How to Build a Website Like CoachUp?

Are you planning to build a business from your passion? If you have loved the adrenaline rush from your favorite sports all your life, starting a sports coaching business is a lucrative avenue.

You can share your love for sports and help aspiring athletes ace their games by connecting them with expert coaches. Whether it’s basketball, baseball, soccer, or fitness coaching, you can easily enter the burgeoning sports coaching space.

CoachUp is one of the largest networks of coaches with expertise across different sports. In this blog, we discuss how to build a website like CoachUp, so let the games begin!

Exploring the Sports Training Market Landscape

Before we discuss how CoachUp works and the steps to build a similar platform, let’s examine the sports training market.

The global sports coaching market is expected to increase by $1.24 billion from 2024 to 2028, which is a 14.07% CAGR between 2024 and 2028. Effective sports training includes different aspects, such as strength, flexibility, endurance, skill development, etc.

There are several reasons for the sports coaching industry’s growth.  The rise in the participation rates, demand for sports training, and technological advancements are some key drivers. Also sports camps and personalized training segments have witnessed significant growth.

Further, resources such as video lectures, interactive learning tools, gamification, leaderboards, and virtual simulations are making learning more accessible. Baseball is the major contributor to the sports market, followed by fitness and sports like soccer, basketball and swimming.

What is CoachUp? How Does it Work?

CoachUp is a Boston-based online sports coaching platform that connects athletes to private coaches in over 60 sports. The platform hosts around 13,000 coaches who train athletes at different levels and it helps them reach their performance and fitness goals.

The online coaching marketplace offers training for all popular sports, from soccer to basketball and lacrosse. It provides both one-to-one and group training. Although founded in 2011 by former basketball player Jordan Fliegel, the platform was launched in 2012 with a $2.7 million seed from General Catalyst.

Fast-forward to 2025, the platform boasts an overall revenue of $7.8 million and a total funding of $10.9 million.

The groundbreaking platform operates with the mission of helping athletes excel in sports and life. While the athletes train themselves under skilled coaches, the latter build their online presence, access resources, and market their services.

CoachUp’s Revenue Model: How Does it Work?

CoachUp is an online sports coaching platform that connects athletes to coaches. Athletes can register on the platform and book private coaches for a specific sport. Once athletes book their coach, they receive their contact information. Now, they can start training and take their game to the next level!

On the other hand, coaches can sign up and submit their profiles for approval. Once the admin approves their profile, coaches get listed and can set their prices and availability. Athletes can take up coaching requests and deliver in-person or virtual training sessions.

Here are the revenue streams CoachUp monetizes from:

• Commissions – CoachUp charges a service fee for every coaching session booked on the platform. This is the primary source of revenue and is deducted from the creator’s earnings. 

The commission rates are based on the number of coaching sessions conducted and charged on the total session rate. The more sessions, the lower the commission rate.

• One-time activation charges – CoachUp charges a $30 one-time activation fee on coaches for creating personalized profiles. This covers the initial background check cost.
• Membership fee – There’s also an annual membership fee of $9.99 for maintaining an up-to-date annual background check with CoachUp. The background screening includes an initial check, a basic background check ( criminal check ), and a sex offender check.

These checks are renewed annually for an active CoachUp account.

Why Build a Website Like CoachUp?

With $7.8 million in revenue, CoachUp has built its empire in the sports coaching industry landscape. If you need still reasons to start your sports coaching website, we have listed the key reasons:

Market Demand

The sports coaching industry had an estimated market size of $8.18 billion in 2025 and is expected to reach $12.67 billion by 2030. The non-professional sports coaching industry is set to grow with increasing interest in youth sports programs, technological advancements, and awareness of health advantages and physical activity.

Profitability

Starting a sports coaching marketplace is profitable. You can earn from diverse revenue streams, such as commissions on coaching sessions, membership fees, advertisements, and sponsored listings.

