Brett Maloley - Ladder: The Fitness Marketplace - [Invest Like the Best, EP.60]

This week’s episode is part of an experiment and so requires a longer than normal introduction. I’ve come to view this podcast as a learning tool, a means to understand a new topic in a short window of time. One of those areas is venture capital and startups—an area that one year ago was completely foreign to me. I think the best way to learn is aggressive immersion in a topic along with some consequences, what we often call some skin in the game. Accordingly, this is a conversation with the founder of a startup in which I am an investor. The founder is Brett Maloley and his company is called Ladder. Ladder represents an overlap of many topics we’ve explore together over the last year. We’ve talked about venture capital, health and wellbeing, the difficultly of fundraising and power law outcomes in startups. We also spent an entire episode, with Alex Moazed, talking about the business model that Ladder is pursing: what Alex calls platform business model and what my favorite technology writer Ben Thompson calls the Aggregator model. I hope you enjoy this collective experiment, which is largely the result of what I’ve learned from past guests and from all of your support which helps me meet those great people in the first place. Let’s dive in to my conversation with the founder of Ladder, Brett Maloley, who starts by describing how he got his start in the fitness world. Show Notes 5:25 – (First question) – Brett describes his history in the fitness industry 10:04 – Realized he could fix the commercial fitness industry by changing it 12:46 – Explain how Ladder works 14:14 – What does the ratio of digital to in-person coaching need to be in order to be effective coaching 17:12 – Explaining the platform business model as a whole and how to scale these types of business 22:15 – Origin of health clubs 24:01 – Current state of the health fitness space through some key stats 26:44 – What happened where gyms were able to start charging a lot less for memberships 30:20 – How Ladder is going to attract customers in the beginning 36:10 – How to drive engagement 37:46 – The opportunity for coaches on the platform 40:28 – How will ladder ensure the quality of coaches on the platform remains high 42:41 – Exploring the value of the data 45:32 – How will Ladder work with gyms in the scope of how a new business can take advantage of existing businesses 48:58 – Comparing Ladder to crossfit and what is not sustainable about 53:14 – Difference between a franchise model vs a license model 55:12 – Strategy for building an audience 59:56 – Competitors to this business 1:03:39 – Brett’s thoughts on brand broadly speaking and how he’s worked to shape Ladder’s brand 1:05:00 – Best individual experience of the platform so far

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I know firsthand how complex the tech stack is for asset management firms. And seemingly every new tool and data source makes the problem even worse, adding more complexity, more headcount and more risk. RidgeLine offers a better way forward. One unified platform that automates away the complexity across portfolio accounting, reconciliation, reporting, trading, compliance and more, all at scale. RidgeLine is revolutionizing investment management, helping ambitious firms scale faster, operate smarter and stay ahead of the curve. See what RidgeLine can unlock for your firm. Schedule a demo at ridgeline.ai.

• 0:36Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Neal and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Patrick O'Neal is a Principal and Portfolio Manager at O'Neal Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Neal Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Neal Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

• 1:19Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  This week's episode is part of an experiment and so requires a longer than normal introduction. I've come to view this podcast as a learning tool, a means to understand a new topic in a short window of time. One of those areas is venture capital and startups, an area that one year ago was completely foreign to me. I think the best way to learn is aggressive immersion in a topic, along with some consequences, what we often call skin in the game. Accordingly, this is a conversation with a founder of a startup in which I personally am an investor. I say this in full disclosure because I believe in being very transparent with you, but also because I obviously want this business to do well. Part of the reason I invested was because I thought I could personally affect the outcome, in part by exposing the model and ideas to you all.

• 2:01Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I deeply respect your opinions and collective breadth of knowledge and welcome thoughts that you have on this startup and this topic. The founder in this case is Brett Maloley and his company is called Ladder. Ladder represents an overlap of many topics we've explored together over the past year. We've talked about venture capital, health and wellbeing, the difficulty of fundraising, and power law outcomes in startups. We also spent an entire episode with Alex Moazed talking about the business model that Ladder is pursuing. This is what Alex calls the platform business model and what my favorite technology writer Ben Thompson calls the aggregator model. Alex wrote the book Modern Monopolies about this model, which describes how companies like Uber, Airbnb, and others serve their clients.

• 2:44Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Platform companies sit at the intersection between consumers and producers in a given category, helping make life easier, cheaper, and/or better for consumers and more profitable and flexible for producers. But the value creation itself is about facilitating exchange more efficiently than it is about actually creating the underlying product. Airbnb, for example, doesn't own real estate, the value in this case, but they unlock the potential of real estate owned by others. Same for Uber, which so far doesn't own any cars. As Alex explained to me in our discussion, a key sign of a market which might benefit from a platform company is some form of latent untapped supply. That brings me back to Ladder. The company is being built to unlock latent potential in fitness and potentially other

• 3:28Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  types of coaching. Personal trainers work 11 hours a day but have four hours of downtime. That is the untapped supply in this case. Ladder will allow two key things: much cheaper access to a real fitness coach for consumers who don't want to spend hundreds of dollars a month in the current format, and a way for trainers with lots of free time to both get new customers and to better engage with their existing customers. Think of it almost like OpenTable, which started as a way for restaurants to better manage their reservations, but turned into a liquid market for consumers to make reservations themselves. The reason this is so interesting, I think, is the enormous size of the commercial fitness industry and the fact that it hasn't changed in a long time. I love people who have an almost bizarre level of knowledge in a niche field, and Brett certainly fits that bill.

• 4:13Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  He grew up with the industry, his mentors and relatives have literally built the commercial fitness industry, what we think of as gyms and personal training as we know it. He knows how this legacy model works and ticks, the flaws and benefits of different business models, and why the future might be different, with a much larger percent of the population using a fitness coach, and maybe other types of coaches in categories like nutrition and health. To see the app in action and get paired with a coach, Brett kindly set up a promo code of sorts like you often hear on other podcasts. If you search for Ladder Coach in the App Store, download the app and then use the promo code ILTB, as in Invest Like the Best, you'll get 50% off the service forever. I don't get any cut of that at all. In fact, you could think about it like a subsidy that I'm in part paying for as an investor.

