the coaching system rather than declaring it finished. And my favourite, be real, which they define as avoiding unrealistic promises. In an industry that runs almost entirely on unrealistic promises, putting that in writing on your own website is a small act of courage.
There is a line they use that I think should be printed on the wall of every health startup in the world. Powered by science, not by influencers. That is a positioning statement and a filter at the same time. It tells you what they will and will not build. It quietly rules out the transformation photo, the miracle protocol, the thirty day shred. And it sets an expectation with the user that the results will be earned rather than promised, which is a harder sell in the short term and a much better business in the long term.
The product is broader than the coaching engine, too. They have built out a set of free tools that anyone can use without signing up for anything. There are ten calculators covering the practical questions people actually search for at eleven at night. Basal metabolic rate, total daily energy expenditure, calories, protein, body fat, body mass index, carbohydrates, fat intake, water intake, and one I had not seen elsewhere, steps to calories. There is a free gym exercise database alongside them, and a blog. For a company that could easily have put all of that behind a signup wall, giving it away is a real choice, and I think it is the right one. It builds the kind of trust that converts far better than a popup ever will.
The paid layer sits on top of that, a membership they call BeanStart, and the free tools plus the free exercise database do the job of letting you find out whether you like how these people think before you pay them anything.
Now, results. I am always careful here, because this show does not traffic in miracle numbers, and neither, to their credit, does TheBean. But their site does carry user stories, and what strikes me about them is how normal they are. Michael reports putting on twelve pounds of muscle. Tyler, Jake and Sarah report weight loss in the fifteen to twenty eight pound range. Megan and Brandon talk about something less quantifiable and probably more important, which is feeling confident walking into a gym. And Olivia's is the one that I think tells you the most about what the product is really doing, because her word is consistency. Not a number. Consistency. If you are building a coaching system whose whole design principle is surviving the bad Tuesday, that is exactly the testimonial you would want to see.
So why does any of this matter beyond one app? I think we are watching a genuine shift in what AI is for in consumer products. The first wave was about generating things. Text, images, plans, output. Impressive, and often not that useful, because a plan generated once is just a PDF with extra steps. The more interesting wave, the one TheBean is part of, is about maintaining a relationship over time. The value is not in the plan it hands you in week one. It is in the fact that it is still paying attention in week nine, when you have missed two sessions and your priorities have shifted and the original plan has quietly become wrong. That is what a good coach does. It is a fundamentally different product shape, and it is much harder to build, because it demands the company keep earning the user's attention rather than capturing it once.
And there is something else here that I keep noticing on this show. A small team in Lithuania is building a product that competes on judgement rather than on features, and serving users all over the world with it. That was not a viable strategy fifteen years ago. The distribution was not there and neither was the technology. It is viable now, and I find that genuinely exciting, because it means the next great answer to a very human problem is as likely to come from a handful of people who care a lot as from anybody with a large budget.
If you have ever downloaded a fitness app, loved the charts, and stopped opening it within a month, you were not the problem. You were being handed a mirror and you needed a map. TheBean is worth a look, whether that is the free calculators, the exercise database, or the coaching itself. Go and read their values page if nothing else. You can tell a great deal about a company from what it refuses to promise you.
That is where I will leave it for today. Thank you for spending this time with me, thank you for the notes and the recommendations you keep sending, because a good number of these episodes start life as somebody's message telling me to go and look at something. Keep them coming. I am Markus J. Diplama, this has been The Next Biz Thing, and I will see you on the next one.