PushPress is a growing fitness platform serving over 4,000 gyms worldwide, providing gym management software that helps owners focus more on their members and less on administrative tasks. With a focus on delivering actionable insights to gym owners, PushPress relies on robust data infrastructure to support critical business decisions.

Results

• 100% focus on business results with team fully dedicated to solving data problems instead of managing infrastructure

• 3X team efficiency with a small team of 3 delivering complete data platform capabilities without DevOps overhead

• 0% maintenance overhead through "set once" analytics and AI pipelines that run reliably

• Eliminated platform engineering roles that would typically require 5-6 additional team members

• Rapid deployment of both analytics and AI pipelines for internal and customer-facing use cases

The Challenge

When Varad Tupe joined PushPress as Senior Data Engineer, he faced the challenge of replatforming the company's entire data stack. The existing setup wasn't leveraging the power of modern data tools, and Varad knew they needed a solution that would allow his team to focus on delivering business value rather than managing infrastructure.

"I'm a strong believer that all data folks should be focusing on data problems, not data engineering problems," explains Varad. "The more we solve business problems instead of setting up infrastructure and worrying about scalability, the more value we add to the organization."

PushPress needed a solution that would enable a lean team to build and maintain a robust data platform without the overhead of managing complex infrastructure components like Spark clusters or Airflow DAGs.

The Solution

After evaluating different options, Varad chose Paradime for its developer-first approach and integrated AI capabilities. Having discovered Paradime through a Reddit post and comparing it to his previous experience with dbt Cloud™, Varad recognized its potential to deliver a cost-effective, powerful data platform for PushPress.

AI-Enhanced Developer Experience

Paradime's Code IDE provided PushPress with a seamless development environment that made onboarding new team members straightforward and efficient. The platform's similarity to familiar tools like VS Code, combined with its dbt™-native capabilities, accelerated the team's productivity.

"It was super easy to configure everything and get it set up," shares Varad. "Learning Paradime was pretty straightforward. You have a very similar code interface as VS Code, following the same principles as dbt Open Source."

The team quickly adopted best practices, with Varad leading by example: "I built a couple of early models showing this is how we should do it, this is how we should use VUE versus Table versus incremental model, this is how we should set up Bolt jobs." This approach enabled the entire team to become proficient with the platform within their first month.

DinoAI has been particularly helpful for debugging and exploring data models. "I've been experimenting with it. If I have to answer some kind of business question which I don't know anything about like the data model, DinoAI helps me build the query," explains Varad.

Seamless Orchestration with Bolt

PushPress leverages Paradime's Bolt for reliable pipeline scheduling and orchestration. The "configure and forget" nature of Bolt has been a perfect fit for the team's philosophy of minimizing infrastructure management.

"It's been kind of a configure and forget experience. I think we had this early chat when we were onboarding about this philosophy which I was trying to bring: if we set up something, we don't have to look at it again," Varad recalls. "Bolt is solving that use case for us. It's been good."

The team particularly values Bolt's AI summaries of logs. "One feature I really like is the AI summary of the logs," notes Varad. "Now I don't have to go down and find out what exactly happened at the very bottom of those dbt logs. I could just get it out of the box."

Building Advanced AI Pipelines

What sets PushPress apart is their innovative use of Paradime for AI pipelines beyond traditional analytics. "Recently we started running AI pipelines as well. We have a lot of actual data, for example, we have Intercom chat messages and Snowflake offers some out-of-the-box AI functions, so we just configured that as an incremental model," explains Varad.

This approach allows PushPress to create AI summaries of customer conversations directly through Paradime using Snowflake's functions. By leveraging dbt™'s incremental model capabilities with Snowflake's AI functions, all orchestrated through Paradime Bolt, the team has created a powerful system for generating business insights without additional infrastructure.

The Impact

For PushPress, Paradime has transformed how their data team operates, enabling them to focus exclusively on solving business problems rather than managing infrastructure. This has led to concrete business applications like AI-powered insights and data-driven pricing recommendations.

"One of the recent projects we did is trying to figure out what will be the appropriate pricing for membership plans," Varad shares. "We looked across thousands of gyms, slicing and dicing by dimensions like location, plan type, and gym category. With that data, we're able to recommend pricing based on location, plan type, and gym category, giving owners a starting point so they don't have to research competitive gyms themselves."

This pricing model now lives in Paradime and is accessed by other teams through Metabase, creating a direct pipeline from data to business impact.

Most significantly, Paradime has allowed PushPress to operate with a lean team of just three data professionals while delivering capabilities that would traditionally require 5-6 people. "If we were just going vanilla on dbt, we'd need to maintain the core project, hook it up to an orchestrator like Airflow or Dagster, then maintain that as well. If something fails, we'd need to figure out alerting to Slack or PagerDuty. There's a lot of logistics with the vanilla approach," explains Varad.

Instead, Paradime has enabled the team to focus 100% on business problems, creating a true "buy versus build" advantage that has accelerated PushPress's ability to deliver value to their customers.

What's Next

PushPress continues to innovate with its data platform, focusing on enhancing their product to make it more robust for their customers—small gym businesses that want to focus on their members' health rather than administrative tasks.

"We are trying to solve the business problems for gym owners so that they don't have to worry about logistics. They can focus on the things they care about most—their members," says Varad.

As PushPress explores more AI-driven automation and agentic solutions, Paradime will continue to be the foundation that enables their small team to deliver outsized impact, helping gym owners across the world focus less on operations and more on their members.