Great Coaching Shouldn't Stop When Class Ends: Ioana and Josh Ellis's Journey Building 8Counts

Ioana and Josh never planned to build a company around dance. Neither of them is a dancer. Between them, they'd spent nearly five decades at companies like Google, Dell, and Marqeta.

Then their daughter fell in love with dance.

In her first year of competitive dance, she wanted to practice constantly. Kitchen, living room, backyard, it didn't matter. Ioana and Josh loved her enthusiasm. They also had no way of knowing whether what she was practicing was right, or even safe.

"We never wanted to become our daughter's dance teachers," Josh says. "We wanted to support her love for dance and understand how to help her grow."

That small, very ordinary problem turned out to point at something much bigger.

The hours nobody is coaching

Youth dance isn't a niche hobby anymore. ESPN has picked up the rights to broadcast the International Dance League's 2026 season, and competitive dance families routinely put thousands of dollars a year into training, competitions, travel, and costumes.

But look closely at where a dancer's week actually goes. A few hours happen in the studio with a qualified teacher. Everything else happens at home, from memory, with nobody qualified watching.

Corrections get forgotten. Bad habits get rehearsed until they stick. Parents want to help, but oftentimes, studios don't allow them in the room, so they never saw what was taught in the first place.

Most youth sports now have some way to carry coaching beyond practice: film review, training apps, a shared picture of progress between player, parent, and coach. That's the gap 8Counts was built to close.

One home for dancers, parents, and coaches

8Counts is the trusted digital home for dance improvement. It's built specifically for young dancers, and it connects the three people who care most about their progress: the dancer, the parent, and the coach.

The idea behind it is simple. Great coaching shouldn't stop when class ends.

For coaches and studios: Homework Mode. Teachers assign practice tied directly to what they're working on in class. They can pick from a library of skills and progressions, or upload their own content, including choreography. When the dancer walks back into the studio, the coach already knows what got practiced that week and can build on it instead of starting over.

For dancers: Game Mode. Starting with Acro, dancers work through structured skill progressions on their own. They take on challenges, earn XP, unlock achievements, and actually see themselves getting better. Coach-informed computer vision gives feedback on the measurable parts of a movement, so practice at home has some guardrails.

For parents: More Visibility. Parents can see what's been assigned and follow their child's progress without ever having to give a technical correction. They get to be the encouragement, and the coach stays the coach.

That last point matters to Ioana and Josh. Technology handles what can be measured. Human teachers stay at the center of technique, progression, and each dancer's individual development.

Built for kids

Most online platforms on which young dancers share their work are built around views, likes, and followers. 8Counts deliberately isn't one of them.

There are no public feeds and no follower counts. Practice is private, progression is age-appropriate, and parents are part of the experience from day one. A dancer's only benchmark is the dancer they were last week, not a stranger with a bigger following.

Shaped by the people who teach dance

8Counts wasn't designed in a vacuum. Experienced dance educators, studio owners, coaches, and industry specialists have helped shape it from the start, from how skills are sequenced to how much practice is reasonable to where technology should step back and let a teacher lead.

The response so far says the problem is real. Without a dollar of outside funding, 8Counts has over 2,100 early-access signups and is working hand-in-hand with its first studio partners. The app is now in Apple's App Store review process, with launch expected in early November with a launch on Android in early December 2026.

Two founders, one kitchen table

The idea started with Ioana, who leads 8Counts as CEO. She spent 23 years in HR and People Operations at Google, Marqeta, and Lateral, and she started where any good people leader would: with the people closest to the problem. She began sketching out skills and working the idea through with their daughter's dance teacher.

The breakthrough was a three-word pitch: Duolingo for dance. The moment they framed it that way, everyone got it.

Josh, the company's CTO, turned those sketches into something people could actually tap through. He'd spent 25 years in research and technology at The Ohio State University, Dell Technologies, and Google Cloud, where he helped build it into the enterprise organization it is today, before stepping away to spend more time with his family.

They started with skill training for dancers. Then more experienced dancers began asking if they could upload their own choreography to practice, and that request grew into Homework Mode, the piece that connects everything back to the studio.

"It's pretty special when you get a chance to build a company, but also your daughter is along for that ride," Josh says.

Advice for fellow founders

Ioana and Josh's biggest lesson is to ship early and keep shipping.

"Don't over-engineer and overbuild the first iteration," they say. "Start with the most basic representation of the solution possible and immediately get it out to people. Early in the process we took a list of 25+ features down to three core extremely valuable features coaches and studio owners were validating."

The second lesson goes hand in hand with the first: get feedback before you think you're ready. "We began sharing demos of early prototypes, literal vibe-coded prototypes in the early days, just to show people the look and the feel of the app, get immediate feedback, and address concerns early. Showing people what's going on and trying to get them to come along on the vision is the most important part."

What comes next

Dance has the audience, the investment, and now the broadcast spotlight. What it hasn't had is a way to make the work between classes count.

That's what Ioana and Josh are building: a place where every practice session at home connects back to the studio, every parent can cheer with confidence, and every coach's teaching carries through the whole week.

Follow along at join8counts.com and @join8counts on Instagram.