Helps Athletes to Master the Game

Platforms like CoachUp connect athletes with coaches, offering them personalized training to reach their goals and needs. Athletes can leverage the training sessions, resources, tools, and community to master the game. On the other hand, coaches get the exposure and tools to share their expertise and market their business. This helps to capitalize on an existing industry gap.

Scalability

As your platform grows, you can gradually hire more coaches and accommodate more athletes. You can diversify your revenue streams with sponsorships and sponsored listings and grow your business.

Community Building

Creating a website like CoachUp fosters a community of like-minded athletes and coaches who bond over the sport. This way, you can promote engagement and individual growth.

How to Build a Website Like CoachUp?

Follow this detailed step-by-step guide on how to create a website like CoachUp:

Step 1: Decide a Profitable Sports Coaching Niche

First you need to find an underserved yet profitable niche to start your sports coaching website.  While you might think with a super-specific coaching niche you might lose potential customers, but that’s not true! Instead niching down helps to stand out in the competitive landscape.

For example, you can zoom in on a specific sport, age group, or sports-related challenges.

The most important thing is to have a unique business proposition to foray. Decide your niche based on strengths, passions, expertise, and skills. 

Here are some popular, profitable coaching niches to build your sports business:

• Youth sports training like high school sports coaching
• Specific sports training like basketball, soccer, ice hockey, etc
• Training for specific needs like injury prevention, skill development, food & nutrition, mental agility, etc
• Targeting a specific demographic like age group, gender, location, etc
• Coaching for athletes with disabilities or injuries
• Catering nutrition coaching needs for athletes

The keyword “badminton grip” has significant volume and a keyword difficulty of 17, which is fairly easy to rank.

Step 2: Research Your Market & Perform Competitor Analysis

“You either evolve or become extinct!” But what if you have a surefire way to find success and avoid being digital dust on the internet?

Performing market research in the initial stages can be super useful for gaining more clarity.

Here are a few steps for market research:

Identify & Understand Your Target Audience

Once you have finalized your niche, you need to paint a picture of your ideal audience. This helps to fine-tune your business to your audience’s goals and needs. Ask questions like: Who are you targeting? What is your audience exactly looking for? What kind of problems are they facing, and how can your platform help?

Use customer surveys, focus groups, interviews, and social listening tools to gather more customer insights.

Look into the Current Trends & Emerging Market Needs

A specific niche might have earned millions last year, but that doesn’t define its future! 

Tools like Google Trends, BuzzSumo, and Exploding Topics help to find the hot niches in the long run!

Perform Competitor Analysis

“Competition always pushes you to do the best!” And performing competitor analysis helps to discover the market gaps. Identify the key players in your industry and their strengths and weaknesses. Gain insights on target audience, coaching methodologies, pricing and packages, and service offerings.

Even assessing their testimonials and website comments helps to find out their shortcomings and capitalize on that. SEMRush, Moz, Ahrefs are few popular tools for competitor analysis.

Identifying Gaps in the Market

Treading an unchartered territory might give you the first-mover advantage, however that’s not enough. On the consumer side, you need to focus on the market demand. To create a viable business, you need to find an industry gap that actually exists.

First, identify your target market based on your demographics, needs, user behavior, psychographics, etc. Get deeper insights on your audience’s pain points and expectations. 

Conduct interviews, surveys, and participate in niche-related focus groups.  This helps to get feedback and better understand user problems and needs.

For instance, you can start with a lesser-known niche like sports coaching for athletes with disabilities. This includes sports like wheelchair basketball, visually impaired sports, adaptive skiing, etc. Another niche is mindset coaching for athletes, where you help them improve their mental game with techniques like visualization, stress management, and goal-setting.

Starting your sports coaching platform in these niches is a sound idea and a profitable pursuit!

Step 3: Pick a Robust Business Model

Now, you have gathered enough information on your niche and the market! Starting a sports coaching marketplace is definitely the best bet to monetize the sports coaching market. 

