#71 with Nick Bare - Monthly vs Annual Subscription Billing, Fitness Events Post-COVID & Making Content To Build $10M+ Biz

this episode is brought to you by super sides so super side dot com if you need something designed quickly go to super side dot com give them a try we are back this is the takeoff nick we have a guest today nick bear sean doesn't know much about nick nick i will i'm gonna say each other in real life no no no i'm a fan i'm a huge fan of his and so nick we we do this podcast and it's got a great listeners leadership and people reach out to me all the time and they think they know me because i'm in their ears and i feel the same thing about you except i get to see you because you're a big youtuber nick you wanna kinda get background about who you are yeah so i'm an entrepreneur based out of right outside of austin texas army veteran in so i i started my business in two thousand twelve when i was in college on a western pennsylvania i started at two thousand twelve was studying and i started bayer performance nutrition which is a sports nutrition dietary supplement company knowing app absolutely nothing about business and thinking that i knew it all and then a short year after starting my business i joined the military went active duty the army where i then got stationed in fort ben georgia for a year completed the us army rangers school airborne school in infantry officer basic course and then got sent to fort texas which landed me in texas from pennsylvania and from there i started using social media building social media platforms scaling my brand long story short i'd transition out of the military in two thousand seventeen and we've scaled our company from making twenty thousand dollars the first year to now making on track for eight figures this year that's create and so while you were in the military you were creating content you were like a youtuber slash soldier yeah man i i like to think myself as like the pioneer of military youtubers and it wasn't really by by like choice i started creating content on youtube's documenting training and nutrition and it wasn't to my unit got sent to south korea for a nine month rotation i was like well i guess i either stop doing all of this stuff or i take my cameras with me in south korea and that's where people really started getting insight of my military lifestyle because up until that point i kept it separate but it was almost forced to merge and at the time there's no one else really doing it at least said i know of and it really just picked up and we're were the people around you were they supportive of it were they like hey what are you doing this is not about youtube right now what was the reaction you got from kinda of your peers or your kinda leadership yeah i mean i kept it very separate so when i was at work i can only count like on my hand a few times that i ever took like a gopro to like to work but i would work be like i would work on my business and youtube and stuff before going to pt in the morning before six am and then as soon as worked was over like five or six pm if we weren't in the field when i was back work on my youtube channel on my business so i kept it pretty separate but my my platoon loved it because when i was a platoon leader in the infantry i forty guys in my platoon and i was creating these videos on youtube and they were in the videos so all their friends from across the country they made the army but like y guys i'm seeing you in guy's youtube videos and they loved it they loved seeing the journey in the process so they were super supportive upper level leadership didn't really feel the same way but like my guys my guys in my platoon they loved it okay that's cool and so and then sam do you do you use this product do you take his product yeah so his product is two things so he has the the nutrition business which i have ordered or i'm i have and i'm in the process of or ordering more from him but the way that i discovered nick was through youtube have you seen his youtube channels sean i haven't seen any should i look at one right now he's amazing nick's awesome so nick what do you have like three hundred and fifty or five hundred thousand subscribers subscribers i just crossed four hundred thousand like last week okay so sean nick's like a hundred and ninety four pounds right i know this that's because i've i watch him a lot he used to weigh like two hundred and fifty two hundred twenty still like ripped like a about like like a good two twenty or whatever you used weigh and he would post these videos of like two hundred twenty pound guy runs a six minute mile yeah i'm looking at the i'm looking at your youtube channel right now and you're like super jacked are you this jack right now or was this like like i can't you know zoom zoom doesn't do you get too many favors right i i i have shoulders i have no pump right now no i mean i used to wait two hundred twenty two hundred thirty pounds and the focus was just put on size and strength this was like body building power thing and then in the past like a year and a half i transitioned more to endurance stuff so i trained for my first iron ironman i did an iron ironman triathlon last november and now i'm training to qualify for the ball marathon so over that journey i have lost like thirty pounds and i maintained some size mean i'm nowhere even i'm not close as strong as and big as i used to be but he's still huge sean he's so very big how did your channel like dip big was it just a steady climb or were there some like videos that went viral or something that lit let it take off yeah i mean for the first two for the first two years it was very gradual like the first two years and i gained thirty thousand subscribers and this was just like fitness information training information diet information and then when i went to south korea what happened there was this one day it was like it was a a week before i had to go to the field with the military for a month so we were gonna be gone for a month i start filming this video i was like know i'm just gonna film like a day in my life so i just carry my small camera ralph me i filmed my pt session and i film what i'm eating i interview my platoon sergeant some my platoon and i just like film this video called day in life of an opinion leader and i edited it up and i post it and within like thirty days that video went to like a million views but was it was crazy was a correlation between subscribers and views so it gained a million views which now is it's nothing like people gain a million views on videos all the time but that that million view video gained me like fifty thousand subscribers in thirty days so my channel went from thirty thousand eighty thousand in like a month and so sean you asked if i use his stuff i watch his videos every five day i don't know how you have a like two or three a week it's like yeah about two a week right now so i watched all of his videos and i discovered him a year ago sean do you remember how i was training for that ironman like a few months ago yeah so i i'm like i'm not ripped like nick but i wait a fair bit i weighed two to ten pounds and i was like i can't do this i weighed too much like i gotta and so i saw his i saw that he was trading for it as well and i really got into it but then i saw that he was in austin so nick my company the hustle we have our most of our employees at this point are now in austin and i was like doing research and i called my friend noah ka and i was like no do you know this guy nick he's the best and so anyway i have like back channel then i've learned a lot about and then i also learned about bear nutrition his company and so i've learned a fair bit about this guy that's why i said that i feel like i know know him even though we've never actually met at yeah small world i yeah i know i know know pretty well small world and just so i understand so you did the youtube channel you built the content first and the the actual supplements brand second or the or they were happening at the same time no so i started my supplement company two thousand twelve i didn't start social media until two thousand fourteen so i see i think that that kinda like blows people's mind now because you typically like you'll see people let's start companies a lot of times in social media they build this audience and then they say how do i monetize him well i created the company first so like i i created my supply first and i eyes okay have no demand for the supply how do i create demand since two thousand fourteen when i started building social media platforms out gotcha and so with the supplement company you know there's a lot of these out there right there's like probably it's probably one of the most competitive categories is sort of health and fitness you know supplements and vitamins and protein shakes and all that good stuff pre workout post workout so what was your thinking at the time you're you said you're you're in college or you're