Mr High (31), an IT professional-turned-personal trainer, is the co-founder of health app ONI, which helps personal trainers provide personalised training for clients without their physical presence.
After the transplant, which was due to a genetic disorder, health and fitness became much more important for the Dunedin man, who began going to the gym. Eventually, that landed him a personal trainer role and he joined ONI co-founder Laurent Pang, a former chef who runs a fitness studio in Wellington, in 2019.
While the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic caused hardship for many businesses, Mr High and Mr Pang saw it as an opportunity, developing the ONI app to replace traditional spreadsheet-based workout plans.
Mr High moved to Dunedin to work on the app, inspired by the tech start-up scene in the city.
ONI is now part of Startup Dunedin’s incubator programme.
The app, which launched its complete service late last year, has about 50-60 trainers on the platform. It hopes to have about 300 trainers by the end of this year. Once that milestone is reached, the technology team will be expanded.
The focus initially was on the domestic market, with a plan to launch internationally at a later date. However, trainers registered on the platform began to take on global clients, including in Australia and the US.
Mr High said it took him two years to develop the application. Videos and other personalised experiences were incorporated into the app for clients to access, allowing for an ease of learning that traditional spreadsheets often lacked, he said.
