How I Built $15M Annual Revenue Vertical SaaS | Dan Uyemura, PushPress

00:00first time Founders like you just don't know we we didn't have to pitch so it was like we're stammering fumbling over slides like we didn't know how to actually present the opportunity and package it the second one is like we just didn't understand what VCS were looking for like I legit thought Venture Capital people were gamblers like I thought that there was here's 5 million go see what you can do you know I just thought they were just gamblers and then

00:19it took us many many pitches for us to realize like oh they actually want to see like there's a business here and there's you have to understand your Tam and what does the growth potential look like all these things I mean the bottom line is this it's like if you're building something that everyone recognizes a value in there's really no value in it because everyone's probably doing it if you really believe that there's something valuable and nobody else can see it and the gamble is like are you wrong are you crazy right and that's what we had to reflect on but if

00:42you're not wrong there actually is a lot of value there because if because no one else is doing it right and that is what value is so especially as a young founder you're like am I crazy like is there really no no way we can beat Mind Body here is this like it's so clear to me but no one else can see it and you want to believe that these people are smarter than you they probably are right but they just don't understand your business or the opportunity and the thing I didn't realize at the time is like in one hour they're trying to

01:05understand what you spent 5 years doing right and you think about it every day for 5 years and they're trying to get in one hour and there's just no way they can right part of that's on me or the founder because if you can't relay all that information in an hour that's on you but at the same time as a first- Time founder it's like it it takes a lot of reps to get to the point where you can explain it and you're going to get told no for every single rep that you're building that ability right and that's okay it really is okay but let it be a

01:26chip on your shoulder because that'll that'll fire you up more yeah great uh my name is Tay I'm a partner at Altos Ventures we are here with Dan the CEO and co-founder of push press we've been working with Dan for the last several years after we led the series a and it's a pleasure to have you here with us today thank you T it's going to be exciting conversation we're about to have so my name is Dan we Mora I am the CEO and a co-founder of push press we are a gym management software platform uh and really it's like our job to help

02:04a gym owner focus on the one thing that they really care about which is their clients and helping their clients get Fitness and strip away all the other complexities of business through our software platform and when did you start the company oh so we had the idea in about 2011 um started writing code around 2011 it took us about 2 years to get enough code written to have the first client which was my gym on boarded 2013 so about 11 years ago well I guess you have to predate the gym ownership I was an engineer I spent about 10 years writing code and building stuff so you

02:34know Builders always look at things from the lens of like how was this built I open the gym I looked at the software that was available and I could tell pretty clearly like this was built a long time ago Andor I don't know it just wasn't up to like modern standards now that I've built it all I can realize it's it takes forever to build this much software so I get it now why it wasn't but at the time I was like there's no way I can use this software so for the first gym we just kind of rolled our own just piece Meed some stuff together on

02:58WordPress and then kind of from there there was just like this organic Inquisition from my peers who are gym owners of like what are you using how can I use that type stuff that kind of like lit the light bulb of like we really should do this so you open the gym what year was this again the gym itself the gym opened in 2010 2010 okay and why did you decide to open the gym I had been coding for about a decade maybe a little bit more I didn't really realize it at the time but when you're an engineer well now it's like there's High leverage with coders right and

03:25obviously my bosses knew this so it was like they would put dinners in front of me Italian dinner they put Coca-Cola and coffee in front of me and i' just be coating all day and in that 10e span I probably put on like 30 lbs I got I was getting a separation from a marriage at the time and you know that's when you actually look at yourself in the mirror and go oh I'm single I'm going to have to go on a date and I'm a slob so I uh I I started I and and I guess I didn't really know about this about myself at the time but entrepreneurs are generally obsessive compulsive I believe and so I

03:55basically went for the fastest thing that can get me the most results which put me pretty much in a direct path right into CrossFit and I fell in love with it became like a RAB rabid CrossFit fanatic helped people open gyms got my coach's certification and then I got laid off at Myspace and just said I'm going to take this money and go open a gym give it a shot I was tired of coding I guess you know it was it was in a in a time when the industry itself was trying to figure itself out so everything was uh you know fast-paced but also very

04:21under optimized and so when you opened your own gym did you do anything differently like how did you organize the gym what was different about your gym so and again so in during this time this is when it was like I don't know if you know much about CrossFit culture but back then it was like pukey the clown and dudes with their shirt off and just like crazy masculine toxic masculinity type stuff which you know is is the brand but we we actually opened our gym thinking like we want to tailor to 40-year-olds who are brand aesthetic

