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Jimenez Julien

Founder of CoachCheckIns, publication director at MLJ, SASU, and the person who answers your demo request.

Portrait of Jimenez Julien

Why a check in tool, and why for coaches

I started building software for small operators because I kept meeting people whose businesses were held together by memory and text messages. The personal training trade was the clearest case I found. A coach with 30 clients is running 30 separate relationships, each with its own program, its own injury history, its own excuse pattern, and every one of them needs a nudge on a slightly different day. The software sold to that coach was almost always built for a gym chain and then shrunk down, which is why so many trainers were still working out of a spreadsheet and a phone.

CoachCheckIns came out of a stubborn observation. Coaches do not lose clients on the day the client cancels. They lose them three to five weeks earlier, in the week the client stops replying, skips a Tuesday, and quietly decides the money is not worth it any more. Nobody sees that week, because it looks like nothing. So I built the thing that makes that week visible: a short weekly form that goes out on its own, a score that turns the answers into one readable number, and a flag that fires when the number falls or the answers stop.

I spent 14 months with working coaches before I trusted the scoring model. Marcus in Grand Rapids let me sit with his roster of 34 and argue about which questions actually predicted a cancellation. Dana in Chattanooga ran the online version, 52 clients across four time zones, and taught me that a check in sent at the wrong hour is a check in nobody answers. A barbell club in Sacramento showed me what happens when three coaches share one board and none of them writes anything down. Every design decision in the product traces back to somebody in that group saying no, that is not how the week works.

What I learned about this trade, in short: coaches are not lazy about admin, they are simply out of hours. Their day is spent on the floor or on calls, and the paperwork gets squeezed into a Sunday evening that already belongs to their family. Software that asks a coach to remember to do something will fail. Software that runs on its own and hands them a sorted list on Monday morning gets used. That is the whole design brief, and I refuse features that break it.

I work with operators in this vertical the way a supplier should. Demos are run by me, not a sales team, and they use your real client count instead of a fictional gym. When a coach asks for something, I tell them honestly whether it is on the roadmap, whether it is a bad idea, or whether they should keep doing it in their spreadsheet because a feature would only add friction. I have talked more than one coach out of upgrading a tier they did not need. Trust in a trade this small travels fast in both directions.

What I am accountable for is simple to state and hard to do: the check ins go out on time, the scores are computed the way the documentation says, client data stays private and exportable, and somebody answers when you write. If any of those four break, that is on me personally, not on a support queue.

Experience and expertise

  • Founder and publication director at MLJ, SASU, the company that publishes CoachCheckIns and operates it as a live service for US coaching businesses.
  • Fourteen months of field research with independent trainers, online coaches and a multi coach barbell club before the adherence model was locked.
  • Hands on with the whole stack: the check in delivery pipeline, the scoring engine, the roster board, the billing screens and the support inbox.
  • Long practice building small, sharp tools for owner operated businesses where the owner is also the person doing the work.
  • Comfortable with the vocabulary of the trade: blocks and deloads, RPE, adherence, session caps, retention, and the difference between a client who is struggling and a client who is finished.

How this product is built and maintained

Every feature starts as a written note from a coach on a live roster, not as a competitor screenshot. Before anything ships it runs against a set of anonymized check in histories so we can see whether a scoring change would have moved a flag that mattered. Changes to the score formula are versioned and announced, because a number that quietly changes meaning is worse than no number at all.

The words on this site are written by hand, by me, and reviewed on a fixed schedule. Statistics quoted here come from platform data across the accounts we operate, and I update them when the underlying figures move rather than rounding them upward. Testimonials are used with written permission from named coaches at named businesses. If we ever quote a number I cannot back up in the database, write to me and I will correct or remove it within a week.

Support is not tiered by plan for anything that is actually broken. A billing question, a stuck import, or a client who says the form did not arrive gets the same reply speed on Side Hustle as on Studio. Security patching, backups and the incident log are handled on a fixed cadence, and any outage that lasts more than 15 minutes gets written up and mailed to affected accounts.

Published articles

Every article in Between Sessions, the CoachCheckIns magazine, is written and fact checked by Jimenez Julien, and each one is dated so you can see how current it is.

Contact the author

Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com with a product question, a correction to this page, a press request, or a partnership idea. Coaches who want to see the roster board on their own numbers can go straight to the demo request form, and questions about billing or data handling are answered in the FAQ and the privacy policy.

Published by MLJ, SASU

CoachCheckIns is operated by MLJ, SASU, with Jimenez Julien as publication director. Company details are on the legal notice page.