When Dr. Jen Ashton left the GMA3 set in the summer of 2024, she was preparing to build the next chapter of her career. Within 10 months, the MVP of Ajenda's Wellness Experiment had cleared $1MM in revenue and 10,000+ customers.

‍

Zero to one, proving the program

We'd been working with Ajenda since the earliest days of the business, helping validate the product thesis and shape the first commercial launch. When it came time to put the Wellness Experiment into market, we made a deliberate call: don't overengineer. Ship on Circle, keep the scope small, let the community form, and learn.

‍

That decision paid off. The program hit product-market fit fast. The community grew. The program itself expanded into three sequential 8-week phases, and then a monthly membership for graduates who wanted to keep going. Every signal from members pointed the same direction: more content, more structure, more personalization.

‍

At the same time, that was also putting pressure on the MVP. Circle was extremely effective for our MVP version, but much of what members wanted couldn’t be accommodated. Filtering a recipe library by dietary preference, advanced automations, personalized workouts, serving both new members and longstanding ones from the same home: the system that wasn't designed for any of it. The MVP had done its job. It had taught us exactly what the real product needed to be.

‍

One to scale, building the real platform

One of the challenging parts of building the second iteration of Ajenda was creating a user experience that accommodated a very unique content structure.

‍

A follow-along workout video and an exercise list are both "a workout," but they need different structures, different metadata, and different behaviour when a member finishes. A recipe is only useful if it can be filtered by how someone actually eats. A program is a sequence with a state, which means it has to know where each member is and what to do when she pauses for three weeks and comes back.

‍

A 55-year-old woman rebuilding after a knee replacement and a 55-year-old woman training for a half marathon should not open to the same first screen. None of that is a setting you switch on in an off the shelf SaaS tool.

‍

So we built for the shape of Ajenda's content instead of bending the content into someone else's shape.

‍

It was also an exercise (see what we did there) in finding little moments of delight. One of our favs: follow-along sessions play as one video with timestamped circuits and automatic pauses between them, so nobody is thumbing at a scrubber with a dumbbell in the other hand.

‍

Programs are also a unique content structure, and are built in a hierarchy of program, then week, then the individual workouts and learnings inside it, with enrollment, pause, and resume built in and progress tracked task by task. Life interrupts an eight week program. The platform accounts for that rather than penalizing it.

‍

We also made the decision to leave the Community on Circle. On the surface, rebuilding community inside the new platform and owning the whole experience looked like the obvious move. But Dr. Jen's community was already thriving, close to 6,000 members who were active, connected to each other, and organizing themselves. Rebuilding it would've meant asking those members to migrate their relationships to a new address for reasons that mattered to us more than to them. So we integrated Circle via SSO, kept the community where it already lived, and spent the build on the content experience instead. Good product decisions sometimes look like restraint.

‍

Designed for what's next

Ajenda now runs on a platform designed for the shape of the business today and the shape of the business two years from now. When Dr. Jen and Korey add new programs, the system already knows how to handle it. When the team wants to experiment with a new tier, or a one-off offering, or a different way of gating access, they can do it without rebuilding. When a member's goals shift (and in this audience, they do), preferences can be updated from Account and the platform updates with them.

‍

The members themselves get a single place for the program they're in, the workouts they saved last week, the recipes they want to try this weekend, the article Dr. Jen just posted, and the live event they're registered for on Thursday. It all lives together, so nobody has to switch tabs or wonder "wait, where was that thing Jen posted."

‍

And most exciting for us, our partnership continues. As content fills out, as the audience grows, and as the business evolves past the Wellness Experiment into whatever Dr. Jen builds next, we'll keep designing, building, and scaling alongside her and her team. The first version of the Wellness Experiment proved what was possible, and the V2 product is what happens when you take that proof seriously.