04:49appeal you know like who appeal to a brand aesthetic we picked colors that were non- shocking and and so our whole brand was was more around inclusivity and for for everybody when we opened it that was kind of you know I was older at the time I was probably 30 33 or something which was you know back then CrossFit was like a 20-year- old thing so we were trying to get it to be uh more inclusive I I look for software immediately I think with most founding stories there's a lot of things that

05:15lead up to it right and so one of the things I led up to it was and this is when I was still at Myspace I was like spending a solid hour a day negotiating our payments rate for this gym we're going to open with the payments company and man they put me through the ringer it was like fact in stuff give me supporting documents dating back for 10 like all of this stuff that I had to do I was a really bad employee but I even remember feeling guilty like I'm spending so much time faxing stuff doing things to make this payments thing happen it was just ridiculous and

05:44anyways I I negotiated all the way down to 1.9% and Brian was a worked at a bank and he came in and he's like it's impossible you're not paying 1.9 he told me to give me I gave him his my our bank statements he looked he looked over it brought it home came back next day he's like you're paying 4.8 and so I was so pissed off that like I spent spent a a month of my time trying to negotiate this right down I got lied to and then and then I had to find out because someone else like fact checked it so that was a reason because I was

06:08connected to the software but I was I'm a software guy so I was looking for software immediately to run the business yeah that's that's that's kind of the Genesis of it yeah and what was the issue with the existing tools you mentioned they all looked old but like what what was the Practical issue in terms of using them for your specific gym yeah so the the biggest issue was every gym runs a little bit differently and that's because in Fitness you have CrossFit you have MMA you have karate you have kids Fitness Sports training just so many different things and when I

06:38pulled up the existing software the form field was like a mile long like every page was like a mile long of options and things that I had to like every form you're like what does this mean what does it do if what happens if I change this what are the ramifications on you know like where where do you think what happens and that thought process just blew me away like I can't manage this and so practically speaking it was like when one software tries to do two much for everybody it ends up doing nothing

07:01for anyone and this was granted um you know I'll cut them slack they built this before like the iPhone came out and I think the Paradigm of the iPhone changed everyone's mind because the iPhone can do anything for everyone but they compartmentalized everything into Apps and it allows you to customize the phone to your own experience what you want and that's what I now expected because this is post iPhone like I'm like why do I have to have all this stuff I just want what I want right and so I think the iPhone changed the game for how we approach software I believe in that way

07:28m you're scaling any Milestones that you remember in those early days that you were anchored on like oh I need to get to 100 customers or 1 million of AR whatever that is so the the one that like we'll never I'll never forget it's uh will from mucker a venture capital firm so we're pitching all these VCS early because I'm like this is going to crush we get payments money like like there was so much to this I'm like this is there's no way this is going to fail all the players suck like we understand it blah blah blah and we got laughed out

08:00of every Venture room for years and one of them this guy guy named will from mucker he told me he's like hey this is a great idea uh why don't you come back when you're at 10,000 Mr because then we'll know you have escape velocity I remember these terms exactly and so right when we hit 10,000 I called him he's like yeah come down show me what's going on blah blah and I was like cool and we we were excited cuz I'm like dude he's going to invest cuz we did what he said and he's like this is all cool why don't you get come call me back when you get to 100,000 Mr because then I'll know

08:29that you escap like literally told me the same thing again I'm like oh all right and so we called him back at 100,000 and he's like we pass like we're not interested and um I just remember like we it gave us a clear line in the say like okay we have to get 10,000 Mr and we're going to we're going to call him back but the the irony is he's actually an investor now because he heard that we were raising a kind of a a safe through another another party one of our connected friends it was another

08:54fraternity brother of ours was investing cuz he did he's done well in some stuff and he's friends with him on the side he's like hey will you should check out this company he's like oh I know them and and then will called me and he's like okay it's time let's do this and I'm like oh now it's time that's funny yeah so uh yeah if you're thinking about getting investment money from from uh Venture capitals they're not they they uh you got to show them some social proof first like they're not just throwing money around like I thought

09:17they were uh when did will invest and what was the scale at that time I think we're at 1.4 million AR or maybe maybe 2 million probably around 2 million it honestly was probably it was a really good deal I'm sure this was like late 2020 so it like during Co we grew we had built a free product and like we were doing we were actually building brand because we were the most authentic like gym owner Centric uh company and we grew quite a bit and it was like the signals were good the social proof was good the the numbers looked good um and but I