• 4:57Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Brett and his team are data heads, and their main goal early in this company's life is to generate data on the relationships between consumers and their new coaches, to figure out what works best for both groups, and to constantly improve the service, so the early adopters among you get a permanent discount. Now, this will be obvious, but nothing about what I do personally is investment advice that you should mimic. Like my investment in Bitcoin, this investment represents a very small part of my portfolio, and as always, I think the majority of anyone's portfolio should be balanced and well-priced. I do not expect that I have any skill in selecting startups, as probably very few people do. But I know that having some skin in the game means that you learn differently, more efficiently, and faster. I hope you enjoy this collective experiment,

• 5:41Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  which is largely the result of what I've learned from past guests and from all your support, which helps me meet those great people in the first place. Let's dive into my conversation with the founder of Ladder, Brett Maloli, who starts by describing how he got his start in the fitness world.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  I grew up in the fitness industry. My dad was a part-owner of some health clubs and then started a company that sold fitness equipment. So, growing up, it was always there. For me, it was baseball and the fitness industry. And boys have a very close relationship with their fathers, and for me and my dad, it was baseball and fitness. And my whole life, I thought I would play professional baseball, and that's what I would do forever. And when I realized that that wasn't in the cards, I got into the fitness industry. And in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense why, because that was the last thing that we had in common, and it was an easy segue.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  So, I moved out to Santa Barbara after I stopped playing. Baseball and I'd lived with one of my dad's best friends, his business partner, and a guy that I had always, you know, heard a lot about and I had met a couple of times, but I didn't really know him. So here I am in Santa Barbara, living with an older gentleman that I didn't really know in a trailer on his property. And he owned a company that sold flooring to gyms. So turf, suspension, wood floors, and him and my dad worked together. And I always say that summer was when I uncovered my passion for the fitness industry.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  So picture a 22-year-old kid that is completely up in the air relative to how he is going to spend the rest of his life because he had thought about doing one thing, playing baseball, and now he realizes that that's not going to happen. And I would ride my bike to the office every day. We would eat breakfast together and lunch together and dinner together. No TVs on the property. It was a summer of talking and reading and it was all focused on the fitness industry. Why did this happen? Who started this? When did this come about? And it was like walking through a museum of the commercial fitness industry. And John had been at the very beginning with Nautilus, which was the first

• 8:06Speaker 03

  really notable fitness equipment company, and then at Life Fitness. And, you know, my dad tells the story about how he bought one of the first life cycles before Life Fitness was Life Fitness, it was called Life Cycle. So I'm starting to meet all these people and spend time with all these men and women who literally started the fitness industry as we know it today. And that does something really special to a young person because it makes a lot of things seem within reach, right? So when you see this, when you go to a gym and you realize that this is one of 200 of these gyms that exist in the world, that feels very big and feels like potentially something that is bigger

• 8:51Speaker 03

  than you're capable of to some extent. But then when you meet the person who started that and realize that he is just a regular guy that had been there early and had had an opportunity to do something and did, it becomes a lot more palatable. So that summer to me was an awakening. And I became obsessed with the industry. I would read everything I could about it. I would talk to anyone who would listen about where it had come from and where it was going. And then I needed to, you know, get a job. And there I was in Boston, back at my parents', ready to take on the commercial fitness industry. And I got my first job at Life Fitness selling treadmills.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  And it's, it's so interesting because I remember my first interview, a woman named Phyllis Dannon, who still works at Life Fitness, who is, I think, the executive vice president of sales now, has been there for a long time. She used to work with my father. She's interviewing me. And Phyllis is tough. She has a reputation in the industry as, as being, you know, very aggressive. And she's become very successful, impactful with the development of companies like Planet Fitness and, and some other big fitness companies. But she asked me, you know, what I wanted to do in the industry. And I remember at the time thinking, I wanted her job. And I told her that I want to someday have your job. And I got the job.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  I started selling equipment and it was probably no longer than six months until I realized I didn't want that job anymore. I wanted, you know, to be the, the CEO of Life Fitness. And over the course of my early career, I would just move to the next biggest thing until a point where I ultimately realized that the best way to help the commercial fitness industry is to help change it. Because it's still fairly young and it's very big, but it hasn't changed much. And at this point, it just isn't offering enough utility to the consumer.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  The value of a gym membership is actually a negative delta at this point. So for 10 bucks a month, you get a gym membership with unlimited tanning and unlimited childcare and you can bring a friend. So it doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense, but we still have 75 million gym members paying 20 bucks a month. And we still have seven and a half million personal training clients paying 350 bucks a month. So that the opportunity, in my opinion, is massive, but it needs to be done collectively. So at a certain point after- You know, I had gone through the selling fitness equipment and started my first company and exited from that and started my second and sold that.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  And then, you know, I was a CEO of a small publicly traded company for a short period of time, couple of years. We took that private and we started Ladder. And with Ladder, it was really about taking everything that the industry has taught us and using it to create the future of the industry. So, so working with the commercial fitness industry, an industry that for a long time has had a tough time working with technology because there's the huge dichotomy between the commercial side of the space and the direct to consumer side of the space. We wanted to champion the commercial side of the space, work hand in hand with the gyms

• 12:22Speaker 03

  to drive a superior solution that ultimately, in my opinion, allows them to not only thrive, but simply survive in the future. Because as more and more opportunities and offerings become available, an industry that in the purest sense just lacks so much utility likely won't survive. But that's okay, we just need to make some changes because we still have so much going for us, speaking on behalf of the commercial fitness industry. We just have to reexamine some of the ways that we do things and make some changes. And I think most industries go through similar paradigm shifts and the commercial fitness industry is a lot younger than most people think.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  So, we're excited to continue to build Ladder into what we believe will be one of the most significant changing agents in paving the way for the future of the industry.

• 13:18Speaker 04

  For all the people that are listening to this and approaching the app and the company for the first time, just describe kind of what it is and what features it will have early on.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  So, when someone asks me what Ladder is, it's a platform that enables more people access to health and wellness professionals. So, in a, in a space that is hamstrung by the logistical inefficiencies and it is purely an exchange of, of time for money, we believe We have a solution through driving a hybrid of digital and in-person coaching that can scale the earning potential of the coach, improving their core competency and monetizing their unused time while simultaneously delivering a far more affordable coaching solution, but more importantly, a more effective one, because we believe that the sweet spot is that hybrid between digital and in-person. So by no means are we trying to replace in-person training. We're trying to

• 14:11Speaker 03

  create an ecosystem where instead of 10% of gym members working with a coach roughly 5.1 times per month, we have all gym members and furthermore, all people working with a coach, but less frequently in-person, where the backbone becomes the digital relationship. And then we're plugging and playing in-person care where it's needed, creating more of a dynamic pricing model that even further reduces the barrier of entry to the consumer. I envision a world where everyone works with a coach and potentially more coaches, building out that action care team that can actually make people live healthier lives and I think ultimately happier lives as well.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  What do you think the ratio needs to be, I've been thinking a lot about this, between a digital, we'll call it like a digital workout or a digital interaction with a coach and in-person. Some amount of in-person, even if it's almost like FaceTime or something, just the accountability component of a coach is a big reason why, say I've used one in the past when I have, which I've done a couple of times, and kind of having them there like watching me, I don't know, there's something about that. And there's a component of ladder that currently it's called a promise, right, which is kind of this accountability function baked into the whole process. But what do you think that ratio on average, kind of a couple of years from now, let's say we're up and running, what do you think that ratio needs to be of in-person versus digital?

