‣ Company: GO Club
‣ Founders: Kamal Kumar Lakshmanan and Ranjith Ramanan
‣ Mission: To make a delightful, beautiful step counter and hydration tracker
‣ App launched: 2025
‣ Team size: 9
‣ Go-to emoji: 🦾

Counting steps and tracking your water intake is important—but not necessarily fun. GO Club, an Apple Watch App of the Year finalist in 2025, fixes that. Designed for anyone with more athletic ambition than ability, this stylish step counter and hydration tracker makes even a casual stroll feel like a victory lap.

“Step counters are everywhere, but they’re cluttered,” cofounder Ranjith Ramanan says. “We wanted to take one thing and design it beautifully—to make even a small step count feel delightful.”

After the success of their F1 widget app Box Box Club, Ramanan and cofounder Kamal Kumar Lakshmanan found themselves glued to their laptops during the offseason—walking less and forgetting to stay hydrated. So they built the app they wished they’d had, pairing gorgeous design and playful animations with AI-powered walking plans, an Apple Watch integration that automatically logs workouts, and a watch complication for tracking every sip (or glass) with a tap.

The team is also intentional about giving back: a portion of GO Club’s subscriptions support causes like clean water initiatives and accessibility efforts.

We spoke with Ramanan, who is based in Bengaluru, India, about turning a passion project into a globally used app and how thoughtful design—not more features—has driven GO Club’s success.

How did you and Lakshmanan start working on GO Club?
GO Club was something we’d always wanted to build. We had a three-month window with nothing scheduled, and I decided to design something exactly how I wanted—completely out of the box. Kamal said he’d push himself technically as far as possible. It felt like a hackathon.

What were some of your initial considerations when designing the app?
With GO Club, we could obsess over micro-interactions, color, and accessibility. For example, we chose blue intentionally—it’s one of the most universally perceivable colors, including for users with visual disabilities. The logo also reflects that: The two legs and circular form reference mobility aids, like wheelchairs. We’re still learning how to better support wheelchair users specifically, but that intent has been there from the beginning.

How different does GO Club look now compared with that first release?
We built the first version in about 45 days and didn’t touch it for a long time—even after becoming an App Store Award finalist. But since November, we’ve refined a lot. We talked to users, connected with Apple’s Developer Excellence team, and focused on accessibility—larger fonts, clearer context, better year-over-year views, redesigned widgets, and a fully standalone Apple Watch experience with onboarding.

Feature-wise, the app is lean and focused. Was it difficult to resist adding more features?
Honestly, yes—it can feel frustrating to work on the same thing repeatedly. But then a user writes in saying how much they love it and that reminds us why we’re doing this.

Just one user?
We once paused everything to address accessibility after a single user reached out. After we fixed it, he wrote back saying he could fully navigate the app with VoiceOver. That moment mattered to us more than metrics.

GO Club is a part of the App Store Small Business Program. If you are a developer and would like to learn more about the program, follow the link below.