Built a fitness asset library for other devs
Spent 3 months shooting 81 exercises in a real gym so other fitness devs could skip it.
I built Fitness Visuals after watching three different fitness-app founders hit the same blocker: they couldn't launch because they didn't have exercise content, or they launched just to receive negative feedback due to lack of images/videos which led to lots of uninstalls .
The options were all bad:
• Shoot your own library: 6–12 months, $20k–$100k+
• License stock: bad angles, one vendor asked for $18k/year (lol), inconsistent videos, commercial licensing is murky.
• Scrape YouTube: don't
I went deep on option 1 and turned it into a product. The one time license fee gets you 81 exercises (324 HD images + 81 videos), JSON metadata, a Rive muscle heatmap, and a single-app commercial license with free updates. Price goes up as the pack grows.
What I learned running the shoots:
Form consistency across angles is brutal. Had to reshoot ~40% of the first batch.
Commercial gym lighting is terrible. I had to spent a lot of time learning how to edit videos.
The metadata was a separate rabbit hole.
Site: fitnessvisuals.com — free CSV of the exercise list on the pricing page.
If you're building a fitness app, I'd love to hear what's blocking your launch.