I train at a local academy. Every week, I watched the same problems play out: students walking in and asking “what’s on next?”, parents hovering in the lobby unsure if their kid’s class had started, and staff constantly fielding questions that a single screen on the wall could answer.
As a software engineer, I couldn’t help myself — I started looking for a solution. I checked every digital signage product on the market. ScreenCloud, OptiSigns, Yodeck — they’re all general-purpose tools designed for restaurants, retail stores, and corporate lobbies. They’ll let you upload a PowerPoint or design a slide in Canva. But none of them understand what a training academy actually needs.
A training academy doesn’t need a blank canvas. It needs a display that knows what class is happening right now, what’s coming next, and who deserves recognition this week — all updating automatically without anyone touching it.
So I built GymBoard.
What GymBoard Actually Does
GymBoard is purpose-built digital signage for training academies and schools. You plug a Fire TV Stick into any TV, pair it with a 6-digit code, and your schedule is live. No design work. No weekly slide updates. No Raspberry Pi hidden behind the TV.
Here’s what makes it different from generic signage:
Automatic Class Schedules
You enter your timetable once. The display knows what day it is, what time it is, and shows the right classes automatically. When a class is in session, it highlights with a “Currently Training” label. When the next class is 30 minutes away, students can see it coming.
This sounds simple, but it’s the feature that generic signage tools completely lack. With ScreenCloud or OptiSigns, you’d need to manually build schedule graphics for every day of the week, or connect a Google Sheet and hope the formatting doesn’t break.
Announcements That Rotate Themselves
Academy owners have things to say: belt testing dates, holiday closures, seminar announcements, membership promotions. In GymBoard, you type the announcement, optionally set a date range, and it enters the carousel. Expired announcements disappear automatically.
No more outdated flyers on the wall. No more “wait, that seminar was last month” moments.
Member Recognition
This is the feature academy owners love most. When a student earns a promotion, hits a milestone, or has a birthday, you can add a shoutout that appears between announcements on the TV. It’s a small thing that makes a massive difference for retention and community.
Recognition categories include level-ups, achievements, milestones, birthdays, and general spotlights. Each one gets a dedicated slide with the member’s name displayed on the big screen for everyone to see.
Multi-Location Support
Many academies grow to multiple locations. GymBoard handles this natively — one account, multiple gyms, each with their own schedule, announcements, and displays. Add a new location and it gets its own board instantly.
Battle-Tested at a Real Academy
GymBoard wasn’t built in a vacuum. I developed and tested it at Ultimate Martial Arts, a busy training academy running dozens of classes per week across multiple rooms. Every feature was validated against real operational needs — not hypothetical use cases.
The lobby TV at Ultimate Martial Arts runs GymBoard every hour the academy is open. Parents check it when they walk in. Students glance at it between classes. Staff stopped answering “what’s on next?” within the first week of it going up.
Having a live testbed shaped critical decisions: the 30-minute polling interval (because real-time wasn’t worth the cost at scale), the auto-recovery from network drops (because academy Wi-Fi is never perfect), and the “set and forget” philosophy (because the owner is busy teaching, not managing screens).
The Technical Decisions
Building this was equal parts product design and technical architecture. Here’s what went into it.
Why Firebase
GymBoard runs on Firebase (Firestore, Cloud Functions, Hosting, Authentication). For a multi-tenant SaaS where every customer needs real-time updates on their TV displays, Firebase’s real-time database listeners are genuinely the right tool. When an owner adds a class from their phone, the TV updates within minutes. No webhooks, no cron jobs needed.
The security rules system also maps perfectly to multi-tenant access control. Each gym’s data is siloed, and the rules enforce that owners can only read and write their own data.
Why Google TV
Early on, I considered Raspberry Pi (what Yodeck uses), Chromecast, and dedicated Android tablets. Google TV won — both as streaming sticks and as the OS built into many affordable 4K displays.
