I'm Zlatko. I built Strenova because I needed it.

I grew up skinny. Not lean - just thin in that unremarkable way that means you haven't really thought much about your body at all. I played sports occasionally as a kid, the way most kids do when it's compulsory or someone needs a teammate. But my real obsession was always computers.

There was something about them I couldn't explain - the logic of it, the fact that you could build things from nothing. By the time I was old enough to choose my own path, the decision was easy: computer science. And by 21, I was working as a software developer. That part of the plan came together exactly as expected.

The body part did not.

When you spend your twenties sitting at a desk, the weight doesn't announce itself. It arrives quietly, over years, in the form of slightly tighter jeans and medical checkups that stop saying "fine" and start saying "we should keep an eye on that." I knew something was off. The blood results were telling me in plain language: skinny fat. Fatty liver. Not a crisis, but not a direction you want to keep heading in.

I told myself I'd deal with it. I kept not dealing with it.

I was good at the thing I was doing. I enjoyed the work. And the gym - the whole world of training - felt like something for other people. People who already knew what they were doing. People who hadn't spent years optimizing their VO2 max through gaming and caffeine.

I got married. Then I became a father.

Olgica and I had built a life together - a good one. She is sharp, perceptive, and has never once let me get away with fooling myself. Which is relevant, because for years, I had been quietly doing exactly that on the question of my health.

And somewhere in becoming a family, the calculation shifted. It wasn't just about me anymore. It wasn't even really about how I looked or what the doctor's charts were saying. It was the much simpler, heavier question: What kind of person do you want to be for the people who depend on you?

At 35, my company ran a routine medical check. The doctor looked at my results and said something to me that I've thought about a lot since. He said the numbers were quite bad for my age. Not catastrophic - but bad. I remember thinking, naah, how bad can it be? And then he told me, and I understood that I had been wrong to keep deferring this.

I finally wanted to start. Badly. I just didn't know how.

I sold my motorcycle. I bought a bicycle.

That sounds simple, but it was the first concrete thing I had done in years toward my own health. I started commuting to work - about 8 kilometres each way. Nothing dramatic. Just movement, every day, that I hadn't been doing before.

Then the routes got longer. Then I started running.

My first attempt at 5 kilometres was humbling. I couldn't do it. My lungs weren't there, my legs weren't there, my confidence wasn't there. But I kept going back to it, and eventually I crossed that threshold. Then 10 kilometres. Then a local race. Then another. Something strange happened during that period - I stopped thinking about the weight at all. The running became the goal. The races became the goal. And the weight, without any dramatic intervention, started to follow.

I ran two half marathons. The second one was twelve minutes faster than the first. Standing at that finish line, I genuinely did not recognise the version of me that had been sitting at that desk four years earlier.

Over four years, I lost 30 kilograms.

Then I looked in the mirror.

I looked like a runner. Lean, light, built for long roads. Which is genuinely a great thing to be - but it wasn't what I wanted anymore. I had solved one problem and arrived at a new one: I wanted to build muscle. I wanted to be strong, not just thin.

So I started learning. Properly, this time - not just picking up a weight and hoping for the best. Nutrition. Progressive overload. Volume. Macros. I consumed everything I could find on Instagram, on YouTube, in research papers. I started training with a structure I hadn't had in the running years.

And that's when I hit the problem that, eventually, led to Strenova.

Every tracker I tried was either too cluttered, too social, too slow to use with chalk-covered hands between sets, or simply built for someone who wanted to feel like they were training rather than someone who wanted to measure whether they were actually progressing. I didn't want a fitness app. I wanted a tool. A serious one.

I'm a software developer. I built one.

Strenova was built for the version of me that finally showed up to the gym and wanted to take it seriously - and found the available tools weren't quite good enough.

But I didn't build it alone.

When the idea started taking shape, Olgica was already in it with me. She handles everything you see that isn't the app itself - the content, the voice, the marketing, the story we're telling the world. If this website feels like it was written by someone who actually cares, that's her. If Strenova has a coherent identity beyond a list of features, that's her too. She brings the same seriousness to building the brand that I bring to building the product.

We're a two-person team. We work on this every day alongside full-time jobs and a child who has opinions about bedtime. We're not a startup studio. We're not VC-backed. We're two people who decided this was worth building, and who are building it the way we know how - carefully, consistently, and without cutting corners on the things that matter.

Strenova is a workout tracker built around one idea: the fastest, most focused experience possible for people who care about progressive overload. There's a social feed - but a quiet one. Follows-only, no algorithm, no noise pulling you away from your training. Just: what did you lift last time, can you beat it, and is the trend going the right direction?

I'm 38. I still train. I still log every session. Every feature in Strenova exists because I needed it, or because someone who uses the app told us they needed it. We respond to every message personally. We ship updates every week. This is not a faceless fitness brand - it's us, doing the things we know how to do, for people who train the way I train.

If that sounds like you, we built this for you.