you're sort pretty young at the time why start a new company and what made you think this could actually work yeah so i was i was studying nutrition in college i was on an army rot scholarship i remember being a freshman in college and my buddies in the dorms had no money left in our bank account so all we wanna do is buy pre workout to go to the gym so we decided our alright we're gonna save up we're each gonna save about thirty dollars we're gonna pitch it in and we're gonna buy these ingredients in bulk and we're gonna mix up our own pre workout so here i am in the dorms freshman in year i have this food scale in my living or in my room on my next to my bed and i've always white powder some ingredients so i'm mixing up these white powder on this food scale and then kids would become in my dorm i'd i'd give them a bag of white powder this pre count looked like i was dealing drugs on my yeah looks like i'm dealing drugs out in my college department i just i loved sports performance nutrition and i love the supplement space so that's how it started that's how i started to make my own stuff and then it was much where did your first stuff come from but my first actual production order was from california but when i used to make my own stuff in the dorms i would just buy like bulk cr bulk caffeine from like supplement other supplement companies that sold single ingredients but between my junior senior of college i was like i i'm gonna turn this into a company so i found a contract manufacturer based on a california and i took it a twenty thousand dollar loan and i i'd i placed a production order for supplements built the website myself did all like the promo stuff by myself the advertising the the the logistics of packing it everyone's everything was done out of my college department but that's how it all started like that's how i got into it and what's your revenue now you said eight figure so north nor a million a month month yeah yeah we're on track like twelve twelve million this year when you when you launch this thing some businesses just work straight out the gate and then others most of them i would say don't and so you know you take the twenty thousand dollar loan you do all this work which category were you in it works right away or did not work right away away yeah so i my plan was i told my dad i said i'm gonna make a million dollars a year one and he got his last man i sent all these bottles of pre workout to like youtubers and fitness fitness influencers at the time which is a completely different term in two thousand twelve and i thought if they would i thought hey these guys have a hundred thousand followers on youtube so if they make a video about it at least maybe a thousand those people will buy this stuff so i sent it to the the fitness youtubers they like do a half ass kinda like posting about it i launched the company and like literally zero sales come in so year one was twenty thousand dollars in revenue after just offering like fifty percent off discounts all the time to start excited to i'd bills to pay year two was twenty thousand dollars in revenue year three was twenty thousand dollars in revenue so there's no growth first three years but it was a crazy first three years because i launched this company a year before going to duty military so i was in and out of the the field training all the time so if this was your main thing you might not have stuck with it but you were able to you kept it going while you're were in the military though yeah i kept the going while was in the military i mean i was gone so much i mean the the one the one that i was in with the military it was a seventeen week course i think nine of those weeks i was gone just in the in the woods training and so i went through ranger school i was gone for four and a half months there so i was in and out of training all the time but i was trying to grow the company whenever i had the the opportunity on twenty k in sales what's your typical margins not including if you not including payroll just like your contribution margin on these things i was in the red den because i was pretty much selling products at cost because the discounts i was offering i was just trying to move inventory because i had guides some bills to pay and then i was spending money on marketing which i had no idea what i doing marketing so my roi was like zero on the money i was spending and i kept trying to invest all the money we were making back into the brand so really like i mean i didn't pay myself personally until two thousand seventeen i built the brand for five years before i took any money from it what about now so on a million in dollars in sales these types of businesses what what can your typical contribution margin be after expenses with overhead just the hard good just add just your fixed or your just like the the growth here cost so after the yeah after cogs after shipping yeah we can have roughly sixty percent profit margins and then so and then you then you gotta take care of your people and your marketing well our but do you guys do you guys spend any on marketing now yeah we do i mean we didn't start spending money on marketing until two thousand seventeen that's when we first started running paid ads up until that point i mean we made our first million in two thousand seventeen and that was all organic and then at that point is when we started spending some money on on marketing but i mean the only marketing we do facebook instagram ads email marketing and then like athletes or ambassadors seo yeah because i would i would think that at this point you guys i would imagine i mean i i definitely think you'd wanna spend on marketing if you could spend profit but would think that the majority of your sales are coming from your youtube channel they were for a while but we've now like last year our brand now today is a completely different brand than it was last year last year if you would talk to our customer base a lot of them would say yeah i know who nick barry is but i think a lot of our customers now actually don't know who i am which is the way i want great this yeah it's where i wanted to go so i'm happy with that that kinda transition in an evolution and what was the turning point so three years this business kinda sucks you know if you're my brother i'm talking to you and be like hey man maybe we should wrap this thing up this is not working and then you know eventually it does turn around and now you guys doing a figure so what was the turning point where did it go from a crappy business to a not so crappy business it was actually when i was i was in south korea so when i had to south korea for a nine month rotation we were making about two thousand dollars a month two to three thousand dollars month in revenue and i told myself by the time i leave i wanna make ten thousand dollars a month in revenue that was my goal so we had a lot of downtime over there i told myself i'm not watching any movies no tv and no like leisure stuff every waking moment outside of work with the military was gonna be spent learning how to market how to create videos how to edit i told myself how to code a website i read books listen podcast and within the first ninety days of being in south korea we went from two thousand dollars a month in revenue to ten thousand dollars a month in revenue and while i was there i did a small re brand of the company with new labels new logos a new website i built while i was there so the re brand helped but it was just learning the ins outs of business that i didn't know up until that point so nick something that we basically this whole podcast had started because sean and i have started and sold some things before like companies and we also angel invest a fair bit and eventually what we started doing was we just like started r on the various companies and opportunities that we're seeing in the market and so i wanna do that with you but before we get to that where sean and i live in silicon valley and this isn't necessarily how i live or we in my business we've not raised any venture capital but most people raise a lot of money not i mean boot bootstrapping which basically is normal for how to start a company that's not normal where we live have you ever considered raising money and what has been your thought process between of not doing that so far so far yeah we i mean like i said two thousand twelve i took on a twenty thousand dollar loan which was my first initial funding two thousand seventeen we grew seventeen hundred percent or seven sorry seven seven hundred fifty percent we grew in two thousand seventeen so at that point is where we started running into inventory issues because for example i to place it a production order for inventory and that is a twelve week lead time so at the time i didn't have established relations really with manufacturers so i had no terms so i'd put fifty percent down the inventory and when it's shipped i pay it off i pay off all the inventory