Melt Studio helps built FitAds — a fitness rewards platform that turns local businesses' ad budgets into rewards for people who show up and train — as a working MVP with four user roles and QR check-in in four weeks, as part of its pro-bono prototype program, giving founder Bryan Nelson a product ready for his pilot and his first investor conversations.

FitAds: a fitness rewards app where local sponsors pay for real workouts

Bryan Nelson founded FitAds around a simple trade: instead of paying for flyers, local businesses sponsor fitness events, and the people who attend and complete them earn points they can redeem at those businesses. Trainers host the events, participants show up and train, and the venue owners who sponsor them get visibility with an active, local audience.

The challenge: an idea with interested users, but no platform to test it

Fitness instructors and runners interested in being part of the first pilot. An AI app generator had helped him sketch the concept, but turning it into something that worked was a different job, and he didn't have the technical team or the funding to make it happen. Without a working product, he couldn't run the pilot or show the idea to investors and partners.

The solution: a multi-role MVP built around the attendance-to-rewards loop

The question at this stage was whether the core loop works: people attend, check in, earn points, and sponsors see the result. So we built that loop and the roles it needs:

• Four user roles with their own access: Super Admin, Trainer, Participant, and Venue Owner, each with a role-based dashboard.

• QR codes for joining a venue and checking in to an event, so attendance is recorded at the moment it happens.

• Points tracking and a leaderboard, the rewards side of the loop.

• Venue, workspace, and user management for the team running the pilot.

A deployed staging environment on Vercel, so Bryan could test every role himself before launch.

How a dedicated team built the fitness rewards MVP in four weeks

Two developers and a project manager, with technical support, working in weekly demos with Bryan. Each feature started as a short RFC that he reviewed before development, so the roles and workflows were agreed on before code was written, and every workflow was reviewed before it shipped.

H2: Results: a working MVP with four roles, live QR check-in, and investor meetings on the calendar

A deployed MVP with all four roles live and testable:

• The core loop proven: venue joining and event check-in by QR, with points tracked per participant.

• A product ready for pilot testing with Bryan's first trainers and participants.

Investor conversations scheduled for February 2026, with a working product to show.

"It was a dark room. And you all provided the light." — Bryan Nelson, Founder, FitAds

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