• 15:27Speaker 03

  As far as the ratio specifically, I think it changes because in everything we've done, we've tried to focus on the science of behavioral change and we've tried to create a product that is mindful of how behavioral change works. So accountability is that secret sauce. That's the thing that that products and entities of any kind in the are always trying to drive because we know it comes down to some variation of of ability. So do you have the the resources, the understanding? Do you have the motivation and the accountability? So do you want to do it? And then the trigger, is it constantly mindful to kind of contribute back towards the motivation?

• 16:10Speaker 03

  So a lot of what we're doing is building a relationship. Once the relationship becomes stronger, then I think the in person reduces. So like I have coaches that I haven't spoken to or seen in decades. If I was to communicate with them and get a plan from them, I would follow that process to a T. Because I've already established a relationship with them that drives accountability. Because we know that accountability is the direct result of a relationship, either with yourself or with someone else. For people that are already self accountable, there are a lot of great products. Calorie counters, food logs, different things of that nature. That's not really us.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  We exist for the larger part of the market that needs a little help relative to accountability. And for a lot of people, they don't have it within themselves. They also don't have anyone within their sphere of influence that can hold them accountable. So in a lot of ways, we strive to create relationships with people or between people, rather, that can drive accountability. And over time, as the relationship becomes stronger and stronger, I envision the in person reducing. So it's kind of a tipping point to some extent where we start off with digital. And then potentially in person is a little higher in volume at the beginning. But as the relationship gets stronger, there's the potential to reduce in person.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  And it can always be brought back in the event that, you know, you're going through a rut or things happen. Because there are so many variables at play here.

• 17:44Speaker 04

  So maybe you could describe kind of from your perspective, what the platform business model is? Key components of being successful and scaling sort of a two sided platform where coaches are one side, people working out is the other side. So give me a high level overview of what you think that business model is, why you chose it as a way to. Attack this opportunity in this space and then we'll get into some of the lovers.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Platforms reduce the friction between effort and results and they thrive in industries that are very large, very stagnant, very underserved. So I love platforms in general because their ability to scale is unlike any other model I've seen. And in the fitness industry, it's almost perfect because we see this massive market that hasn't changed in close to five decades and really lacks utility to the consumer. So there's only so long the commercial fitness industry continued to grow with a, you know, 60% inactivity rate and a 50% attrition rate, yet it is continuing to grow. And we know that 16 and a half percent of the country belongs to a health club and that

• 18:49Speaker 04

  What percentage?

• 18:49Speaker 03

  16 and a half percent. And that number's staggering if you think about it. I think ERS, the International Health, Racquet and Sports Club Association, in their global report from 2015, listed that one in four individuals in the United States have been inside a health club, which is mind boggling. And with that said, the industry really relies on that inactivity, which is good for now, but it's not necessarily sustainable. And as more competition comes about and there are more things available to consumers, I just don't believe that you can rely on a model that lacks utility. So we set out to change that and we

• 19:30Speaker 03

  thought the best way to do that would be through a true platform business model where we're literally just productizing the existing ecosystem, connecting coaches, our producers, with people who need or want to be healthier, our consumers, in a way that removes the logistical inefficiencies that currently exist and in a way that reduces the barrier of entry to the consumer and in a way that monetizes unused time to the producer. So, big picture, just like Uber has their drivers, producers, riders, consumers, or Airbnb has their host producers, guest consumers. Again, we have our coaches, producers, people who need or want to be healthier consumers. The one thing that I think

• 20:12Speaker 03

  is a little bit different about what we're doing is I actually believe that in executing this model that provides a better widget essentially, we also are expanding the amount of people that can access health and wellness. With what we're doing, I think that the hybrid of digital and person is a far better solution for people, but I also think that it opens up the door to get more people into it. So I don't know if we're going back to reasoning by analogy, if there's actually a platform that has had the ability to do that. Maybe Airbnb has, to some extent, I think maybe more families are taking vacations, and obviously that's one of the most special companies that exists.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  So I think that we have every opportunity to create what could be the most dynamic and impactful platform business model that we've seen. And I think the commercial fitness industry, for a long time, has been ignored, for the most part, by technology and furthermore, finance, because it's a very asset-light space, and, you know, it's very fluid and there are a lot of ups and downs, but it's still here and it's getting bigger and it's massive. The fact that people go to these facilities multiple times a week and actually spend time at them is very special. I just don't know that anyone's ever been able to create an entity that brought them together.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  So there isn't a, or if you look at, the golden goose for the industry is healthcare subsidies. We know that one of the best ways to get more than 16.5% of people to belong to a gym, or more than 22.5% of the population to be active, is to have it affect their wallets and actually make it less expensive to be healthier, which I believe will happen. With that said, there isn't a health club chain, or even group of health club chains large enough to provide enough data or enough access to users or members to really drive any dynamic paradigm shift at any level of scale, unless you can actually create an entity that works in lockstep with the commercial fitness industry. So core to our model is finding a way to

• 22:19Speaker 03

  Serve the commercial fitness industry and help them in the interim, but also help them potentially down the road and really allow these guys that put guys and gals that put their their blood, sweat and tears into building an industry that is so special. It's such a small community. You know, we have our few trade shows every year and everyone knows each other and it's a very tight knit group. And, you know, we think about health clubs as been around forever. They really haven't.

• 22:50Speaker 04

  What's the origin? Like, how long? What was like the first gym?

• 22:53Speaker 03

  So there have been variations of gyms around since Roman times, but gyms as we know them came about in the mid 70s into the mid 80s. I believe electronic funds transfers really changed the industry where people were being built on a continuous basis as opposed to the pay for play space. And that really changed the dynamic from what were transient racket clubs, which would see, you know, peaks in different seasons depending on where they were in the country, to a more consistent model that enabled them to finance themselves in a way that enabled them to buy nicer things and add different components to the business as we know it today. Things like childcare and tanning was big for a

• 23:34Speaker 03

  while, but just basic as steam sauna, group exercise. So having heard all these stories about what happened to group exercise, how it went from where it was to where it is now, where personal training came from. Like, I remember literally sitting in Santa Barbara with John Donati, asking him about personal training. And for all intents and purposes, he kind of invented it, right? Or he was one, there are other people doing similar stuff at the same time, but he actually created the first type of curriculum. And guys like Agi Niedo, who started Life Fitness, my dad bought one of the first ever life cycles. And he tells the story of buying it and not being able to pay for it in full. So Agi left

• 24:16Speaker 03

  the machine, but took the battery with him. And then when my dad sent the rest of the money out to Irvine, he sent the battery back and Life Fitness went on, or Life Cycle went on to be Life Fitness, which is subsidiary of Brunswick, multi-billion dollar company. So it's all I know.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  So let's talk about the current state of it. So you mentioned a couple of stats. Already 16% of people belong currently. Give me a sense of like, how many gyms are there? Within each gym, kind of what are the key stats in terms of people signing up? Everyone probably thinks, the first thing I thought when we were talking about this is yeah, everyone signs up for New Year's resolution, for your two-year contract, whatever. They go for a little while, it lapses, attrition rate's super high. You know, a small percentage of people have trainers. So just some stats on the ecosystem, kind of what the state of gym, commercial gyms are.