before it got to us what was happening it was because we were growing so fast i would get that inventory in i would tell out of it in five to seven days and then it'd would be eleven weeks until i had more inventory so we were constantly out of inventory we're pissing off all of our customers cash flow was like i was pulling my hair out at night know i was like so stressed out so they're out we're growing we're making money but cash flow was so tight because we were scaling and we slowly dug out of that just nationally and organically just by stacking some production orders timing inventory getting control inventory more and we kind of set ourselves up for success there there were some points after that with with growth because we've essentially doubled revenue year over year after after twenty thousand seventeen that i thought about taking some investors on and we've had the opportunity to but what i actually ended up doing was creating systems and other services that aren't product based so like subscription services or like virtual services that are essentially just hundred percent profit margins that are we're using to internally fund the growth of the brand so what what are the what yeah best one of those so training last like three years of total online training programs which are pdf downloads we're about to launch our app within the bp vpn app which is a subscription based training platform called braces up training and then launching a online nutrition course here shortly so all of those because like really no overhead associated with them we're using to fund the growth of bear performance nutrition because i i personally at this point why but why why why not just only do that because because i love the project based business i love i i love i love vpn i love like the employees we have of the team of the culture in the community like i could never give up bp vpn do you think any of those could be the same size or bigger or do you think they inherently might be smaller but good cash good cash cows for you to fund the business i think they the they could be the same size if not bigger yeah sean i what dude his you're i've been researching a lot of these influencers that create fitness apps they crush it they crush it at do you know who kayla it's new is it seems yeah we we both have lives that subscribe a hundred bucks a year to her oh my god it's crazy how big that is and then i also was researching another one you know did diamond dallas page yeah d of course yeah do you know how do you know so you know what is stick now is right no no no what okay so he diamond dallas page is a wrestler from the nineties and probably eighties even and he's he might be sixty five now and he has a yoga training program and a lot of veterans use it a lot of man like manly men use it to rehab themselves and people love it and he charges i think fifty dollars for three months and it looks wonderful like i i'm i almost bought it the other day i might buy it but these these like training programs i imagine the churn is pretty high but these training programs and these apps they seem relatively to build they seem like awesome businesses if you can prevent churn yeah right next i think a lot of people do it they do it wrong a lot of people rush it and then they don't put any they especially in the fitness industry people just wanna turn turn out all these products and push them out as fast as possible so like someone that's not qualified to create a fitness based product or a nutrition based product we'll do it because they i think they're qualified which is it's a massive liability and so like for example with with our training platform embrace up training the subscription we hired someone who who's fully certified strength conditioning certified green grey to build these programs for us because as much education experience i have with training i don't have all the certifications that that make me credible to you know two dude when you're jacked that's the certification for do you know how to train well that's the thing that's that's that's that's what i consider certification and that's what most people do but i some people would just have great genetics and like they don't have the is that you did you have great genetics were you just naturally pretty ripped i mean me my brother and my dad we like the bear family it's it's like grass fed farmer from central pennsylvania so we got some good we have some good genetics but dude i'm like like fed farmer from india it's like man we're we're we're screwed it it what did you build your pla this platform on it okay and your same platform is it gonna be an an app what is it gonna be what which one so your training he thinks he's saying did you hire a developer did you use some note code tools how did are you building the fitness app yeah the the fitness app was built from scratch as a developer here in austin so we've been working on that for the past man eight months and it's not but it's not launching officially till this summer however we launched it early for free during covid nineteen and just made a home training portion of it so like day one we had like ninety five hundred downloads on that because it's it's free and it's like home training so like that value we're offering this people were they're people were taking advantage of it they love it what's your niche gonna be for that is it gonna be like people who are like i don't know how i don't know the politically correct way to grab it but like manly men who are like buff or or like heads is it yeah are like what nerds nerds who wanna get fit women who wanna lose weight like what's your thing it's it's it's geared towards a functional like hybrid athlete so it's it's the way i train like going to the gym throwing weights around strength training running up to ten miles doing some hikes it it's it's a combination of a hybrid style training that's i mean it's called embrace socket it's it's gonna be difficult it's not necessarily a beginner program but i'd say more so intermediate to advanced and what will you charge for this thirty dollars a month dude this is gonna make so much more money than profit like so much more money than protein yeah but our our goal is we want like i see things as vertically aligned like i want people to come to with a bare performance nutrition platform where we're training them properly as opposed to what we're doing we're we're providing great products the supplements and we have the nutrition course where like we're literally like we wanna give them all the assets and tools that they can to become successful within one spot why are you guys gonna succeed at this whereas was like i would okay so i know on it i don't i don't i know have any insider information on them i just know of them from googling and researching the founders and stuff like that they seem from an outside perspective that does not seem like a very good business if i had to guess why you think that you guys will succeed at this and why do you think that people like those folks are not as good i i'm not you don't have to say they're not as good because you seem like a nice guy but i can say i don't think that they're i would bet they are a super profitable company i think i think on it's killing it pretty well i mean they have a pretty good representation here in in austin and i i know and i i respect everything they do and put out i think like where we focus is and we're a lot of and i'm not speaking about on it i'm just speaking about the supplement industry in fitness industry in general is there's a lot of companies that launch and they wanna mimic another company's approach where like us internally here we never really look at what everyone else is doing we talk about what we wanna do and what our community and and our customers are asking for and we use that feedback to build on these systems so this past year we went through another kind of mini re brand where we were building out a new website we have new brand colors guidelines going off of go one more which is our our slogan so everything we do is like base off of this for the next next year at least campaign wise go one more and building campaigns around that so we used to be all over the place like when i first launched my business it was like i'm selling to everyone who goes to the gym but over time we refined our mission and where we're heading and who we wanna attract are you just sole owner that's a good place to be u i mean you got this you got a solid nutrition company and then in just in my head if i had to look forward eighteen months in the future i feel like this is gonna be a home run yeah i mean this is this has been something that we've been working on like all these things for the past past eighteen months and they're only now coming to life because of the things we've been doing in the past eighteen months so like these past eighteen months have been like you know seven days a week five am till midnight most