Built by a coach.

Why Stratum exists.

Coalition STL

Coalition STL.

I’ve been coaching for ten years. Coalition STL is the in-person gym in St. Louis where most of that work happens — athletes ranging from intermediate competitors to advanced lifters running 2000-pound totals, sport athletes preparing for seasons, and serious lifters running hypertrophy blocks. The remote coaching practice grew out of the in-person work, and the spreadsheet tooling I built for myself stopped scaling around the time I had a dozen remote athletes.

Programming for one athlete is easy. Programming for thirty athletes across different modalities, tracking their volume against landmarks, calibrating their readiness scores against their actual performance, building blocks that respond to how each one is recovering — becomes a full-time data problem on top of a full-time coaching problem.

I built Stratum because I needed it.

The platform

Why a new platform.

Existing coaching apps fall into two categories. Generic fitness platforms (TrainHeroic, TrueCoach) that work for general training but don’t understand the technical demands of any specific modality. Spreadsheet-as-an-app tools that move spreadsheets to a web interface without solving the underlying complexity.

What was missing was a platform that took serious training seriously as a discipline. That understood Adaptive Load isn’t the same as tonnage. That tracked per-athlete calibration instead of treating every athlete identically. That handled powerlifting work and S&C programming and hypertrophy structures with appropriate methodology for each. That surfaced programming decisions to coaches instead of just storing data for them.

Stratum is that platform. Built in close collaboration with the athletes who train at Coalition STL. Refined against real coaching cases — what works, what doesn’t, what coaches actually need surfaced and what’s noise.

The web platform is live now. iOS launches in August. Roadmap continues from there.

Solo founder

About the build.

Stratum is a solo founder operation right now. I do the coaching, the programming methodology, and the product direction. Engineering happens with AI-assisted development tooling that’s gotten genuinely capable over the last two years. The platform ships fast because the team is small and the customer (me, and the athletes I work with) is one room away.

That changes over time. Once the August launch validates the model and the customer base grows, there will be a real team. For now, you’re working with the founder directly. That’s a feature, not a limitation.