Tim Dettmann sometimes still feels like playing on a badminton court, he says. Eyes on the badminton, dancing, swinging for the next smash, only the sound of the game – a full whipping – in the ear. The difference is that Dettmann no longer trains as a professional athlete for the German championship and participation in the Olympics. Today the Berliner is entering a different competition: with his sports app Beat 81 he wants to become the world market leader for fitness workouts. More than 70,000 hobby athletes are currently actively using Dettmann’s app by regularly going to circuit training sessions in the park with others or chasing their heart rate to the maximum indoors while cycling in a dark club atmosphere. Ultimately, that’s the idea behind the name “Beat 81”: Bringing your own heart rate to the limit and entering a learning mode at more than 80 percent of the stress limit in which the body improves its fitness and burns a lot of calories.
The ambition that drives the founder has been the same for over 20 years. “Striving for success has been in me since my professional career. I often don’t know why, but it will stay that way.” Dettmann used to be 15th in the international men’s world rankings and won several bronze and silver medals, including one gold at the German Badminton Championships. Eleven years ago, when he was 29, he ended his sports career: “You just noticed that you don’t stand a chance of winning an Olympic title against a Chinese who are ten years younger than you – they kicked us in the butt,” says Dettmann and laughs . The Berliner does not mince his words, but says what he thinks.
Without founder fuss and drivel
The 40-year-old also transfers his honest sportsman mentality, to knowing clearly where his own strengths and limits lie, into everyday business life – in the Berlin startup scene he gets along without founder fuss and drivel. Over the years, he gradually developed the idea of exercising outside with like-minded people and building what he calls an “anti-metaverse”. Because Dettmann didn’t always have a fitness startup in mind.