Interviewing Stepan from Wyder.io: building Belgium's social coaching app

Great conversation with Stepan Krivosheev, CEO and co-founder of Wyder, the Leuven-born endurance app betting that training should be social and personal at the same time. 🏃We dig into the origin story, what makes Wyder the "first social coaching app," and how the three first-time founders went full-time just three months ago. Stepan walks us through the marketplace model for finding training partners at your pace, the new AI coach (€14/month, self-hosted on AWS Bedrock for GDPR reasons), and the brutal reality of integrating with Garmin, Coros, Polar and Suunto. We also get into their city-by-city growth playbook (1,400 users in Leuven, now with the move to Antwerp), why micro-influencers care more about brand alignment than money, the willingness-to-pay puzzle among triathletes, and the structural challenge of raising B2C money from European VCs. Plus a fully bootstrapped status update, fresh VLAIO grant in hand, and what the next twelve months and ~30 target cities look like.🙋‍♂️ Guest: Stepan Krivosheev, CEO & Co-founder, Wyder (Leuven, Belgium)🔗 Website: https://wyder.io📩 Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stepan-krivosheev/📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wyder.app/🎵 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wyderapp(00:00) - Who Wyder is + meet Stepan (01:46) - Origin story: from Ironman burnout to a founding team (06:50) - What makes Wyder stand out + the ideal athlete (10:00) - How it works: the workout marketplace (14:18) - Cracking the cold start: 1,400 users, Leuven to Antwerp (21:40) - Monetization: the €14 AI coach + the B2B lever (25:27) - Wearables, Garmin's gatekeeping & the data battle (29:05) - Inside the AI coach: structured vs free-form plans (38:04) - GDPR, the AI Act & self-hosting the models (40:08) - Bootstrapped, a VLAIO grant & why EU VCs avoid B2C (47:45) - The next 12 months + where to find Wyder