• 25:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's about 35,000 commercial fitness centers in the US, but that's only for-profit facilities. So that doesn't include YMCA's, JCC's, college rec centers, community centers, which we don't really know how many of those there are. Best estimates are there's probably around 55,000 facilities that a human being would say is a gym. Of those facilities, they average about 2,500 members. And roughly 10% of those people work with a coach. They pay about $68 per session and train about 1.22 times per week. The average attrition rate is right around 50%.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  That's for the gym.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Correct. The average attrition rate relative to the personal trainer-client relationship is right around 13 and a half to 14 weeks. And that's on average. We have a huge, you know, spectrum of facilities, right? You have your 999, you're, they call them high-volume, low-price, whatever. You can call them whatever you want, but those are the $10 a month clubs that came about as of the last... Like a Planet Fitness. Planet Fitness is a little different because they don't have personal training. In the Northeast, a workout world potentially is probably the biggest one. And then they charge a little bit more for other things. Group exercise, childcare gets you up around 20 to 24. 99 per month is the average order volume.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have the Equinoxes of the world that are, you know, upwards of $200 a month. The sweet spot is around... Thirty right now. We've seen that decrease massively. When Planet came out with the $10 a month clubs, the ones in the middle, the gold gyms types that were charging anywhere from 40 to 60 a month, had to decide whether they were going to try and add more value and go up, or whether they were going to succumb to the competition and go down. Unfortunately, we saw the majority of them go down, and now there's kind of a tier of $10, a tier of $20, and then there's still some of the mid-market regional players that are in that, you know, 30 to 50 dollars

• 27:09Speaker 03

  a month. And then you run into your sport club types with pool and basketball and stuff that is likely closer to 100.

• 27:16Speaker 04

  What did Planet Fitness realize? What did they change that allowed them to charge so little? Because my impression is that that's been a hugely successful story, and I may be wrong, but I've seen that pop up more and more in writing, like in business cases, things like that. So what did they recognize and do that was revolutionary or allowed them to grow so fast?

• 27:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we've talked about like retroactive narratives in the past. So the retroactive narrative for Planet is that they knew more than everyone else, and they were able to drive more volume at a price point, understanding and activity with a facility that could still handle all those people. The reality is they had a couple failing facilities and were trying to get as much out of them as they could. And they tried that first $19.99 and then $10 a month. And I think what they realized was that, or this is what I think, I don't know that anyone really knows why they work, but they are working and Planet is doing great. For most people, the only thing they have in their lives that is working towards a healthier

• 28:18Speaker 03

  lifestyle is that gym membership. So the question becomes, is it worth more to the member to continue paying the $10 a month than to just give up on their quest for a healthier lifestyle? So you have those people, and then you have the people that literally just, it's not worth their time to cancel at $10 a month, or they forget. But it's working. I don't know that it's great for the industry as a whole. For a long time, the industry, from an organizational standpoint, the Ursa's of the world, were kind of trying to shut out the Planets of the world and the lower-cost providers. But now, they can't. Now, the lower-cost providers are such a big part of the market, where they're approaching...

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Being bigger than the rest of the market combined. So we'll see where it goes. I think for a lot of people Planet Fitness is great. I mean, to the naked eye, it doesn't appear to be much different than most other facilities. The thing that I love about Planet is the somewhat cheesy, a lot of people would say, branding that they've done. They've done a lot of things over the years that people were like, "Why would they do that?" Purple. Yeah, the purple, the pizza on Fridays, the getting rid of dumbbells over 55 pounds. But they know who their beachhead user is and they market to that user. Well, the purple, there's an interesting story behind that too as well, right? As far as it's actually part of their business model? Yeah, I mean, I wrote an article when Planet IPO'd.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  I think it was 43% of their total gross revenue comes from the resale of commercial fitness equipment. So having been in the commercial fitness industry and selling commodity commercial fitness equipment for years, you know, at the beginning, I'm like, "Why is this stuff purple? This is like really ugly." And what I came to realize is that as a franchisee, you're mandated to buy equipment that falls in line with the franchise or guidelines. In the case of Planet Fitness, it requires you to buy purple equipment. Well, the purple elliptical machine that costs $34.99 is the exact same as the non-purple elliptical that costs $29.99. Just so happens that you're buying it from Planet, so Planet's making

• 30:29Speaker 03

  $500 on that unit. Awesome spark. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense and it's one of their key drivers from a revenue standpoint. Whether or not it's sustainable, who knows? But you find a Planet Fitness franchisee that might have 5,000 ellipticals paying the same price for them as the guy on the corner who might have 25 ellipticals. There was a great quote I saw, I think it was Paul Graham recently, that said...

• 30:56Speaker 04

  To raise a seed round, you just need to please investors, but to raise an A round, you need to please customers. So let's talk about how that's going to happen. So we've mentioned earlier the importance of maybe starting with more in-person relationship building type stuff with a coach and the fact that that can get phased out. And as you said, that I realized that that totally happened with me too, that when I did, I did CrossFit, for example, and the early stages, we just did it here in the basement of the building we're sitting in. So I wasn't actually at a gym, but we've got a gym here and he came to us and did a small group. And early on, that relationship was everything, right? And then I kind of phased him out and it became just a relationship over text,

• 31:36Speaker 04

  basically sending workouts, really straightforward. So talk about the customer experience. This word, when I talked to Andy Rackliff, the benchmark, one of the benchmark founders, he likes this word delight. Like he wants people that use a product to be delighted. And I'd love to hear the components of how you think about delight. Like how will, how will the experience, the product and the experience of being a ladder customer, or ladder coach, I should say, because it matters on both sides of the platform. How are you thinking about that early on? And how will you kind of test and experiment in trying to delight people?

• 32:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I guess we'll start with the interaction and then I can speak specifically to the consumer and then the producer. So the way that the product works now is one, a consumer, or I guess a prospect at that point, comes to the platform, they go through an assessment. And the assessment should take between 60 and 90 seconds. And it includes a wants-based assessment. So what type of coach the consumer is looking for, old, young, male, female, more of a cheerleader type, or more of an analytical type. And then we do our very best to leverage cognitive behavioral therapy geared questionnaire to uncover the needs of the consumer relative to their surpluses and/or deficits as it relates to exercise,

• 32:51Speaker 03

  nutrition, sleep and stress management. We use that information in combination with location to make a commoditized match. So we're using that information to match a consumer with one coach, the coach that we feel is best for them. Dig into why we chose to go with commoditized versus uncommoditized matchmaking.

