The fitness world is full of noise. But while most brands sell “plans,” Grace Beverley built a movement.
Back in 2016, Grace was part of an online fitness culture that glorified exhaustion where working out till you fainted and chasing thinness were seen as achievements. She wanted to change that.
So she started selling PDF workout guides to her followers. She had no investors or a massive team, she started from her dorm at Oxford.
Fast forward to today, those guides evolved into Shreddy: a creator-led and challenge-based fitness community with hundreds of thousands of active users, millions of downloads, and an estimated $1.8 million in annual revenue.
Shreddy didn’t just sell workouts. It redefined what fitness could feel like: collective, empowering, and human. Let’s break down how they did it and what you can steal for your own brand.
Make Fitness Collective, Not Competitive
Grace’s insight was simple: most women don’t need another gym plan. They need accountability. They need belonging.
So she built Shreddy as a space where women could train together, share progress, and celebrate milestones. She wanted to leave the “fitspo” trend behind, and create a space that was friendly, inclusive and supportive.
And it worked.
Members weren’t customers, they were part of a “Shreddy family.” The brand gave shoutouts to the people that shared their journey, created special community hashtags and group chats within the app. The brand’s Instagram didn’t feature elite athletes, it featured the users. Every post was built to show that they belong there.
And that feeling became Shreddy’s biggest retention tool.
The Strategy: Build Rituals, Not Campaigns
Their success didn’t come from one viral campaign, here’s how Shreddy turned that vision into a scalable community system.
“[Shreddy] has been running fitness challenges for over 8 years and these fitness challenges have been designed to actually change your life… […]… by building consistent habits that are doable and can fit into your routine, designed for people with full time jobs, by people with full time jobs.” – Grace Beverley on tiktok
If you want loyalty, you need rhythm: people want to know what to expect. Grace and her team turned a simple fitness idea into a repeatable engine of engagement by designing a rhythm: challenges, rituals, and roles that kept members active long after sign-up.
Everything about the brand, from content to communication, was built to make people feel seen, supported, and accountable.
Here’s how they did it:
Recurring challenges create built-in engagement
Every quarter, Shreddy launches a new community challenge, four a year, every year. Think of them as fitness festivals, people always know they are coming, they are just waiting for the headline of prizes.
Current members can join the challenge in the app with one click, new members get drawn by the challenge FOMO and they all start tracking progress together.
That rhythm, four distinct moments of community activation, creates predictable engagement spikes and organic word of mouth.
Why it works:
- Shared timelines create accountability.
- Hashtags like #Shreddy70 or #Shreddy30 build social proof.
- Each challenge brings inactive members back.
- Seasonal themes and prizes keep motivation high, from New Year resets to summer prep and winter arcs.
In other words, it’s not just a workout, it’s a team movement.
Weekly Mini-Challenges Keep the Energy High
During the challenge, Shreddy adds an extra layer of motivation: weekly mini-challenges.
These smaller, themed goals, like “hydrate every day this week” or “get those 10K steps in” give members extra chances to win prizes and stay engaged throughout the challenge. They spark friendly competition, encourage members to post updates, and flood the community feed with authentic progress photos and stories.
“It’s small meaningful changes that actually make a difference” – Grace Beverley on tiktok
The result? Continuous participation, more user-generated content, and a steady pulse of excitement that keeps the main challenge alive from start to finish.
Official Challengers Turn Members Into Motivators
In 2025, Shreddy introduced a game-changer: Official Challengers.
These are not influencers or trainers. They’re users, women who’ve already completed previous challenges and now act as peer motivators. They post their own updates, welcome newcomers, and offer real-time encouragement inside the community. And as a bonus, they get invited to special events and get special merch.
It’s powerful because:
- It decentralizes support: help comes from peers, not just staff.
- It gives role models that feel attainable.
- It turns retention into advocacy.
When you see someone like you winning, you don’t just join, you stay. And who knows, you might become a challenger during the next challenge, and get some cool freebies.
Inclusive Representation Builds Identification
From day one, Shreddy understood that representation drives loyalty.
The brand’s visuals show real diversity in ethnicity, in lifestyle, in fitness levels, giving new members the confidence to join. Instead of perfection, Shreddy celebrates progress. Winners are not the ones with the biggest physical transformation, but the ones with consistency, and also mindset wins.
That inclusivity extends to tone. The brand speaks like a friend, not a coach. It encourages micro-wins: showing up, staying consistent, celebrating effort. This relatability makes every post and program feel accessible and every challenge feels like a team goal.
A Connected Ecosystem Reinforces Loyalty
Once the digital community was strong, Shreddy expanded strategically, but never randomly.
Everything connects back to that same mission: empowering women through fitness and wellness.
- The Shreddy App → Personalized fitness & nutrition
- Shreddy Equipment → Bands and dumbbells designed for home workouts
- Supplements → Supergreens, Superskin, Supersnooze
- Brand Collabs → Partnerships with sister brands TALA (sustainable activewear) and TPM (productivity tools)
Each product deepens engagement with the brand. That’s how you turn customers into community members, and community members into lifelong advocates.
Retention, Reach, and Real Growth
This combination of structure and authenticity explains why retention is so high. While Shreddy’s official numbers aren’t public, the impact speaks for itself:
📊 Key Stats
- Hundreds of thousands of active users in the Shreddy App
- ~$1.8 million annual revenue (source)
- 4 community challenges per year driving consistent reactivation
- High cross-brand retention across Shreddy, TALA, and TPM
Shreddy’s creator-led community model continues to grow through challenge-based engagement, showing how sustainable community loops outperform one-off marketing pushes.
But here’s the real achievement: Shreddy doesn’t just keep people working out, it keeps them believing in their progress. That emotional connection fuels repeat participation and long-term brand love. When your members start motivating each other, the ads stop doing the heavy lifting.
What You Can Learn from Shreddy
Here’s the playbook for any solopreneur-led brand that wants to build this kind of momentum:
- Build around belonging. A mission people believe in will outlast any marketing trend.
- Create engagement loops. Recurring challenges or seasonal events make communities self-sustaining.
- Empower your members. Promote loyal users into mentors or motivators, it builds pride and ownership.
- Lead with representation. People join when they see themselves reflected.
- Grow horizontally, not randomly. Every new product should serve your core mission.
Community-led growth isn’t just a marketing tactic. It’s the future of brand building. This is what a community-based business looks like: one powered by shared purpose and participation.
Apply this strategy to your business
Challenges aren’t just fun, they’re one of the most profitable formats.
Why? Because they convert better.
They break big goals into bite-sized actions, giving members quick wins and a sense of progress every step of the way. It’s gamification with a purpose, turning intention into consistency and consistency into results. And for creators, it’s one of the easiest ways to monetize your audience authentically while delivering real value.
And that’s exactly how Grace Beverley started. Before Shreddy became a full-scale brand, she sold her first workout guides as simple PDFs. No app. No complex tech stack. Just a digital product that helped people achieve a goal.
You can start the same way. With Nas.io, you can sell your digital products, create a short challenge, and start building your online community around it, even if you’re not starting with thousands of followers.
The difference? Nas.io gives you the tools to do what took Grace years to build: host and manage challenge-based programs, automate progress tracking and reward systems, sell digital guides, templates, or courses, keep members engaged with in-app updates and analytics, and most importantly, find your customers, even if you’re just getting started.
Because while Grace began with an audience, you don’t need one. You just need a goal worth sharing, and a challenge that helps others achieve it while growing your brand online.
That’s the power of community-led growth and it’s exactly what Nas.io helps creators build every day.
