How Afitpilot Became Real — And Why I Still Don’t Have All the Answers

I didn’t start Afitpilot because I had a great idea in a coffee shop. I started it because everything else had fallen apart.

In February 2024, I got laid off. I’d been giving that job everything — showing up two hours early, staying an hour late, making sure they knew I was committed. Nine months in, they restructured and cut the juniors and the least performers. I was in that group. That hit differently than I expected. It wasn’t just a job. It was the question underneath it: what am I actually good at, if showing up isn’t enough?

I didn’t have a Plan B. So I started looking for one.

I recruited three interns and built Akwanza — a creative web project rooted in African culture, selling pendants, clothes, coloring books. I designed things, sourced products from Alibaba, sold coloring books at the CrossFit box where I coached. Alongside that, I built a small RPE monitoring tool for athletes — a touchpad with ten emoji faces mapped to an effort scale, so coaches could track perceived exertion across sessions and spot patterns before injuries happened. Check it out here, password: 123.

I was doing a lot. But I was also lost.

I turned 30 in August 2024. My dad and stepmother told me I needed to find my own place. That same year, on Christmas, I got a phone call from my best friend Paul’s flatmate. He told me to sit down first. Paul had died of a heart attack.

I couldn’t speak properly for weeks. My voice went quiet in a way I didn’t know how to explain.

In January, I was staying with my sister in the UK, waiting to hear about the funeral arrangements. She sat me down and asked me — gently but directly — how many people were already selling African-inspired clothes online. I didn’t have a good answer. She pushed: what’s actually scalable here? I didn’t have an answer for that either. Akwanza was a creative project. It was personal. It wasn’t a business.

In March 2024, I flew to Nigeria to bury Paul.

When I got back, I had a meeting with Actiris — the Brussels employment office — to report on my job search progress. I told the advisor the truth: I wasn’t looking for another job. I was done with that path. She didn’t push back. Instead she mentioned a programme called We Are Founders, run out of BeCentral in Brussels, backed by Google, Bruxelles Formation, and BeAngels. She thought I should apply.

By that point I’d already been testing AI for months — building prototypes, running scenarios, thinking about what it would look like to replace the patchwork of spreadsheets and intuition that most serious athletes use to manage training across multiple sports. The idea for Afitpilot had been taking shape through all of it — through the RPE tool, through coaching Jacob through his powerlifting meets, through my own experience training across disciplines and never finding a tool that actually thought the way a hybrid athlete thinks.

The We Are Founders application opened in May. Around 170 people applied. 70 were invited to pitch in front of a jury at BeCentral. I spent a full week preparing — market research, business models, competitive landscape. I pitched. I got in.

The programme runs September to June across three phases: Build, Grow, Scale. I came in already ahead of Phase 1 in some ways — I had a prototype, I’d done the research. But at the end-of-phase pitch, a coach stopped me mid-presentation.

“Something’s not right here. Who exactly are you targeting?”

I said hybrid athletes. Serious athletes. Athletes who don’t want to be put in a box. It didn’t land. Not with the coach, not with the room.

I passed Phase 1 because the MVP existed and worked. But that question has followed me into Phase 2, which is supposed to be about marketing, publishing, growth. And honestly? I’m still working out what I’m marketing and to whom. I’ve had people sign up with completely different profiles — rugby players, kinesiologists, CrossFitters, endurance athletes — and none of them have stayed in the way I hoped. Is that an audience problem? A UX problem? A program quality problem? I don’t fully know yet.

What I do know is that this is what building actually looks like. It’s not a clean narrative of idea to launch to growth. It’s sitting inside hard questions and refusing to paper over them with the wrong answer just because you need content to post.

I’m in Phase 2 of We Are Founders. I’m inside a programme that has pushed me to think more rigorously than I would alone, surrounded by other founders who are doing the same thing. Afitpilot is real — the product exists, people are using it, and the problem it’s solving is real. The path to the right people is what I’m still finding.

More honest updates as I find them.

— Walter