• 33:11Speaker 04

  What would uncommoditized be, meaning like you get a menu or something?

• 33:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you'd have the ability to pick between coaches, right? So like you order an Uber, you want to get from point A to point B. You don't necessarily need to know who your coach or who your driver rather is, but probably most famously, we've seen what happened with TaskRabbit and their transition from a commoditized platform to an uncommoditized platform. There are a lot of reasons core to our business model and core to the consumer experience that we believe the commoditized feature will be very important for us, not only at the beginning, but down the road. Anyway, once the match is made, the engagement is driven from the coach to the consumer purely through an in-app messenger. It took us a while to get there. We started with some variations of other

• 33:58Speaker 03

  communication vehicles, streaming and call. And what we realized is that they require undevoted time, which drastically increases the logistics behind the interactions, which drastically increases the time it takes for a producer to service a consumer in any given month. Anything that requires undevoted time on behalf of either the consumer or the producer drastically increases the volume relative to time of that relationship. Now, that's not to say we won't look at adding those back down the road, but it would likely be an add-on where you're paying more for the time or you're getting FaceTime at the beginning of every month, for example. But back to the user flow, when the engagement is driven,

• 34:43Speaker 03

  the coach is then building a monthly fitness plan for the consumer and assigning a weekly promise. The promise is designed to drive keystone behavioral changes. So I either will or will not do something for one week, actually five days. And that is usually not geared towards exercise, but towards one of the other pillars of a healthy lifestyle, nutrition, sleep or stress management. From there, we're tracking all the data we can, both through wearables, Apple HealthKit, self-entry, which Populates a producer dashboard and the producer is driving communication, answering questions, giving feedback, encouragement, modifying workouts, so on and so forth throughout the course of the month.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  The process or plan lasts for one month and then it repeats itself. So that's the, as basic as I can put it, user flow. I believe that one of the most important things that a coach has to do is insert themselves in the decision-making pattern before the depletion of willpower reserves. So in the event that you don't live up to a promise, the coach is learning a lot, right? The coach is learning whether the promise was too strict or too hard. The coach is learning how the consumer looks at the promise and they might need to reinforce that. So as I think Alex talks about in your podcast a bit, rules and regulations are incredibly important to

• 36:12Speaker 03

  Enforcement. Yeah, platform business models. So you think about certain things that at the beginning and from the onset of companies might seem crazy like Twitter's character limit or, you know, the fact that you couldn't zoom on Instagram photos early on. But things like that ultimately go on to identify the model and drive the brand. And for us, promise is incredibly important. I believe it's the most important aspect of the overarching promise or process and always will be, even when we add other stakeholders potentially and other monikerms of coaching such as nutrition and so on and so forth. Driving engagement is everything because that's what's going to accelerate the relationship and that's what's going to drive the accountability.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  So we're constantly trying to find ways to prompt engagement and spark engagement, we like to say, because we think that does, you know, the two most important things for us. It makes the process more customized, right? Because the more the coach knows, the more information they have, the more data they have, the more coachable the consumer becomes. So the process becomes more customized, but you're also driving the strength of relationships. So the compliance to process likely increases. exponentially. So at the beginning, you know, we're really trying to work with our coaches to ask certain questions. And we don't necessarily know what all those questions are, but we're paying close attention to which questions are getting better answers.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  And we believe the sky is the limit relative to how we can offset, you know, the human to human engagement through different variations of machine learning and AI that make it easier for the engagement to take place. So we believe that as it relates to the health and wellness industry that is so focused on empathy. The best use cases for machine learning and AI are actually in enhancing the human to human relationship as opposed to replacing it.

• 38:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, you see that everywhere. And it's true in finance, too, that that there are these firms popping up that do a combination which are more successful than than one or the other, which is really interesting. Talk about the opportunity for coaches. So that that is a maybe the key early driving force is getting quality coaches. Sort of like Uber regulated their driving or drivers by making you rate them early on. I think it's interesting. I don't think you actually have are forced to rate them anymore, which is a change. But early on you had to. It was a two way rating system. So it sort of ensured quality both directions. So one, how do you recruit really good coaches? And two, given that obviously good bad coaches will make their way onto the platform. How do you keep? How do you get them out quickly?

• 38:54Speaker 03

  To start off, just to go over the existing ecosystem a little bit, there are about 350,000 health and wellness professionals in the US. And believe it or not, they're making just $11.57 per hour when you account for the fact that they're working over 11 hours per day. And they have on average about four hours of unused time during the course of any given day. So with that said, we firmly believe that a personal training certification doesn't make a good personal trainer. It definitely doesn't make a good digital coach. We don't yet know what personality traits and types make up a good digital coach. We'll find out. It won't take us that long. But at the beginning, we're getting our coaches from

• 39:36Speaker 03

  Our partnerships with the gyms. So gyms that we're partnering with are giving us explicit access to their coaches. We're also enabling non or coaches or trainers that aren't partnered or don't work for any of our gyms to join the platform, but only if referred from one of our existing coaches. So we're definitely trying to maintain a level of exclusivity for our coaches. And we believe that depending on how much time the coach has, a coach can can service roughly forty to sixty consumers in a given month. Again, depending on their schedule and how much time they have, but that's just on average. It should take a coach about sixty minutes to service a consumer in any given month, all of which is undivoted

• 40:20Speaker 03

  time for the most part. And that will go down exponentially at scale because the coach is able to actually store workouts they're creating. So not all workouts will be built from scratch, per se. If I'm training Patrick and I have a new client who has similar wants and needs to Patrick, I might just amend Patrick's plan to work for Tom, for example. So the time it takes to build plans will likely decrease.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  It's like, it reminds me of the GitHub example where a key component of the platform business model is providing tools in the middle, right? So come on the platform, we're going to make what you do easier and more scalable. That's like best example. So what, if any, I guess, rating service will there be? Or I guess you could, like a rating could almost be implicit in like who sticks around. Like if someone, if one coach has a bunch of people that aren't lasting at all, that that could just be information or data enough. But how have you thought about that in terms of the backend, once you've got a coach on board, making sure that the quality stays high?

• 41:20Speaker 03

  So we're not looking at just a general rating. We think that's a little too vague to really pull out any valuable insights. We are paying very close attention to certain dynamics of the relationship, like response time, like time in app, like a rating of a plan, for example. As we grow, we'll be able to, again, make better matches. So if we find out that the consumer wants response time... of two minutes, we will then be able to match them with a coach who has an average response time of two minutes. Whereas if a consumer is more concerned with the complexity of a workout plan than they are with response time, then we know that and we can do that

• 42:03Speaker 03

  as well. We think that's super important for just driving utility to the consumer, making it worthwhile for the coach. But also as we get bigger and as the opportunity expands, giving more information to referring entities and potentially payers as well. Because we know that a large corporation or a physician group would be a heck of a lot more likely to use our platform as a referring agent if they actually have data and insight into who the coaches are going to be, as opposed to just, hey, use this platform and the platform matches with you with a coach. The referring entity, whether it's a gym, a physician group, a corporation, can actually pre-vet the trainers that will be available to the people being

• 42:47Speaker 03

  referred. Now, that gets really special when we start to talk about different subsets of critical care conditions, for example, when we can actually prove that Cecilia has a proven track record of working with people who are at risk of getting type 2 diabetes or who have lupus or digestive discomfort, for example. So that's where, you know, we believe that the data compounds and gets really special.