nights but now it's a point where these things are coming to life gonna launch and it's gonna pay off would you ever sell the company i would in in in the future for the for the right price i don't know what that price is right now but i don't i don't wanna let go of it anytime soon so do you do people in the military take you know pre out you know do they take branch chains afterwards you know what would do they are they consumers oh yeah because there's a million plus i think soldiers in the army type of thing so you know how how how much have you been able to tap into that market given that that's your background and your brand and things like that because that seems like if you just serve that customer base if you just won that segment over you would be one of you know you'd be a ten million dollar plus brand in general yeah i mean that we when we first started and now sharing my military story a lot of the audience that we attracted was military so we have a massive military following people sent us messages all the time saying you know then they go on a new military installation they're seeing bp vpn shirts all over the place which is a really cool feeling and we recently went through a certification process with our brand it's called bs g drug free certification so we third party test all of our products every time they run so that they are certified ban substance free drug free so that military can take them and know pay i'm i'm safe to use these some brands go so hard on on marketing to the military where it's like it's just like a military brand but that's not something i ever wanted to do i didn't want i wanted the people in the military total who does that who who's a brand that does that i don't know i'll see like random brands online that just like you you camel everything digital like print but we i never wanted to be a brand that was just strictly military i wanted people in the military to align with our values in our mission and wanna use vpn stuff but i didn't feel right targeting just the military on sales and i i never thought that was like a right thing to do and sam kinda alluded to this earlier but one of the things we try to do is we try to say whenever you're doing something whenever you're in the middle of a field you see all kinds of stuff you see problems that your company has that you're like god i wish somebody would solve this problem you see other opportunities that you're like man we you gotta stay focused but that i believe in that opportunity and some entrepreneurs are better at recognizing those than others i'm curious have you seen any either problems opportunities trends in your space that you can kind of r on and and share it can be half baked ideas but just what are some things you've observed yeah i mean like i kind of touched on a little bit earlier i feel like people are people in the space don't step back and look at the big picture they're so just tunnel vision focused in where it's like a trail where one person sets trail and everyone's in line just following what everyone else is doing but it it hit us like you know years ago we'll report ourself back from a bigger perspective to like we don't have you don't have to follow this trail that everyone's taking you a clear example is just like content that companies and brands are posting online where it's like the most unnatural organic c post and we don't align with that like we we want things to be organic and natural and and the people that align with our brand the athletes and ambassadors we bring on we want it to be different like we wanna set the path we wanna set the standard i think it's it's partially a value adapted from the military and things that are learn learning in leadership and just supply at the business what are some of the faster growing skews in in your industry that didn't even exist a year ago our fastest growth right now i was like the health industry and it's been like that for the past eighteen months so like strong green strong reds multi vitamin strong joints and it's interesting because when we first launch we're primarily sports nutrition brand protein pre workouts cr and we added strong greens a green super food supplement to the line thinking it was just gonna be an opportunity for an upsell like hey if if you want a green supplement we're gonna create one we're gonna add to the line or quickly became our best seller and we'll sell through you know eight thousand units a month of strong greens alright this episode brought to you by super side so here's the deal i'm incredibly impatient like horribly impatient i get a an idea of midnight and on eight am the next day i want it done and unfortunately hiring people to get that stuff done is really time consuming it takes forever so super side dot com here's what it you go to super side dot com they already have a team of designers ready to go you tell them what you want and they get it done it's twenty times faster than traditional hiring and fifty percent more affordable than agencies if you need something designed and need it done well and fast try them out super side dot com i've used them before love them so the health market part of our brand is really taking the lead now and how big do you think athletic greens is i've bought their stuff before that seems like a pretty big company right i'm i've seen i've seen their sponsored stuff on like instagram and facebook i've never used it i don't know anyone else has ever used it but i mean it's hard to tell sometimes with with social media because you can make any brand look big you know right it's it's hard to tell if i gave you a million bucks and i said hey nick i trust your judgment in your space you can invest this million bucks in any other company besides yours what company would you invest a million bucks into i i probably won't do a product based business i would do some sort of some sort of technology based business just because i've seen how fast money goes in a product based business and you can burn through that and you can burn through a million dollars like like that so i do something service based and a tech base probably anything come to mind or just hard hard to pick it on spot i'd say something something in the health industry because the the health industry health space it's not going anywhere anytime soon it's only can get bigger and even when times are are tough in times are good like health is still a priority for people so it would be some sort of health based either subscription service or or just technology i think wearables something if anything product based like wearables like the garment i'm wear right now i think that's like yeah that's a lot of stuff i was heading and i think doing something with they a wearable in fitness in technology based that'd be massive you know who two companies in that space that i think are doing wonderful are whoop and or a ring yeah i i think those guys are just crushing it i don't know how when i think of how to finance a company like that it makes my head hurt i like that it just seems so expensive to start but people are buying the fuck out of that stuff i think yeah i was sent a a woo and i just i couldn't get on board it i i they didn't like grab me i like being able to see like i like the display like i want quick real time data and i don't wanna look at my phone for it so like i'll i'll wear a garmin for the rest of my life till the day i die i don't need all the crazy features to it like anything like measure my heart rate measure my sleep give me a pace on a run i'm all i'm i'm team garmin all the way sean isn't it funny how nick said that so his company from an outside i think he's awesome and he's like yeah i wanna do tech and then so sean had a company that he sold twitch and now he's trying to launch physical goods like a a dc thing but i i would agree that tech is the way to go so i'm with you on that in fact there's a company i'm looking at investing in i really like this guy i think i'm gonna either investor or advising this company and they he's doing a kind of a a a app based workout thing but his he's not doing influencer stuff he doing it's it's a it's it's ai based now ai is just kind of like a bullshit term but what he's doing is pretty simple he's like you know let's say you're gonna do a workout and most people just do some random thing like oh three sets of ten and he's like why three sets and why ten and he's like well these are just round numbers people use because there's no science underneath you know like for you on this day is that the correct amount to be doing of this weight so what his theory is he logs everything so he knows what weight you did how many reps you did how many sets you did last time and so he knows how it incrementally gets you once one unit further a little bit further a little bit further when you need to rest that sort of thing and so over a six month period you can get more gains if you use this than not and now i think that's would that's