But, you also need a business model to scale your business. This is how your platform drives revenue from the target audience. For instance, CoachUp adopts a commission model where it cuts commissions from coaching sessions.

Besides commissions, some other popular business models for your sports coaching business are:

• Subscriptions– Your sports coaching website can monetize from monthly or yearly subscriptions offered to athletes to access various services.
• Ad-based model – The platform can monetize from niche-related adverts displayed as banner ads on your website. 
• Featured listing –  This involves promoting specific coaches on the website for a fixed fee.

You can even diversify your earnings with multiple revenue streams: subscriptions(primary), ads, and featured listing.

Step 4: Decide the Essential Features of Sports Coaching Platform

Now we have a business model to scale our sports coaching business, it’s time we decide the essential features.

Let’s take a look at the key features of building a website like CoachUp!

• Search & discovery – Athletes can browse extensive coach profiles and filter results by distance, price, reviews, training types, etc. Thus, find the right coach as per needs and goals.
• Booking & scheduling – After choosing a coach, users can book from light package, group trainings, online trainings and schedule a training session.
• Communication tools – CoachUp offers in-app messaging, video conferencing, discussion forums, online whiteboards for seamless communication between coaches and athletes.
• Payment gateway – Integrate trusted payment gateways like Stripe or PayPal with your platform to manage payments for training sessions. Offer users with multiple payment methods like credit cards, debit cards, wallets for convenience.
• Profile management – Athletes can create their profiles with personal information, skills, preferences, etc. Coaches can include qualifications, expertise, session prices, reviews, packages, and even training locations in their profile.
• Reviews & ratings – Here athletes share their training experience and rate coaches after completing their training. While coaches can increase their credibility with testimonials, the reviews help athletes to choose the right coach.
• User dashboard – Athletes can track their booked sessions, group events, training progress, and search coaches through the dashboard. On the other hand, coaches can manage coaching requests, upcoming training, and track the payment status and overall revenue.
• Marketing features – CoachUp offers few marketing tools, such as creating blogs or articles, social media promotions, email marketing, and SEO optimization for profiles,etc.
• Reporting & Analytics – Detailed reports & analytics help to track the sales, athlete performance, coach payments & revenue, lessons, session management, etc. Admin can get a bird’s eye view of the business including  number of athletes and coaches, commission, revenue, and total sessions, etc.

Step 5: Choose the Right Development Approach

There are two development approaches to building a website like CoachUp: building from scratch and ready-made scripts.

Coach Up Clone Script

Want to launch a feature-rich sports coach platform quickly? A ready-made CoachUp Clone Script can help you build a sports coaching platform with essential and advanced features, reducing the time it takes to enter the market. 

Pinlearn is one such effective white-label marketplace software for building robust sports coaching marketplace. Create your own community of athletes and coaches who share the love for sport! 

Here’s how you can gain a competitive edge with Pinlearn:

• Highly-customizable clone script
• One-to-one & group training sessions
• Course-selling and management features
• In-built payment integration with Stripe, PayPal and other regional gateways
• Book & schedule live classes with in-sync calendar integration
• Coach dashboard & Analytics
• Multi-language support in different locales

This is a cost-effective and convenient development approach as you save time and effort! The overall development cost is reduced as we have a market-ready product. You need to pay a one-time; no recurring fees and gain lifetime access.

Building From Scratch

The custom-development approach is building the entire platform from scratch. You need to hire a development team to complete the development process. This involves extensive financial investment and the development time spans across a few months to a year!

Unlike a ready-made script, significant time goes for MVP development and subsequent customization.

Step 6: Onboarding Coaches to Your Platform

Ensure a smooth and informative onboarding process where you provide all the essential resources and tools. This involves streamlining the entire process from recruitment to ongoing support.

