How Emily Fulcher runs AilikiFIT on Coachful
How Emily Fulcher runs AilikiFIT on Coachful
Emily Fulcher coaches beginners. Her business is called AilikiFIT, her website says "Fitness Coaching for Beginners" at the top of the browser tab, and the first line a visitor reads on her homepage is "You don't have to already be an athlete to become one." She works with women who are somewhere on the scale her own site describes, from "I've never run a 5K" to "I'm chasing Ironman dreams", and she calls the group around her the Ohana.
On her site she introduces herself as Em and explains the name: "Ailiki means 'Irish' in Hawaiian." She describes herself as "Irish by blood, Hawaiian by heart…", lists a B.S. in Kinesiology from Texas A&M, an 80/20 endurance coaching certification and an ACE personal training qualification, and says she came back to training after what she calls a heart health setback. Her method is published on the same page as a split she names in two halves: "80% Hawaiian Chill" for easy aerobic work and "20% Irish Determination" for the strategic hard efforts.
In May 2026 she left a review on Coachful's Trustpilot page with the headline "It's the coaching platform I always wanted, it just didn't exist yet". The review is the reason this article exists, because it is one of the clearest descriptions we have seen of the thing most coaches are actually paying for: five separate products, five bills, and a client who has to remember which one to open.
This story is drawn from Emily Fulcher's public review on Trustpilot and from what she says on her own site; we have not added anything she did not say herself. Where we explain a Coachful feature she names, we are explaining what the feature is and what it looks like in our demo account, not describing her setup, her client numbers or her revenue. Those are hers and they are not in either source.
What Emily was running before Coachful
The review opens with the stack, and it is worth reading slowly:
"Like every business owner, I was paying for 5+ different platforms and it still wasn't what I really wanted. Website hosting, a digital product shop, a community app, Zoom, and the coaching programs I was creating somewhere else."
Count them. A website host. A shop for digital products. A community app. Zoom. And a fifth place, unnamed, where the coaching programmes were actually built. Five subscriptions, five logins, and none of them aware of the others. The website did not know who had bought. The shop did not know who was in the community. The community did not know who was on the programme.
Then the sentence that most coaches will recognise before they have finished reading it:
"My tech stack was losing me clients."
Emily Fulcher, Founder, AilikiFIT, Trustpilot, May 2026
She is specific about why. "I was growing too quickly and my user experience was 3 different apps." The stack was failing the person who had just paid, opened an email, and found themselves asked to make a second account somewhere else. Growth made it worse rather than better, which is the opposite of how tooling should behave.
The last piece of arithmetic in the review is the one people quote back to us:
"I already saved $1300 by cancelling everything else that I tech duct-taped together."
Emily Fulcher, Founder, AilikiFIT, Trustpilot, May 2026
That is her figure for her old stack and we are not going to extrapolate from it. What it does show is the shape of the problem: the money was not going to one expensive thing, it was going to five reasonable-looking things that each felt fine on their own.
The rest of this article takes the five items on her list one at a time. The screenshots come from the Coachful demo account, so every name, client count and dollar figure on screen is demonstration data.
Website hosting, and the funnels attached to it
First on her list is website hosting. In Coachful, that is the website builder, and it is part of the same subscription as everything else rather than a separate bill.
The builder works in pages. You get a home page and you add subpages, each made of sections you can turn on and off: a hero, the problems your clients recognise, your method, case studies, an FAQ, a coach bio, a footer. There is a blog on the same domain, a newsletter block, and a contact form. You can point a custom domain at it, so the site lives on your own address and not on a platform subdomain with your name after a slash.
Sitting next to the website is the part that a plain host cannot do. Funnels are standalone pages with one job each: give away a free thing, take a booking, sell one programme, collect a lead at an event. They live on the same domain as the website, and the person who fills one in arrives in your client list rather than in a spreadsheet you export later.
This is the ordinary shape of it for a fitness or endurance coach. The website carries the method and the proof, and a funnel carries the free entry point, usually a short challenge or starter week that costs nothing and asks for an email. On her own site, Emily's navigation offers a free week, a page for an event she attends, and a book-a-call page, which is exactly that pattern: one site, several doors, all on the same address.