bullshit i think i think that's bullshit why would that be bullshit because there's already things like nick would know way more but like there's so many calculators that you can do where it helps you peer what's it call period prioritization where you can like it tells you like like maybe for example two or three weeks you keep the same and then on the third fourth fifth week you you increase it by x percent i don't understand why you need so much technology to do that do that well i think it comes down it's a it's a theory of convenience it's called auto regulation and i mean like anyone can auto regulate but a lot of people don't understands like your body doesn't know reps for example your body knows effort your body doesn't no pace it knows effort so that's why a lot of people use like the rp scale the rate of perceived exert so if i just said hey use this weight for an rp nine well the rp rpc scales based on ten so it means rp nine is one rep short of failure so i think using effort as opposed to reps is better but older regulation is for example like if i go to work out and do one more upset and i don't feel good but i just don't i don't do what i was supposed to do that day i just you know you use common sense apply that to fitness but ai i i can see where ai comes into play with some sort of auto regulation or perceived effort yeah like sam for example you know our wife subscribe to sweat and it's a workout program there's a million workout programs online why do you why do need to an why do i pay subscription right people pay for convenience they pay for certainty they pay for having their handheld to do things and so you know if you have an app that's gonna do the hard work for you of helping you hey pick what workout to do today and then what's the numbers how many idea of of which so that i can get gains over time people will pay for that that benefit and people are so these these guy's doing you know over let me let me pull up his numbers real but he's doing over a million dollars a month already on this app so so he's have phenomenal success and and he's grown it you know in a very very short amount of time but you it's been his what well what was his main source of growth pay ads pay ads yeah so we and nick have you heard of active i don't think so apt is cool so it started by the card named ethan he spoke at our event hustle con and it's it's a bad company but now i wanna hear nick's opinion but basically what they do is they it's just like a they probably have a thousand classes and you say like strength indoor running outdoor running yoga or a bunch of different stuff and then they have like they must have they must license music from someone else and you say how much time they and they'll give you a variety of audio classes that you can do it's wonderful it's a hundred dollars a year and he scaled it to twenty million in sales and like i think three years and it's subscriber revenue it's pretty amazing revenue but i would have to but the cost of or the barrier to entry for a business like that is so low i have to imagine the competition is stupidly high maybe the the most competitive on the yeah it itunes store didn't any grew that mainly through ads yeah yeah i i was wondering like for the ads for subscriptions like that because like say for example it's a hundred dollars a year maybe it's like ten dollars a month like you have such a low cost you have like your cost per acquisition has to be pretty low taking consideration like the lifetime value that customer so i think those numbers have to get pretty like messy yeah like you know if you're able to acquire a customer for twenty bucks or forty dollars then you know you're saying okay cool i'm gonna pay this customer off in let's call it four months and that's the that's sort of the math you have to do to make that work yeah but that's it's like you're waiting to see and you're making sure like that customer holds on or you're gonna loss for that calls per acquisition yeah yes but the secret i think i think that the trick is and i so we have a subscription business called trends trends dot c it's and it's a great business and what i learned doing that is i went and talk to ethan apt as well as like ten or twenty different subscription companies and they were like i wish we would only do annual billing so we only do annual billing and it helps significantly and so i think the secret for apt as well as others like it and i i don't know if what you what your guys plans are nick is you have to do annual billing or three month bill billing you find that by not offering so you don't offer monthly no no we don't and i so do you know the athletic the athletic yeah it's like this it's like how do you describe the athletic it's sports sports news but you pay it on subscriptions like local you know they they're born on your local team that you gotta pay for yeah and and they raised like i don't know two hundred million dollars i shit ton of money and i talked to those guys and they're like we wish we only did annual and so does it it we it definitely limit it it i think it limits the amount of people that will sign up but i think if your sales copy and your brand branding is good enough it it won't matter and i think that that's something that people don't realize and they don't expect is that they think annual billing will be a turn off for people but i don't think so particularly if it's thirty thirty thirty dollars a month is what you're charging at three hundred sixty dollars a year that's not quite an impulse purchase but i think like a hundred ninety nine dollars as an impulse purchase and this type of stuff is super easy to ask you don't even need to know you don't even need to say this is better than that you literally run both tests and then the data will tell you okay when you do monthly the conversion rate goes up but then people churn out at this month and when we do annual the conversion rate this much and it goes and you just multiply the two numbers together and it'll tell you which one to do of course everybody wants annual because you have more certainty you get more cash flow all that good stuff but you know it's a math equation and you can run this test really easily i don't think you should be really religious about it i disagree agree sean i i don't think you can ab b test this because if you do ab b test then customers are gonna expect monthly i'd rather just take that around of the equation go ahead next like for for most apps you don't they don't most customers don't know what the other customers are seeing would i would just automatically assume that your conversion would like take a massive hit if you didn't offer a monthly i can say for our service i don't think that's true because our conversion is really high what's your what's your monthly fee in your annual or what's your annual fee three hundred two ninety nine and and we're gonna raise the price to probably five or six hundred and i just think that i just think that annual i'd rather i i just think it's better and so our company i haven't raised venture capital but the cash flow from trends is just magnificent and it allows us to actually create what we wanna make for people otherwise it's it's hard i have another company i'm part owner and a software company that does monthly billing it's way harder it's way hard that's it's interesting perspective actually that it's a really good insight to take over to this this training platform yeah i would i and whenever i i have downloaded like the top fitness apps because i'm a nerd and i just like looking at how how marketers do stuff it seems like most do annual billing only like i use this app called strong which helped me track my lifts it was it was only annual billing i think apt was only annual billing i think that like i always say to myself i think like like there's a handful of industries that do things best particularly people who are developing games for the iphone those types of marketers are the best and i think fitness people are close like a second or third place for like the best marketers because it's so freaking competitive oh yeah i mean there's new new fitness app i mean every every influencer where there were a hundred thousand followers on on an instagram is coming out with an app now now it's crazy yeah that's not gonna work like that that is a temporary phenomenon and then you know eighteen months from now there's gonna be a whole bunch of dead apps oh one hundred percent i mean even in even in our space we see people launching launching companies or or trying a copy of things that we do i think a lot of people don't realize well it took me eight years to to build this thing and grow and scale it but we'll see our some of our direct competitors copying and following things that we're doing whether it's product it's like a a marketing campaign but it's like by the time they someone else copy someone else you're already like six months a year behind nick are