Here’s an onboarding checklist for your sports coaching platform:

• Pre-onboarding formalities – You need to define criteria for background checks, qualifications, certifications. For instance, CoachUp conducts an identification check, basic background checks, and sex offender check before onboarding coaches. Establish clear contracts, including guidelines for goals, pricing, confidentiality, and termination clauses.
• Onboarding process – A smooth onboarding process helps coaches understand their roles and retain them for a longer time. The onboarding starts with a welcome message introducing the coaching platform’s functionalities and features. You can share videos navigating through the platform’s dashboard, which includes essential features like profile creation, request management, scheduling sessions, etc.
• Post-Onboarding – This involves performance review, feedback sessions, informing new platform upgrades & features, etc.

Step 7: Promote Your Sports Coaching Platform

The last step is to market your sports coaching platform and increase visibility. Building the platform is only one side of the story; a hands-on promotional strategy attracts ideal clients to your business. 

Here are the effective strategies to market your sports coaching platform:

• Leveraging social media platforms – Social media is a powerful tool for building your brand. Share teasers, success stories, tips, and live Q&A sessions on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter).
• Influencer marketing – Collaborate with popular sports personalities or niche influencers to spread the word to a larger audience.
• Referral programs – Create a robust referral program to incentivize users to bring new joinees to the platform.
• SEO optimization – Target niche-relevant keywords that users often search online. Include these keywords in your website, blogs, or social media posts to appear in searches.
• Host events & workshops – Build credibility by hosting affordable camps, clinics, and classes for all ages and sports.

Well, that was a detailed guide on how to build a website like CoachUp.

Successful Alternatives to CoachUp

Below are few successful alternatives to CoachUp:

CoachList

CoachList is another sports coaching platform connecting athletes with coaches across different sports, fitness, and wellness categories. It offers both in-person and online services for over 140 sports and 800 specializations. Its services include personalized training sessions, camps, clinics, events, and training sessions.

The platform hosts trained professionals from sports specialties like sports medicine, nutrition, mental skills training, etc. 

TrainingPeaks

Another versatile training app, TrainingPeaks, connects athletes, sports enthusiasts, and expert coaches, creating a positive ecosystem. The comprehensive training app offers personalized coaching for different sports, such as triathlon,cycling, running,rowing, swimming, etc. 

Athletes can set goals, schedule workouts, track their progress, and compare peaks. Besides the training sessions, the platform hosts a learning center, blog, training guides, and podcasts.

CoachNow

CoachNow is an all-in-one digital coaching platform for training athletes with tools like video analysis, personalized training, private groups or spaces, etc. The platform offers different membership plans tailored for athletes to chisel their sport.

One of its significant features is “Video and Image Analysis,” which integrates features like AI-enabled analysis, voice-over,coachcam, etc. The platform hosts the world’s best coaches, academies, and trainers, putting together the best expertise.

Conclusion

The sports coaching industry is expected to grow rapidly with increasing demand for personalized training. Hence, it’s the right moment to launch your sports coaching platform. You need to discover an underserved niche and determine profitable revenue streams to grow your coaching business.

Secondly, leverage an all-in-one ready-made script with all essential features to quickly build a website like CoachUp. You can reach your unique platform goals and establish your brand in the industry!

FAQ-Related to How to Build a Website Like CoachUp

1. What is the alternative to CoachUp?

Thumbtack, CoachList, TrainingPeaks, CoachNow are some popular alternatives to CoachUp. 

2. What is the business model of CoachUp

CoachUp primarily operates on a commission model, which charges a service fee for every coaching session. The rates are set based on the number of sessions delivered. More earnings per session as your sessions increase over time.

3. How to promote a website like CoachUp?

Social media marketing, influencer marketing, referral programs, SEO optimization, and networking are some ways to market a website like CoachUp.

4. How to create your sports coaching website?

Follow these steps for building a website like CoachUp:

• Step # 1: Find a profitable sports coaching niche
• Step # 2: Research your market & perform competitor analysis
• Step # 3: Choose a robust business model
• Step # 4: Decide the essential platform features
• Step # 5: Choose the right development approach
• Step # 6: Onboarding coaches to your platform
• Step # 7: Promote your coaching platform