Pittsburgh, PA

Hi, I'm John.

COO at Trainwell. Y Combinator founder. Data scientist by training; growth and operations by trade. This site collects my work, writing, and whimsies.

John LaGue
$1k → $10M ARR
at Trainwell as first growth leader; $30M+ revenue in the years since
3 → 125 employees
at Trainwell, scaled as COO
2 publications
IEEE (deep learning for public health) and Towards Data Science
Experience

Where I've worked

Resume (PDF) · TXT
Feb 2021 — Present
Chief Operating Officer · Trainwell
  • Trainwell is a 1-on-1 remote personal trainer and fitness app that has helped tens of thousands of people build healthier habits.
  • Drove B2C ARR from $1k to $10M as growth leader before hiring a head of growth; scaled to $30M+ in revenue in the years since.
  • Scaled the company from 3 to 125 employees as COO.
  • Acquired customers on both $0 and $6.5M marketing budgets.
  • Supported execution of a large-scale partnership with Peloton.
  • Oversee all marketing/growth, customer support, and operations.
Feb 2020 — Nov 2021
VP of Business Development · Trainwell
  • First full-time hire.
  • Found initial user traction using the Bullseye framework outlined by Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo).
Feb — Sep 2020
Data Analyst · PNC Bank
  • Extracted, cleaned, and analyzed millions of data points across home equity, mortgage, and credit card products (Python, T-SQL, Hadoop, PL/SQL).
  • Defined the strategy for identifying mortgages with imperfect insurance termination dates, saving customers thousands.
  • Key resource for the SBA Paycheck Protection Program — processed and approved hundreds of small-business loans.
Jul 2019 — Aug 2020
Founder · PocketPosture
  • An ecommerce store selling posture-improvement devices. Broke even on sales.
  • Primarily a space to experiment with off-the-wall marketing ideas — see the Towards Data Science article.
Dec 2017 — Jul 2019
Co-founder & COO · Community Phone (Y Combinator W19)
  • Affordable cell phone service (MVNO). Bootstrapped from $0 to $300K ARR in one year.
  • Wore many hats: sales, customer success, marketing, business development, analytics, retail management, recruiting, product sourcing, and more.
  • Front-page coverage in the Boston Globe.
Nov 2017 — May 2018
Data Science Practicum Team Lead · LA County Elections Department
  • Cut ballot collection times by 12% in the 2018 primary elections using the Google Maps API and k-means clustering.
Jan 2015 — Dec 2017
Graduate & Undergraduate Teaching Assistant · University of San Francisco
  • TA'd Business Statistics, Calculus, Statistics with Applications, Intro to Data Science, and Bioinformatics.
  • Lectured for the graduate Bioinformatics course as an undergraduate; graded assignments and led exam reviews.
Feb 2015 — May 2017
Event Staff · Planet Granite Climbing & Yoga
  • Taught climbing technique and led team-building events.

Education

Skills

  • Growth strategy
  • Performance marketing
  • Funnel optimization
  • SEO
  • Influencer marketing
  • Python (advanced)
  • SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL)
  • R
  • Predictive modeling
  • Google Analytics

Awards

  • Most Impactful Graduate Research award — USF, 2017
  • Inducted into Pi Mu Epsilon, mathematics honor society — 2016
  • 2nd place — Data Institute Data Science Hackathon, 2017
Publications

Published work

Towards Data Science · Dec 2019

Is it possible to predict poor posture?

Scraped ~1,000 websites to collect 200K+ public emails, ran a large-scale habits survey, and analyzed whether daily behavior predicts poor posture.

IEEE IEMCON · 2018

Applying deep learning to public health

Predicting thyroid disorder from imbalanced demographic data alone — +35% accuracy vs. the industry benchmark. Won USF's "Most Impactful Graduate Research" award.

→ Older projects, school work & case studies

Press

Coverage

Trainwell was previously called CoPilot, and before that DeltaTrainer — so the earlier coverage runs under those names.

Trainwell

Podcasts

Community Phone