I talked to a coach this morning about what would actually stop him switching online coaching platforms.
I expected the answer to be data. Exporting his client records and programmes out of a system that would rather he didn't. That's a real problem, and some platforms do make leaving deliberately awkward.
That wasn't his answer.
It's the videos
His biggest hurdle is finding exercise videos. Not bench press — every stock library has bench press. It's the uncommon movements he actually programmes: handstand plate walks, handstand shoulder taps, the things that make his coaching his rather than generic.
Those aren't in the standard libraries. Rebuilding that collection on a new platform takes hours he doesn't have — and until it's rebuilt, the new platform is worse than the old one at precisely the thing he's known for.
Which reframes the whole migration problem for me. I'd been thinking about switching costs as a data problem. For him it's a content problem, and content is a lot harder to export than a spreadsheet of client records.
So I have a decision to make
I could film them myself. Unique, premium, mine — and slow. I'm also not confident I'd get the demonstration quality right for every movement, and a badly demonstrated handstand progression is worse than no video at all. I'll probably go this route once the app is making revenue and I can work with real professionals on it.
Or I could use free and open resources. Much faster, but it comes with real risks I'd need to work through first: licensing, attribution, inconsistent quality, and what happens when a source disappears and takes part of the library with it.
I'm still thinking on this one. If you've solved exercise video libraries before, I'd genuinely like to hear how.
Meanwhile: the import wizard
This week I'm building the part I can solve. Coaches screenshot their programmes from their old platform, and AI reconstructs them inside hiignite — so migration stops being a weekend of manual retyping.
It doesn't fix the video library. But it does mean the rest of the move is no longer a reason to stay put.