you able to do pay yourself well because since you own the whole company or like the so like i said sean and i are like mostly in silicon valley and typically people build their wealth by selling businesses amongst our friends are are you able to create wealth along the way or is it mostly just as little as possible i take a small i think a very small paycheck from bp vpn but then i have additional revenue sources from other things i do it's like i haven't i'd haven't increased my pace and that started paying myself in twenty seventeen so so then is most of your income from like youtube ads and and your pdfs yeah youtube ads pdfs other contracts i have with other companies like retainer for for some marketing stuff that i've been doing but that that's majority of my money at vpn is probably what i pay myself on salary through vpn is a small it's amount of money that i make and what what how do you have time to do marketing for other people i mean it's something that i to do more of and something this year that i'm actually i've cut back on like a lot of my contracts i have it sounds like you're the you're the you're the model you're not the marketer right you're the you're the you're you're giving your likeness to that is that right yeah yeah so it's like some post that i'm doing for them oh oh and it's i'm not i'm not i'm not doing their marketing like it's a paid post here and there or a youtube feature or i promote a product and it's an affiliate sale or my book that i launched stuff like that so what's the premise of the book so the books called what twenty five hours looks called it twenty five hours a day it's essentially what does that mean is is that your philosophy well the story behind it is i was sitting in fort betting in georgia and i was i was talking to the the captains from the seventy fifth range judgment and i turned to one of them and this is before i i met my platoon when i'm still in training i just got done with ranger school and i turned to this one cats and i said like you know tell me how to be a good leader in the military any essentially and he's stuck with me he pointed to guy across the room and he's like you see that guy over there that guy when like shit hits the fan when when bullets are flying over a shoulder he i'll look at him and he's just calm him the other side of the pillow like he's just cool the other side of the pillow he just he doesn't correct anything need just slows down time itself so they go shit well i need to slow down time itself so i came up with this concept in my head and it stuck with me for a long time like i'm just literally extending my day to twenty five hours like i'm living my day like i have twenty five hours so like when i was first building the brand and in the book is about building my company and going to the military and the lessons i learned in the military and applying those to being a leader in business i essentially would just like sacrifice sleep if i had to i sacrificed all lockers if i had to because didn't have a choice it's like i'm out here just like working for to work it's at my the amount of time i had to work was so small because the military so i had just adapted his mindset of just living like a life of like twenty five hours a day something that no one else was able to do but mentally to me it it it worked so that was a premise behind like coming into the story so what what does that mean so so you twenty so how does one live with twenty five hours in a day is it i sleep one hour less is that the trick what did you have you yeah i mean it's it's mentally slowing down time itself to me so it's like while and i'll i'll watch people do this in business like in fitness with social media stuff it's like they're so reactive so like as soon as like shit hits the fan something goes wrong they're jumping to its conclusions and they're rushing into failure and it's like they're not able to pull themselves back and like look at it from a bigger perspective and i learned that from the military it's like shit is always gonna go wrong but like you would up to like pull yourself back and like slow down time itself where it's like you're in a movie and everything else is still going owen but you're watching yourself from like a third person and it's just like this mindset adaptive just like slowing down the day and if you don't get sleep at day you don't get sleep if you don't get food that day you don't get you don't get food and i think like the military itself had a really strong impact in that but the content of twenty five hours a day it it just kept sticking with me because it's like everyone's so rushed to do things in a day at only twenty four hours it's like i'm gonna give myself twenty five hours who did someone publish that or did you sell publish oh lying chris publishing publish that here in austin do they give you it oh tucker yep yeah tucker company tucker is a good friend of mine did so then you didn't get like an advance on it i didn't do you think that that book sales will be a significant stream of revenue not significant i mean they they've done pretty well so far but i think it's just a really good way to get the story on about the brand so guess then it's another way for people to connect with bear performance nutrition at a deeper level other than it just being a supplement company because there's such a strong story behind it sean have you heard of line chris no that's okay part of the book in the boxing yeah so tucker max who's an angel investor my company and someone i i look up to he created this business and at first what it was was you paid twenty five thousand dollars and they would write a book for you where basically what you do is you like would i'm kinda i don't wanna disrespect them so i don't wanna dumb it down too much but basically you they asked you a series of questions and you kinda dictate it to them and they helped ghost straight it for you and then they offered more services i think now they charge thirty six thousand dollars and they then eventually they offered more services where they would like help like launch it make the design it and a ton of cool stuff it was awesome did you like that experience nick yeah i mean it was it was a good experience overall i was i was having them right here in austin that i could kinda just bounce that ideas off to and go to go to the office and stuff did they approach you did then like cold email using saying hey nick your story would be great or did you try to find them or how did that happen i came across scribe and tucker her like years ago i was on their email list and ready and book was always on my mind so i got like a you know one of their emails one day i was the man saves the day i'm gonna do it so i just made the move it i was like january of twenty nineteen is when i started started working with them k i i i've i've thought about this oh nice the book in the box method so i've thought about doing this but then you know the questions that i have is like hey how much time is this gonna take because you know i think this is gonna be like some big win air winner it's like a fun project is nice to have and then b you know what's really gonna come with this so you know how many people actually read this thing that you know is this gonna have a big impact or small impact so what was your experience so how long did it take you to how you know how much time did it take on your end to get this thing done and then what was the impact deal i mean it was a lot of time it it required a lot of time and it was essentially all of of twenty nineteen and it launched january twenty eighth of twenty twenty but the impact is great i you might a lot of my audience saw of people that follow me they know the story but the the thing was all my story is spread out over years in hundreds of videos of youtube and for me to say hey go watch hundreds of hours of content on youtube to find out what the story is my thought process and bree was well i'll create this book that tells a story that shares nuggets and information that i haven't talked about before but it's a well organized like way of creatively telling story and then that's what i wanted it for that's great yeah everything in one place and so how how many books like i guess sold or whatever would you consider like a success for this i think like week one this sold like ten thousand copies that seems great to me i i was awesome mentioned yeah i know what the number of total copies matter right now like week one it was like ten thousand i believe did you have a goal for it or you were just like whatever i was kinda just like whatever like i i wanted i wanted to get as many hands of people as possible to to find out the story find out more about bare performance nutrition i really wanted to create the book as well to be more of a credible source in the space you know i first started i was seen as a youtuber and i think some people still see me as youtuber i don't wanna be seen as a