• 43:11Speaker 04

  How do you think about the value of the data? So, we're in the stage now where software is easy, right? Like, it's very easy to build, change, pivot around software. So what become really valuable in these platform companies is the networks, because networks are enormous moats, very hard to bust once they're big. And data is another kind of key thing that can be packaged, it can be sold, it can be used to do other things that you never expected. So what kind of data, or how are you thinking about collecting data and how that might be part of the business side of this?

• 43:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so when I think about data, at this point, we have more and more access to it, and the question becomes, what are you going to do with it? Our objective is to use it to enhance the experience for all of our stakeholders, potentially drive more stakeholders into the equation. But we're very focused on the producers at the beginning. We think that health and wellness professionals are very underserved. One of our main core values is working for health and wellness professionals to enable them to better serve more people. So we're doing a lot of stuff with them on the scheduling front, making their lives easier. We're allowing them to work with their clients free of charge, which is great for us because

• 44:26Speaker 03

  hopefully it gets them in-app more, but it also will likely be able to drive incredibly powerful trigger. So if we find out that you're trending in a certain way relative to nutrition around mid-morning on mid-weekdays, we can actually drive messaging to the coach that prompts them to drive communication to the consumer. So we're not yet really thinking about data and how it might be important externally, though in the digital coaching space, in a variety of different verticals, we've seen

• 45:07Speaker 03

  data plays where pharmaceutical companies are buying digital coaching companies to drive communication that increases medication compliance, for example. Now, we will likely be put in positions where we have the opportunity to work with some companies like that, but that's not really on our radar. At the beginning, we just want to aggregate the data that's already there between us and the device, and the consumer, and the producer, also from the gym, to improve the core competency of the coaches, improve the latter user slash gym member experience, improve the consumer gym member trainer experience.

• 45:49Speaker 03

  There's all these pre-existing relationships that through productizing them, we now have access to a tremendous amount of data, and we just want to use it to make all of our existing stakeholders' lives easier and better.

• 46:04Speaker 04

  How's it going to work with gyms? So, one of my favorite things in the platform idea is tapping or using existing networks rather than trying to start from scratch. And obviously, there's an enormous network of gyms and the trainers who are so key here, the coaches who are so key. A lot of them are operating in that ecosystem. So what does that look like early days? How do you partner with them at a conversation? Actually, the podcast that's coming out, I guess, next couple of days on Tuesday, talks about this idea of complementary assets. So like the ability of a new business to use existing assets outside of its own asset base as net positives for itself. And gyms seem like the obvious one here. So, how do you think, and you mentioned your dad knows all the gym owners, you know all

• 46:49Speaker 04

  the gym owners. It's an ecosystem and a network that's super valuable, that sounds like everyone can benefit from this idea. So, how do you think about gym partners? How are you going to cultivate those relationships? How will it work early days? Kind of the details around the gyms would be really, really interesting.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  Yes. So, the relationship with the gyms is something that I paid really close attention to. I didn't believe that any business model even like this could work without the buy-in of the gym. So, we were very thoughtful about how we approached the gym owners and how we were able to bring them into the mix. So, where we're at now is we're creating partnerships with health clubs, and we've partnered with some of the largest health clubs in the country who are giving us explicit access to their trainers, but also working with us to market our solution to their non-training members. So, the 90% of their members who aren't working with the trainer, as well as all their former and prospective members.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  So, assuming the industry average of a 50% annual attrition rate, a health club that has 3,000 members at any given time, but has been in business for 10 years, likely has access to between 175 and 200,000 people or data points that at one time they paid to acquire, but they're only monetizing 3,000 of them. So, there's a huge opportunity for the gyms there. And when you look at the health club business, aside from real estate, the only KPI That actually matter are average dues per month and average dues per member per month. So we know that a health club that charges an average order volume of $20 will likely

• 48:27Speaker 03

  have an average dues per member per month of around $23 and the majority of that delta comes from the 10% that are buying training because there aren't a heck of a lot of other revenue streams that account for much. We know that retail accounts for roughly 40 to 50 basis points. So the gyms have a very difficult time further monetizing their members above whatever the average dues per month is. Our platform includes a rev share to our partner gyms in which case we're driving what could be an additional $5 per month, which for a health club that's charging $20 per month, that incremental revenue could be incredibly significant. But more importantly, it's creating relationships that make the

• 49:10Speaker 03

  consumer more likely to buy in-person training, so potentially increasing the club's personal training penetration. And most importantly, it's just creating genuine engagement, which creates a much higher lifetime value member. We know that the average lifetime value of an engaged gym member is just over 60 months, whereas an unengaged member is just under nine months.

• 49:31Speaker 04

  Let's talk a bit more about CrossFit because it's it's an interesting lens through which to think about both the community and the business side. So you mentioned there are elements that maybe you don't like. Obviously, there's community elements that are undeniable. I actually want to focus on the, to start, the business things that you think may not be sustainable. Obviously, that's relevant for how you're thinking about building ladder. So what is their business model? I'm not sure I even know it. I think it's a franchise model, but I'm not sure. What is their business model? How has it grown or changed over time? And what what is and is not sustainable about it?

• 50:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so CrossFit is actually like a license model. So if it was a franchise model, I would be a lot more bullish on the long-term sustainability. But one of the issues that I've seen, and at my last company, we worked with CrossFit facilities almost exclusively, and we were able to partner with about 25% of them. Like a year and a half. So we got really into the weeds of how they run their businesses. And one of the issues that we saw is that the number of boxes or physical locations was growing exponentially faster than the number of CrossFit members. The barrier of entry to open a CrossFit box is very low. So the community is creating a tremendous amount of competition that is not great for any of the individual stores.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  So you take a CrossFit box in, you know, a certain location that was early and got up to a couple hundred members. And of those couple hundred people that were there at the peak, 50 of them became literally obsessed with CrossFit. And three or four of them opened their own box or store. And they weren't willing to move to do so. So now all of a sudden, you know, that actual group of 200 people is spread out between five different stores. And it's tough because there's no aftermarket. There's no liquidity or ending for an owner. If you're not willing to put the hours in to operate it, there's not a heck of a lot

• 51:34Speaker 03

  of money to be made. So opening one up, you're kind of just buying yourself a job with a heck of a lot more exposure than you'd get if you were to just get a job. And there's a lot of liability there. So I'm not all that bullish on the long-term prospects on the business side. I think at last count, there were just over a million and a half CrossFit users or members globally, which if you look at that against the rest of the commercial fitness industry is, you know, I think there's about that many gym members in Massachusetts alone. So it's not nearly as big as a lot of people think it is.