Worth knowing honestly: this is a website builder for coaches, not a general-purpose design tool. You arrange sections that already exist. If you want a bespoke layout built from scratch, the section model will feel restrictive and a dedicated site builder is the better answer. If you want a good site live this week that is wired to your booking, your programmes and your payments, this is the trade worth making.
A digital product shop, without a second checkout
Second on her list is a digital product shop. In Coachful, selling is not a separate storefront. Everything you make is sellable where it already lives.
A programme can be sold. A course can be sold. A library of resources, a downloadable plan, an audio session, a one-off strategy call, a membership, a bundle of several things at a lower combined price. Each one gets a price, a currency and a billing interval, and clients browse them on a Discover page inside their own app.
Payments run through Stripe Connect, or Razorpay where Stripe is not available. The money lands in the coach's own account. Coachful takes 0 percent of it, on every plan, which means the platform bill is the platform bill and the processor's percentage is the only other cost of getting paid. Invoices, receipts and subscription status all sit in the same Payments tab.
The general pattern for a coach in this niche is a ladder rather than a single product. Something free at the bottom that proves the method works, a membership in the middle that carries the training and the group, and one-to-one coaching at the top for the people who want a plan built around their own race. Emily's site lists three ways to work with her, a free membership, a premium all-access membership and one-to-one coaching, which is that ladder in public. What the platform contributes is that all three are the same catalogue, sold at the same checkout, to people who already have an account.
More on this side of the product is on the digital products page.
A community app, replaced by squads and a feed
Third on her list is a community app. This is the item that usually costs the most to run separately, because a community tool charges by member and the members are the same people already paying you somewhere else.
In Coachful, groups are attached to programmes rather than floating on their own. Enrol a client in a group programme and a cohort squad is created for that intake, with the group chat already in place before the first person posts. There is also a wider community feed for the whole practice, where announcements, wins and questions sit in one stream with comments and reactions.
For an endurance or fitness coach, the group is usually doing the heaviest work in the business. Emily's site describes the Ohana as virtual rides, strength sessions, check-ins and local group runs in Dallas, with the community running nationally so that people outside the city get the same thing remotely. One of the athlete testimonials published on her site puts the tooling part plainly: "The team app and resources were invaluable."
The general version of that is simple. People do not keep training because the plan is clever. They keep training because a named group notices when they do not show up. A community feature earns its place when it makes that noticing automatic rather than something the coach has to do by hand every Monday morning.
The coaching programmes that used to be built somewhere else
Fourth on her list, and the one she phrases most pointedly: "the coaching programs I was creating somewhere else". The programme is the product. Building it in a tool that has no idea who bought it is the part of the old stack that hurts most.
A Coachful programme is your method written as weeks. Each week carries goals. Each day carries tasks. Habits run alongside on their own streak, and morning or evening check-ins collect how the person is actually doing. A programme can be one-to-one or group, and the library shows each one as a card with its format and how many clients are currently on it.
The client sees the same thing from the other side, as a week they are in rather than a folder they have to navigate. Their page shows which week of the programme they are on, what percentage of it is behind them, and the single next thing to do.
Habits are tracked separately from tasks, because the two behave differently. A task is done or not done on a day. A habit is a count against a target, and the number is the point.
Here is where a fitness coach should be careful, and where we would rather be honest than enthusiastic. Coachful structures a programme as goals, tasks, habits and check-ins. It is not a periodised training builder. It does not write intervals by pace or heart-rate zone and push the session to a watch. Emily's own site describes heart zone testing and structured workouts sent directly to an athlete's watch as part of her one-to-one coaching, which is work that belongs to a training platform. A coach doing that kind of prescription keeps the training platform and uses Coachful for everything the training platform has never handled: the sale, the group, the check-ins, the accountability, the client record and the calendar.
If you want the fuller picture of where the line falls for this niche, the page for fitness coaches says the same thing at more length.
Zoom, and the calls around it
Fifth on her list is Zoom, which is the cheapest item on the stack and still one of the most annoying, because the video link is never the actual problem. The problem is the booking, the reminder, the rescheduling, the no-show, and the client who cannot find the link ten minutes before the call.
Coachful has booking built in, with two-way calendar sync to Google, Apple and Outlook, so a busy afternoon in your personal calendar closes the slot on your booking page. Sessions can use Coachful's own video, or carry a Zoom, Meet or Teams link if you would rather keep the tool your clients already know. Intake calls are tracked separately from client sessions, with their own conversion view, and agreements can be sent and signed electronically before a package starts.