youtuber rest of my life i wanna be seen as entrepreneur business owner author so was another way to build credibility in my space and i was another one of the reasons when you do a video and so you have four hundred thousand subscribers you said when you do a video let's say it that you do a video and and it's not like a an it's not overly promotional but let's say you do this video and you're like alright we have these new these new athletic or these new green this new green product the greens are whatever or this new protein powder and you launch it how much traffic would you send to that product in twenty four hours it really depends on what it is we have a launch coming up may six for a new endurance supplement and i think like that day we might sell three thousand units wow like black friday for example black friday like forty eight hours we like i think it was nine thousand orders but that'll be a mix right of paid your email list plus your youtube plus what that'll be the total kind of marketing yeah that's like one that's the culmination of all efforts coming together right so why are you operating the business now or do you have a partner who handles most day to day are you in the trenches still i'm still in the trenches we just we just hired a director business operations who's kind of in the process of taking over a lot of my admin stuff he started april first so that's still like in a transition but i got to a point where i was handling way too much in the business rather than working on the business stuff yeah why wouldn't you just like hire a young guy to follow you all the time with the camera and just start churning the shit out because your stuff's good why why don't you just only do content i did hire a full time videographer like six months ago and then they performed nutrition grew so much that he had to be the soul videographer for bp vpn we have another creative that starts may fourth and then our next hire is going to be another videographer just for my content but trying to keep it up with our scale i'm really slow to hire just because we just strong culture here that i wanna maintain that culture i don't wanna bring in like essentially cancer that ruins at sean you should see their office they have like it's like a i don't know what how many square feet you guys have we're now in twenty thousand square holy shit so this like twenty thousand square foot warehouse and it has like a huge gym which with turf and all this it's it's really cool what do you what do you pay for twenty thousand square feet in the sub it's suburbs of austin right it's north austin it's about twenty eight thousand a month twenty eight grand a month so like a dollar twenty per square foot or something okay so nick you you can do my idea vince so i have this idea not long ago i don't think it's a a great business idea but i just think it's fun and i think it actually would align well with what you're doing which is you know like the nfl combine yeah so basically i think that as youth sports has gotten more and more competitive and people really care more and they're spending a lot of money on trainers and travel teams of whatnot i think there should be a combine for youth athletes and so if you have a facility where you have this you know place where you could do a forty yard dash and you could do a vertical leap and you could do all this stuff i think it'd be great to whole host a field day and you let any young athlete come they pay their fifty bucks and they're gonna get official time school their bear they're gonna get their measurements they're gonna get everything and it's gonna give be given to them as sort of an official certification a official bear certification and you could just do it out of your facility and it would just be a good marketing event for your thing but i really think there's quite a lot of demand for youth athletes to sort of start to to build their resume like like they see the pros do okay especially especially here in texas football is no joke here exactly that's not a bad idea it's like a it's like a combine but you have to add it like a five mile run yeah exactly you do whatever whatever you believe like a all round fitness test is yeah i mean we we've bounced around the idea of of building something similar to like you know tough mud the go rocks like spartan races we kind of seen embrace suck training going towards that model someday there's no plan in place yet to get there but it's kind of just a division we see of of taking it to something similar to that it'd be interesting to see what is a tough mud kind of in the post covid world right where like i think in general large gatherings large events where there's lack of sanitation is is not gonna be a popular thing for the next i don't know eighteen months or forever i'm not sure and and so i wonder what would be the a similar thing where it's away to test yourself something you sort of brag worthy like something you could share that you're doing but maybe it's something that you could do in your backyard or your garage and it is sort of the bear challenge and you know you can the person sorta of gets they they open up your app whatever and it sort of auto films like a time lapse of them doing the whole thing and this is a very tough thing to do but everybody's doing it on their own not i'm not in one large gatherings yeah it's kinda like you know all the races now are virtual like this virtual five k's i'm doing a virtual one mile race this weekend and i think honestly for the time being a lot of stuff will go virtual it's just because of the way everything with could covid nineteen is how does that work you just go run on your own and just push your time or what yeah i mean yeah have you heard us have you heard a zeus sean no what's it called nick is it zeus what's the the site is that the cycling zeus is a baby what's it what's the cycling one that starts with the z oh man i know you're talking about it's huge they basically a hundred million in funding yeah i can what do they do swift so zwift yeah so what they do is it's iron ironman are are basically competitive cyclists love it and what you do is you hook it up to a smart trainer it's expensive like a the the their trainer costs like five hundred dollars and then the the people who are really into it what they do is they it's usually people who have money and so you put your your smart trainer sean which is like this like little stand that you put your bike on and then you put a big screen tv or a computer in front of you and you can do rides with competitors so you can like be like a group ride where it looks it's just like a video game you're like riding your bike on this pain and you're competing with people and walk time you could do time trials it's huge i think i would have they never believe this i mean a hundred and sixty four million dollars raised at a five hundred a billion dollar valuation wow this is it's huge it's it's huge it they probably don't even have that many customers so i mean cycling is not that of a market the endurance market like endurance sports endurance athletes they will spend money like that that's a that's a space to get into and that's kinda why like we're we're not creating products in the endurance market because we have we have a company here in austin called ro you know ro makes like triathlon gear running stuff i bought my my my my tri suit from them because of you i mean roku makes great stuff but like they're dominating the market right now because it's that's like a market that from what i see is almost behind in in times and that's space of fitness and like ro just went out there and absolutely wrecked and destroy it nick we had lance i'm s on the podcast a while back and like a few months ago and i we're i was trying to convince some he needs to become the jimmy buffett of weekend warriors so like have like hotels for people who are training for iron man's have just sell all types of cool interesting stuff for that endurance crowd because i agree if you look at iron man and you look at the participant growth it's pretty phenomenal it's just because it's a bunch of rich white dudes who are looking for like who wanna stay young for a long time and are doing all types of interesting things to do that and it's crazy it's growing like crazy yeah i mean we think we think breaking into that market like from a nutrition standpoint it's gonna be really big for us but like yeah when i launched my like iron man series like that that blew the channel up i that was a big spike in growth in my channel just because that attracted so many new people this is crazy so if i'm looking at man competitors by calendar year so you're right so somewhere around two thousand and eleven it started spiking and it grew year over year up till two thousand fourteen fifteen it's been about the same since then a chinese company bought iron ironman for about five hundred bucks really eighty thousand athletes that are in the