• 52:16Speaker 03

  Yet we see the CrossFit Games on TV and everyone knows what it is because it is so dynamic and it is so different. When you see regular people push themselves to these crazy limits and the shape physically that it gets people in is undeniable. But the thing that I love about CrossFit is that You know, from a, from a health and wellness business standpoint, the name of the game is, is retention because you have to keep people long enough so that they can see results. And there's a tipping point when people actually start to see physical changes to their body, they start to become addicted. And the question becomes, how, how can you keep them long enough to, to get them to a point where they can actually see those physical changes?

• 53:00Speaker 03

  Cause it takes, you know, three to five months. So CrossFit has been able to create that community, which in my opinion drives a level of accountability that is second to none and keeps people a little longer than most other applications have. And then they truly do become addicted. Their whole friend groups change and the way they eat and literally the way they live their lives. If you have ever, for me, I remember not seeing people that I went to college with in, you know, a decade and then they got into CrossFit. And it's like a totally different person. They don't look anything like they did before. They don't act anything like they did before.

• 53:37Speaker 03

  So the fact that a small business that's less than 20 years old, I think, can actually have that effect on people is, is pretty significant.

• 53:46Speaker 04

  So talk about the difference between the function and attractiveness of a franchise model versus a license model. I'm just curious because that'll become relevant again when we talk about gyms a little bit later, I think.

• 53:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think if they had, if they had gone with a franchise model where the barrier of entry was a little higher and there was some protection relative to territory and there was more structure relative to the, the operational structure of the businesses, they would have been able to create a brand that was a little more palatable to people. They don't give you a heck of a lot of guidance. You get a certification, you pay a certain amount of money and you get that CrossFit brand and you can put it on.

• 54:24Speaker 04

  It's basically, the license model is basically paying them to be able to use the name. I mean, there's really nothing more to it than that.

• 54:30Speaker 03

  Correct. You don't have to buy anything that they tell you to buy. You don't have to use any products they tell you to use.

• 54:37Speaker 04

  Whereas the franchise version would be. Like you said, maybe more expensive, you've got to buy this, this is your menu of options for equipment, we sell it to you, just more higher touch.

• 54:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they also, in most franchise situations, teach you how to run the business. They tell you what you should expect and work with you to actually operate, whereas in CrossFit, you're buying the right to use the name and you're kind of sent off to your own devices, which in a lot of ways, I think, has accelerated the early growth because the franchisor, CrossFit, has learned a lot from their successful franchisees. But in doing that, they, they put a lot of other franchise, or licensees, in a position where it would have been tough for them to succeed. They probably didn't have the wherewithal to operate a business at that time. And I think that's tough. I've seen a lot of CrossFit

• 55:28Speaker 03

  box owners that have, you know, put a lot of money and effort and time into their businesses, and the passion wasn't enough to create a sustainable business, just because they had never been in a situation like that and didn't have the operational expertise that they probably would have needed.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  Talk about audience building. So, the hardest days for any platform company are the early ones, kind of pre-scale. Are you going to focus on particular geographies to start, kind of go city by city, like Peter Thiel suggests, you know, start in a niche market and completely scale out there and own it, and then kind of move laterally? What will be the strategy there? And whether or not it's in one small market first, or a broader strategy first, what will be the methods for acquiring customers, for building an audience? What types of acquisition strategies do you think will work?

• 56:15Speaker 03

  The audience building is just so important to me, right? I come from a background of buying something for one and selling it for two, and not being an engineer, or previously not being a technologist. I was always fascinated with, you know, people build these products and hope people use them. And that was never how we looked at it. We always knew the product had to be second to none, but we didn't believe that was enough. So, the audience building strategy is fairly intricate for us. Working with the health clubs enables us to create a locally based supply and demand, and we know that in platform business models, that's incredibly important. You have the Chicken and the egg for Uber. If there aren't enough drivers at the beginning, the riders can't get picked up in an ample amount of time. If there aren't enough riders, the drivers can't make enough money.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  So a lot of companies subsidize producer compensation at the beginning. We believe we have a very unique opportunity to solve this from the onset by partnering with the gym. So we will have somewhat of a geographic approach in that we're Boston based. So the majority of our boots on the ground marketing initiatives will take place in Boston. And we're also very closely tied to New York, so we'll roll out there secondly. But we also have other parts of the country where we have health club chain partners like Little Rock, Arkansas, which we probably never would have gotten to in the first maybe couple of years.

• 57:37Speaker 03

  But we have a relationship there with a health club chain that services the overwhelming majority of members and trainers in the given market. So we can roll out there as well. So it's a combination of rolling out city by city, but also rolling out gym partner by gym partner.

• 57:54Speaker 04

  When will that happen? So what's the timeline for, let's say, trying to build a, I'll call it like a liquid market where, you know, it's easy to, the supply, demand balance will be there at some sort of scale. So let's say, let's pick Boston, for example, where someone in Boston that's a consumer that wants to find a coach can do that. And it won't be, there will be no friction in terms of quick matching, a liquid market meeting. There's different types of coaches. I want to get back to some of the questions that you ask people to match them to a coach. I think people will just be really interested in like what you care about when trying to find a good coach for them in terms of outside of the gym strategy. So you've got a captive base to begin with, which is a big advantage early on.

• 58:37Speaker 04

  But for just the, you know, Joe Blow on the street that doesn't have any sort of affiliation with a gym, someone that, you know, might be interested in training or has thought about it, kind of your target, your target consumer, right? That you want to convert, maybe even bring into the gym ecosystem for one of your partners. How are you going to get their attention? So what's the, what's the early strategy there?

• 58:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, so our direct-to-consumer audience building strategy from the onset will be mostly through social, but also through a referral engine. Given that we are letting our coaches work with their existing clients free of charge, we do believe that will turn into a viral coefficient to some extent. The average personal trainer in the US has about 18 clients at any given time, and they're only retaining them for, like I mentioned, about 14 weeks. So if you look at a trainer that's been training for 10 years, they likely have access to a pretty significant pool of people. And we're working with them in a lot of different ways to seamlessly bring on not only their existing clients, but also their former clients as well.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  And then, like any delightful product, just trying to drive a referral engine through our satisfied users. So we do have to pay attention to the growth relative to consumers and producers, though we believe we have a unique opportunity to manage that better than most platforms. We can't just go gangbusters on the consumer side from the onset. So we do have a lot to learn at the beginning. We believe we know what data points we should be paying attention to, and we've set up the product in a way that gives us an incredible amount of transparency to those things. But at the beginning, before we can actually take the training wheels off and let platforms

• 1:00:20Speaker 03

  do what they do, which is just scale and drive, network effects and compound, we need to make sure the product is where it needs to be.

