How Changing the Product You Love Can Build the Business You Need: Family Dinner with Scott Tsangeos

Scott Tsangeos once built for casual weightlifters. Now, his startup works with Olympic teams and private gyms. At Family Dinner on Wednesday, the recent Kellogg graduate shared the mindset that made the difference.

Tsangeos is the founder of Olympus, a sports performance platform helping high schools, colleges, private gyms, and pro teams manage athletic workout data.

Tsangeos began building Olympus while he was a student, and The Garage played a key role in that journey. He participated in the Jumpstart Pre-Accelerator program and placed third in Northwestern’s annual startup competition VentureCat. Now, just a year after graduating, he’s returning to VentureCat this spring as the MC for the 2025 competition.

In revealing Olympus’s origin story, Tsangeos shared that his initial strategy was to build a B2C app – a “Strava for weightlifting.”

Despite building a polished product and receiving positive feedback in user interviews, Tsangeos recalled that Olympus struggled to grow its user base.

Tsangeos noticed that the problem wasn’t the product, but rather, the business. He realized that striving for a “minimum viable product” wasn’t enough. “I think it’s a fallacy,” he said. “I think it should be the minimum viable business.”

“If you are not actively selling your product, then the feedback you get is all in a vacuum,” Tsangeos advised the student founders. “The best customer discovery interviews that I’ve done have been during sales pitches.”

What followed was a shift not just in strategy, but in perspective.

“I went and did some introspection because this is changing everything that I thought I was wanting to build,” Tsangeos said. “First were the signs. Second was opening my eyes and having someone pry them open for me so that I could see them.”

That clarity set the stage for Olympus’s most pivotal move: shifting from a B2C product for fitness enthusiasts to a B2B solution for athletic departments and performance coaches.

It wasn’t a clean break, according to Tsangeos. He and his team initially held onto the idea that the product could serve everyone, including gym-goers, high school teams, and college athletes. But Tsangeos pointed out a common trap founders can fall into: confusing multitasking with agility.

“The problem with multitasking is that if you try to build for everyone, you are building for no one,” he said. “It’s confusing your marketing, it’s confusing your website, it’s confusing your features.”

The turning point came when Tsangeos asked a simple, focused question: who else had the same problem, but was willing to pay? The answer was athletic departments. With that, Olympus started building for organizations, not individuals.

Still, getting in the door wasn’t easy, leading Tsangeos to his next piece of advice for Residents: Constraints foster innovation.

For Tsangeos, one unlikely constraint came about when he sent so many cold outbound emails that his email domain began landing in spam, cutting off his number one sales channel. His solution involved asking current customers for warm introductions, driving an 80% conversion rate.

“All these constraints, while they suck in the moment, our business is a product of constraints across the board,” Tsangeos said.

One high school using Olympus even leveraged its data reports to secure funding for an entirely new weight room. “That, to me, is electric,” Tsangeos said. “I’m getting chills just talking about it.”

As he closed out the evening, Tsangeos reflected on how a shift in mindset helped him break out of the trap of perfectionism and focus on delivering real results – even if it meant getting a little scrappy along the way.

“To be at Northwestern, you have to be a bit of a perfectionist. We can let perfection get in the way of good. I was very guilty of that,” Tsangeos said. “Once I reframed and said, how can I just say yes to most things and make it happen? That was transformational.”