The client's version is a single page that answers the only question they have, which is what is next and what do I need to do before it.
A group coach usually has two kinds of call and both fit here: the scheduled group sessions a whole cohort attends, and the one-to-one calls a member books into an open slot. Both land on the same calendar, sync out to your phone, and count as sessions delivered in your own numbers rather than in Zoom's.
One dashboard, and one login
Everything above is the list. This is the sentence that follows it:
"I have 1 dashboard for everything."
Emily Fulcher, Founder, AilikiFIT, Trustpilot, May 2026
And she closes the review on the same note: "And, I only have 1 login!"
The coach home page is a briefing rather than a menu. While you are setting up it carries a wizard with the steps you have left, and once that is finished it drops away. Underneath is your client list with a completion percentage against each name and a one-word status: thriving, active, quiet or at risk. The status is not a label you assign. It comes from whether the person has been doing their tasks and check-ins, which means the client who has gone quiet appears on this page before they appear as a cancelled session.
The Clients page is the one you open before a call. Above the grid of names is an insights row for the whole practice: task completion, check-in rate, average mood, goals near finish, and a flag for anyone who needs attention. The numbers on screen are demonstration figures. The useful part is that they exist at practice level, so you find out the whole roster is drifting in one glance instead of one person at a time.
Two more things live behind the same login and are worth naming, because coaches usually find them after they have already moved in. Email is built in, so lists, broadcasts and sequences go out from the platform that knows who bought what. And Michelle, the AI assistant, works from your own practice data rather than from a blank prompt box, so asking who has gone quiet this week is a question about your clients and not a general one.
What she says about the team
Two of the sentences in the review are not about software at all.
"Nour, the software designer, is inside the program actively creating changes when we ask to add new features."
Emily Fulcher, Founder, AilikiFIT, Trustpilot, May 2026
She follows it with: "He met with me personally on an onboarding call to answer my questions."
Both of those are true and both of them are a description of a small company at a particular moment. Onboarding calls are part of how coaches are moved onto Coachful today, and so is the import: clients, programmes and content are brought across for you rather than left as an export file you have to reformat yourself. We would rather you read a sentence like Emily's as an accurate account of now than as a promise about a company three years from now, because personal onboarding is exactly the thing that gets harder as a product grows.
Coachful holds a 4.5 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 21 reviews. Twenty-one is a small sample and you should treat it as one. The whole set is collected on the reviews page, unedited, including the ones that are not five stars.
The trade-offs, honestly
Four things a coach in Emily's niche should know before deciding, none of which appear in her review because a review is not a spec sheet.
There is no periodised workout builder. Covered above and worth repeating, because it is the single most common mismatch for fitness coaches. Coachful gives you programmes, goals, daily tasks, habits and check-ins. It does not build a training block by pace or heart-rate zone, and it does not push sessions to a Garmin. If structured workouts on a device are the core of what you sell, you are keeping a training platform alongside Coachful, and you should price that into the comparison from the start.
Coachful is not HIPAA-certified. It is GDPR-ready, data is exportable as a full ZIP whenever you want it, and there is no lock-in on your own records. But if you are a health coach handling protected health information in the United States and you need a signed business associate agreement, Coachful is not the right platform for that work today. That is a straight no rather than a soft one.
The client app is under the Coachful listing. Your clients download Coachful from the app store and then see your branding, your name, your colours and your content inside it. On Solo and above the in-app experience carries your brand. What you do not get is your own separate listing in the App Store and Google Play under your business name. Some coaches do not care at all. A few care a great deal, and they should know before they start.
It is a young product. Coachful launched in early 2026. The review corpus is all arrivals and no departures, because the coaches who might one day leave have not been here long enough to. Compared with tools that have a decade of reviews, that is a real difference and not one we can argue away.
What this looks like for a coach like her: a seven day trial plan
The trial is seven days and needs a card at signup, with no charge during the trial and cancellation in one click. Seven days is enough to test the whole thing if you use it in the right order. This is general advice for a fitness, endurance or group coach, not a description of anyone's setup.