• 1:00:28Speaker 04

  Who are the big competitors, people that have started? I mentioned this to someone, they're like, "Oh, it looks like Trainerize," or something that they use. Who are the competitors that have attacked some dimension of this whole thing? What have they gotten right and what have they gotten wrong?

• 1:00:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's probably 10 different companies that are still in the space. Maybe another 10 have entered it and since left. On the nutrition side, there are a couple of companies. Vida is doing a good job. Noom is doing a good job. They're both working with a different producer set. They're working with registered dietitians and nutritionists. Photocracy is doing something similar. They were acquired about a year and a half ago, though they're not making commoditized matches. No one is working with the commercial fitness industry. Trainerize is cool. I like what they're doing. However, their business model is a lot different than ours. They charge the coach. So... We don't necessarily think that's as scalable. We don't think coaches are the best

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  salespeople. So if you're tasking coaches with selling the opportunity, we think you're taking them away from their core competency. So as it relates to our model, allowing coaches to work with their existing clients for free and then marketing to the consumer to drive them more clients, first on a digital side and potentially on the in-person side as well, and doing that with the acceptance of and ability to work with the commercial fitness industry who has access to not only the majority of the coaches, but also the overwhelming majority of prospective users or consumers as well. So there are some competitors in the space. I believe our biggest competitor hasn't been born yet as a company that we'll

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  see come about down the road, which we're excited for. I think that's, you know, something that's inevitable. But yeah, that's how I look at it.

• 1:02:19Speaker 04

  What do you think about gyms themselves as a potential competitor? Like, why hasn't a gym done this? I'm always interested in the, back to that idea of complementary assets, that when you're using a complementary asset like, like a gym in this case, as part of your business model. And if you're, almost like if you're too successful, or your margins look too good, why wouldn't they just say, well, we're just gonna do this ourselves? So do you think that gyms, which are gonna be, and obviously, early boon, could become a threat or a competitor down the line?

• 1:02:51Speaker 03

  I think there will eventually be gyms that try and do this. We've already had some conversations where the gym owner says, well, why don't I just do this? My response is always, go for it. Platform business models need real massive scale for network effects to come into play, or they're not cool. They don't work like they can. So there isn't a gym or gym chain that is big enough, in my opinion. With that said, there are a couple that I know are gonna try and do it. And I think there's an asset to be created there that can potentially add value to the gym, but not necessarily as much value to the producer and/or consumer. Because-

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  You know, I always look at Instacart and what they've been able to do with Whole Foods, though with the recent Amazon deal. Who knows what happens there? But the product at scale has to get inherently better to both sides of the fence. And I don't know that the gyms have access to enough scale to enable that. So I envision a lot of them trying. But I think if we build the brand that we're trying to build and transparently show these gym owners that we actually exist to make their lives better and easier, we can stay the course and continue working with the industry because that's very important to us.

• 1:04:09Speaker 04

  How do you think about brand? Like, this is something I think about often, especially in conversations in the venture world, where early on, that's kind of one of the variables you can control most, or at least be really thoughtful about. So how do you think about, first, before we get to Ladder, like generically, what does brand mean to you? Like, how would you define it? And then, how have you been deliberate about trying to shape Ladder's brand early on?

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think brand is arguably the most important, though most difficult, to create aspect of any business. And I think the brand is ultimately how people identify with who you are, what you're doing, and why you're doing it. It's interesting because in the fitness industry as a whole, both commercially and direct to consumer, we see brands market themselves in certain ways through bodybuilders and bikini models. And there is so much low-hanging fruit. People care about their health and wellness, or at least how they look. So at times, it can be somewhat easy to transact opportunities into the space. And I think the result of that is a shortage of great brands.

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  We definitely, I often say, if you look at the Health Club spectrum with Equinox on the far right and Planet on the far left, we think we fit nicely in the middle. When we look at the product we're trying to build...

• 1:05:31Speaker 04

  What has been your favorite story thus far? So Ladder is two years old, right? What's been the, if you had to like hone in on one individual experience or story, what's been most memorable so far?

• 1:05:43Speaker 03

  So that's tough. I honestly just love the process, like the good stuff and the bad. This part of it and people that I spend a lot of time with often say like, don't forget these times because you'll never have them again. No matter how big the company gets, this will always be probably the most special part of the company because right now, Ladder is not much more than an extension of my team and myself. One of the things on the fundraising side that I think is interesting is that before you have a product, so now we've gone through a few betas and we've got a few hundred users

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  and we have a team, but at the very beginning, when you're telling people your dream and you're articulating the story, now people will tell you that business isn't personal, but it's so personal because if someone doesn't want to invest or help, whether that's time or money, that's basically them saying, I don't think you're going to be successful. Which, you know, you can get pissed or you can ask them why and try and learn, but I'd be lying if I told you that I don't have a list in the back of my head of people that...

• 1:06:57Speaker 04

  You want to prove wrong.

• 1:06:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just like the people that didn't give me at least the time to help and not necessarily with money, right? You try and raise capital and I have a very unique view on raising capital, especially from angels. Someone's giving you money that is theirs and they can do anything with it. So I don't necessarily get upset if people don't invest. What does cause people to go on that list is if they won't give me the time or the mind share to actually consider the opportunity and give me feedback, good or bad, because even if it's bad feedback, you have the opportunity to, you know, correct that and build a relationship. And I think that...

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  So much of this is about building a team and building a group of people that you can learn from and communicate with. So I guess the whole process is great. It's very competitive, which I love. I don't know that I could pick one specific thing or moment.

• 1:08:00Speaker 04

  I love it. Well, what we're going to do is chronicle this process, right? And watch a company try to scale, which, you know, there's such an appetite for this nowadays. I certainly feel it listening to something like How I Built This every week. And everyone watches Shark Tank. And I think there's this dynamicism and this spirit that people want to watch something like this grow. And to my knowledge, there hasn't been something like this that's chronicled that growth. So this will be part of kind of an early series of these things where we learn about business, we learn about new kinds of business models, a particular industry, in this case, the healthcare, fitness, wellness one. This is going to be a blast. So thanks for round one.

• 1:08:44Speaker 04

  Hey, everyone. Patrick here again. To find more episodes of Invest Like the Best, go to investorfieldguide.com/podcast. If you're a book lover, you can also sign up for my book club at investorfieldguide.com/bookclub. After you sign up, you'll receive a full investor curriculum right away, and then three to four suggestions of new books every month. You can also follow me on Twitter, @Patrick_OShag, O-S-H-A-G. If you enjoy the show, please leave a quick review for us on iTunes, which will help more people discover Invest Like the Best. Thanks so much for listening.