- Cost: A Chromecast with Google TV is $30, or spend $0 extra — many budget 4K TVs from TCL, Hisense, and others ship with Google TV built in. Your academy might already have the hardware.
- Reliability: Consumer devices designed to run 24/7 on a TV. No SD card corruption, no thermal throttling, no separate box to hide behind the mount.
- Availability: Any electronics store, any budget. No waiting for Raspberry Pi stock or sourcing specialty hardware.
- Familiarity: Most people already have a Google TV device at home. Zero learning curve for installation.
The display app is a web application that runs in the device’s browser. Full-screen, auto-starting, always on. The pairing flow takes under 60 seconds — and if your TV already runs Google TV, there’s nothing to plug in at all.
The Polling vs. Real-Time Trade-Off
Here’s an interesting architectural decision. The TV display could use Firestore’s real-time listeners — which would mean instant updates whenever data changes. But Firestore charges per document read, and a real-time listener on a busy gym could generate thousands of reads per day per display.
Instead, I built a snapshot system. A Cloud Function compiles everything a display needs (schedule, announcements, shoutouts) into a single document. The display polls this snapshot every 30 minutes. The result: roughly 48 reads per day per display instead of potentially thousands. At scale across hundreds of academies, this saves real money.
The snapshot rebuilds automatically via Firestore triggers whenever underlying data changes. So updates still propagate — they just batch into a single document rather than the display listening to five separate collections.
Authentication Without Accounts
TV displays don’t have keyboards. You can’t ask someone to log in on their Fire TV Stick. So the pairing flow works differently:
- The TV shows a 6-digit code
- The owner enters that code in their admin dashboard
- A Cloud Function generates a custom auth token tied to that specific device
- The TV authenticates silently and starts receiving data
The device’s unique ID gets stored in the gym’s device list, and security rules validate that only authorized devices can read that gym’s display data. Simple, secure, no credentials exposed.
What I Learned Building a SaaS for Training Academies
Academy Owners Are Not Technical
This sounds obvious, but it shaped every product decision. The admin dashboard had to be dead simple. No drag-and-drop layout builders. No template galleries. No “design your screen” workflows.
You enter classes. You write announcements. You recognize members. GymBoard handles the rest.
“Set and Forget” Is the Killer Feature
The biggest compliment from academy owners is: “I forgot it was even running.” That means it’s working. The schedule updates itself daily. Announcements expire on their own. The display recovers from network drops automatically.
Generic signage tools need constant feeding — new slides, updated content, design refreshes. Academy owners are busy teaching classes, not managing digital signage content. The product had to respect that.
Every Academy Calls Things Differently
One school calls them “classes.” Another calls them “sessions.” A CrossFit box calls them “WODs.” A yoga studio has “practices.” A dance school has “lessons.”
GymBoard lets each location customize the label that appears on their display. Small detail, big impact on whether it feels like their board or some generic software.
Pricing Has to Be Simple
I charge $40/month flat. Unlimited displays, unlimited classes, unlimited announcements. One additional fee only kicks in if you add more locations.
Training academy owners — especially small ones — hate per-screen pricing. When ScreenCloud charges $20/screen/month and you have three TVs (lobby, training floor, back room), you’re suddenly at $60/month for basic signage. GymBoard’s model means you can put it on every TV in your building without watching the bill.
The Road Ahead
I’m actively building GymBoard based on feedback from real academy owners. Current areas of focus:
- Event scheduling: Special events, seminars, and workshops that override the normal timetable
- Display theming: Color and layout options so each academy’s board matches their branding
- Health monitoring: Alerts when a display hasn’t checked in, so you know if a TV went offline before your members notice
If you run a training academy, school, or studio and your current “signage solution” is a printed schedule taped to the wall (or a generic tool that’s more work than it’s worth), try GymBoard free.
Wes Crockett is a software engineer and the founder of GymBoard, digital signage built for training academies. You can reach him at [email protected].