Day one, put one real programme in. Not your best one. Your shortest one. A seven day starter, a four week base block, whatever you already have written in a document. Build it as weeks with tasks and one habit, and stop there. This is the test that matters, because if your method does not fit the structure, nothing else is worth checking.
Day two, enrol yourself as a client. Open the client app on your own phone and look at what you built from the other side. You will find out in four minutes whether week one is too heavy, whether your task wording makes sense on a small screen at 6am, and whether day one gives someone a win.
Day three, connect payments and price one offer. Connect Stripe, create one paid offer at your real price, and buy it yourself. Follow what happens next: the receipt, the enrolment, where the person lands. That path is what your old stack was breaking.
Day four, build the free door. One funnel, one free challenge or starter week, one email capture. Most fitness coaches already run this informally through direct messages, and putting it on a page turns it into a process.
Day five, turn on the group. Create a group programme, enrol two people, and watch the cohort squad appear with them in it. Post something and see how it lands on a phone. If a community app is a separate line on your card statement today, this is the day that decides whether it stays.
Day six, wire the calendar. Sync Google, Apple or Outlook both ways, set your availability, add a Zoom or Meet link to a session type if you want to keep the tool your clients know, and book yourself in from your own booking page.
Day seven, move one real client. Not the whole roster. One person who will tell you the truth. Ask them to do a week in the app and say what was confusing. Then decide, with something real to decide on.
If you are comparing platforms rather than testing one, the coaching software overview and the roundup of fitness coaching software are the two places to start.
Frequently asked questions
What five platforms does Emily Fulcher say Coachful replaced?
Her Trustpilot review names them: "Website hosting, a digital product shop, a community app, Zoom, and the coaching programs I was creating somewhere else." She describes paying for "5+ different platforms" and says she saved $1,300 by cancelling what she had, in her words, "tech duct-taped together". She does not name the specific brands, and we have not guessed at them.
Is Coachful a good fit for a triathlon or endurance coach?
For the business around the coaching, yes: the website, the funnels, the shop, the memberships, the group, the check-ins, the booking and the client record all sit behind one login. For the training prescription itself, no. Coachful does not build periodised sessions by pace or heart-rate zone or send workouts to a watch, so a coach doing that keeps a training platform alongside it.
What does Coachful cost, and is there a free plan?
Lite is $29 a month for up to 5 clients, Solo is $49 a month for up to 20, and Pro is $99 a month for unlimited clients. There is no permanently free plan. The free part is a 7-day trial that requires a card at signup, does not charge you during the trial, and can be cancelled in one click.
Does Coachful take a percentage of what I earn from clients?
No. The platform fee is 0 percent on every plan, including Lite. Client payments run through your own Stripe Connect account, or Razorpay where Stripe is not available, and the processor's percentage is the only other cost of getting paid. A coach collecting $6,000 in a month on Solo pays $49 plus processing, and nothing else to Coachful.
Can I run a paid community and a free community in the same place?
Yes. Groups in Coachful attach to programmes, so a free programme carries a free group and a paid membership carries its own. Enrolling someone creates or joins the cohort squad automatically, and there is a wider practice-level feed on top of the individual squads. You are not paying a separate per-member community bill for people who are already your clients. There is more on this on the group coaching software page.
Do my clients need a separate app for the community, the programme and the calls?
No, and this is the part of Emily's review that is about the client rather than the coach. She wrote that "my user experience was 3 different apps" and that the stack was costing her clients. In Coachful the client has one account: programme, habits, check-ins, community, sessions, documents and anything they have bought are all in the same place, on the web or in the app.
Can I bring my existing website and client list across?
Yes. Clients, programmes and content are imported for you during onboarding rather than left to you as a file to reformat, and the website builder has an import option for an existing site. You can point your own custom domain at the Coachful site so the address does not change for people who already have it bookmarked. On the way out, a full data export ZIP is available whenever you want it.
Is Coachful safe for health coaching data?
It is GDPR-ready and your data is exportable in full at any time, but it is not HIPAA-certified and there is no business associate agreement available. If you handle protected health information in the United States and need that paperwork, this is not the platform for that part of your practice.
Join Coachful now
Emily's review is one coach describing one stack, and the reason we published it is that the list she wrote is the list most coaches are quietly paying for. If you recognise it, the seven day plan above is the fastest way to find out whether one login actually holds your work.