i don't know what kona is but i guess that's the official one so eighty thousand athletes who do the official iron ramping per year kona is think the qualifier they have a million participants a year ira man does i almost did a big case study on them i'm really interested in ira yeah the richest man in china he's a real estate developer and he has a company that now owns a bunch of stuff and he recently bought iron man about three years ago four years ago for maybe three or four hundred million dollars and then he sold it about four months ago right before corona for like a profit of a hundred to two hundred million dollars a good profit i forget who we sold it to but it's changing hands and then another one that's that they bought was the rock and roll marathon which is a series of marathons in austin nashville charlotte things like that and they have a band every mile and it's not a sophisticated business i mean they're not like hard you just have to build a brand around them a minute and they're pretty good i think because people it's it's growing like crazy but the downside is like during corona like they just are completely dead nothing they can do yeah that's tough okay so i got a business idea for you so so i don't know if you've ever done these through the nike training app they have these like guided runs i don't know if you guys ever seen these but yeah they're off pretty it's pretty cool you just say i'm gonna go for a twenty minute run and there's like a kind of the nike you running coach is talking to you mixed in with music as you do it it's pretty good and so let's say you know again if if this sort of whole endurance market is is as big as it seems which i i believe how do you how do you do this how do make like sort of a a virtual version of this that's really great and i wonder if you could do this you know into people's airpods how do you have a live you know you know maybe set of of of surprised guests that every mile switch it's a new sort of celebrity coaching in your ear new dj onset or whatever it is and you take people through you know a ten mile run or whatever it is but it's a live it's a live audio experience for anybody that shows up that day at that time to run in their neighborhood basically what do you mean how do you do that it's easy we we go ahead we still start like we started talking about doing something similar to that where we were gonna film like one of my ten mile runs or like a half marathon or even a marathon and and streaming on facebook and instagram to see like people engaged in watching and it was it's just gonna be me running but we have to get the team involved or something we thought about doing that we talked about that idea basically how interesting can you make it you know yeah that's why i think you gotta do audio so that it you you're you need people to participate so they can't be watching right because they can't be on the phone while they're running or whatever and so if you do it audio if you go in their ears and they can go outside and they can start their run or just like you're gonna do a a virtual five care or whatever it is you said how do you do that but you know what what would you be able to do where you could charge fifty bucks to enter and like what would you need to provide maybe there are celebrities today who be down to kind of help you know help people stay fit during this you know really weird time by by being a guest or you know hopping into hopping on on the microphone during you know a certain part of the race that'd be cool it's it's so weird right now because no one knows when all this covid stuff's gonna end so that's that's what we're trying to figure out now is how far in advance we planned for and what makes most sense to spend time on and like say like say say you spend all your time doing something that all these these lifts get taken away and p well the the way i view it is is like you have this six month period right now for sure where there's gonna be some some kind of rolling shelter in place situation and everybody's now aware that this is the way that life could be so they will like businesses will buy products now because they know hey at any time we could have to support a remote workforce same thing on the consumer side where it's like you take a loan of users you're like hey can i get a loan of like two million users because and i know i to kinda pay them back when the world you know reopen but if i if i borrow these users today and i can give them some experience some percentage of them are gonna stick with this when the world sort of goes back to whatever the new normal is gonna be and so the way i look at it is you can get free adoption of a sup of some new experience during the next six to nine months and so you get this crazy adoption now what percentage of them stick with you i don't know you're gonna have pay back some of those users who will not who will not continue with you but you know maybe twenty percent of them maybe thirty percent of them will actually stick with whatever new experience you have and actually carry it forward post this and so i think it's there's just this great window of time where you're gonna get a bunch of free adoption and that's how i would think about any business during this time yeah yeah that's kinda what we do with with that free embrace suck home training you know exactly that's a perfect example yeah so hasn't it's been going on people are fallen off naturally like they've they found places to train and work on ad we've had a lot of people you know stay on the on the the program and the platform so yeah i mean it is it's an interesting time it's i think it's time to be innovative and create something different sean do you know tough mud file for bankruptcy a few months ago yeah we we talked about it on here i don't what ended up happening then did they actually close to trade hands what happened not yet but it's looking like it it's it was it's a month ago they almost made a deal but they did file for bankruptcy and that fucking company took off man they got to a hundred million in sales in like three or four years so nick you should go get involved in that and you should go because you will be able to go see all their numbers all there usage say all their everything so if you've ever thought about doing your own race you know tough motors books are open right now and whether you buy them or not it doesn't matter you can go under can go get all their information for free you right now what was their issue what what what was the reason for bankruptcy i don't know i know that i i don't know that all the details i do know that the founder i think his name is will dean i think that he was a controversial guy i i think there were some lawsuits they also owe active networks eighteen active networks is like the ticketing platform they owe them like eighteen million dollars i don't think that it was a matter well i do know that over the last handful of years demand plateau code for spartan race and tough mud that definitely happened like that shit was like a novelty and it kinda got a hold fast and i think that it was more like a one off experience versus a marathon that you do every single year or you do like three or four a year and so i think that demand definitely plateau towed and there was not space for all of them in the market but then also it seems like they had really bad cash management and they just couldn't handle their debts they so they didn't raise any money so in february it actually did sale out of bankruptcy to spartan race and so spartan raised paid seven hundred thousand dollars and assumed ten million dollars of their liabilities and had to honor the prepaid tickets to like tough mud events that are coming up but that was the price paid by spartan for for tough mud that's awesome deal that's kinda what the way i see those races anyways it's like it's a one off type thing it's not something like i'm not gonna train for a tough mud or a spartan race like on a quarterly basis i'm gonna train for a marathon or just sm that but like it's hard to measure your improvement on a race like that it's like there's no right a baseline sean is there anything else you wanna discuss before we wrap up no we should wrap up nick where where should people i don't follow you find you where what should they check out you guys have a podcast at twitter what where do you wanna send people yeah and instagram my personal is nick bai it's b a r e fitness our company instagram is bp vpn sup and our company website is bear performance nutrition dot com awesome i just got so i'm gonna go row right after this and in your honor i'll be thinking about you the whole time i i got seven miles of this i'll be running awesome thanks for this dude this is awesome you are i i we have a lot of cool guests on here but i'm super pumped that you're here because i am a personally a big fan so selfish assured this is awesome for me i appreciate it and thanks guys