09:49didn't know how to raise money and so this uh anti- VC type company com fund came to me and he's like hey I think I can just get some LPS together and raise some money but it's got to be at this valuation and I was just kind of like if I can do no work on this because I don't believe you're going to raise it like I had no belief like I'm like I'm going to do no work on this you can have that good valuation but I don't want to do anything like you know and he's like cool and he got heo he did it in a weekend like got it all closed up and that's when will heard of the circle so

10:13anyway that first round uh we were at 2 million in AR roughly 2 million in ARR and I think it was like at 11 million valuation so it was like 5x at a time when people were getting like 50x or something so I just didn't think it would happen wow yeah so you reflect on the many con Sation you had with the investors and a lot of them were just not going well what do you think just was missing like what what happened super good question for firsttime Founders like you just don't know and I remember like so some of the early ones

10:42we pitched so one the first thing is we were playing rotating CEO so like for the first pitches I think Chris was the CEO and then Brian was CEO for a while and then at towards the end like at the 2020 stage it was me but I remember them coming out we would come out and they'd be like we we don't see any passion and I was like what like dude we are like we are so passion like I I couldn't believe it but really what it was was we didn't know how to we we didn't how to pitch so it was like we're stammering fumbling

11:06over slides like we didn't know how to actually present the opportunity and package it um so that was early problems for one the second one is like we just didn't understand what VCS were looking for like I legit thought Venture Capital people were gamblers before like I thought that there was here's 5 million go see what you can do you know I just thought they were just gamblers and then it took us many many pitches for us to realize like oh they actually want to

11:27see like there's a business here and there's you have to understand your Tam and what does the growth potential look like all these things and then once we actually got to the point where like I I knew how to pitch and I can actually get to the point of term sheets I started to realize like I don't really want to work with investors they're all like they're all going to make me do the things that I I could see all of our predecessors are doing that don't work like when

11:46you're obsessed over the money you're just squeezing them for more Revenue you don't really care about them as customers they numbers to you like none of that stuff I wanted to do so it that irony is once we got to the point where we actually could get term sheets I'm like I don't even want to do this so yeah I felt uh I don't know the word for it right now but basically very disconnected from the fact that like something that I could see so clearly was not obvious to other people so that that made me feel disconnected for one it put chips a huge chip on my shoulder

12:12massive we joke about it all the time that like and I wish I did this but we call it the list of all the people who didn't believe in us like I wish I actually kept the list because okay so let me tell you the story actually this is a good one so at at one point throughout this journey I had to keep taking jobs because I just didn't make enough money so it's like I was running a gym had to go take a full-time job and doing push press like three things at once and one of the jobs I took I actually had to drive past the house of an investor who turned us down like he

12:36we went to his house we sat there and pitched him I thought it went really well and then he went back to the fund that was he was representing and he's like oh they suck like don't don't invest in them and so every day for like a year I had to drive past his house and I flipped off his house every day like I was so pissed off at like like he became the personification of like everyone who said no to us I mean the bottom line is this it's like if you're building something that everyone recognizes a value in there's really no value in it

12:59because everyone's probably doing it if you're getting like if you really believe that there's something valuable and nobody else can see it and the gamble is like are you wrong are you crazy right and that's what we had to reflect on but if you're not wrong there actually is a lot of value there because if because no one else is doing it right and that is what value is so it was um very challenging especially as a young founder you're like am I crazy like does no is there really no no way we can beat

13:24Mind Body here is this like it's so clear to me but no one else can see it and you want to believe that these people are smarter than you you they they probably are right but they just don't understand your business or the opportunity and the thing I didn't realize at the time is like in one hour they're trying to understand what you spent 5 years doing right and you think about it every day for 5 years and they're trying to get in one hour and there's just no way they can right part of that's on me or the founder because if you can't relay all that information

13:46in an hour that's on you but at the same time as a first- Time founder it's like it it takes a lot of reps to get to the point where you can explain it and you're going to get told no for every single rep that you're building that ability right and that's okay it really is okay yeah but let it be a chip on your shoulder because that'll that'll fire you up more yeah so how did you fund the company for the first several years it was technically bootstrap yeah there's there's a few different angles to it we've always been Scrappy and there's like two pretty impactful moments I'll

14:15I'll highlight the first one we printed a poster we actually partnered with a a weightlifting coach who's here in San Francisco and we we brought her down we did a photo shoot it was very inexpensive and we printed this poster of like weightlifting technique and it was like Chris co-founder Chris had this brilliant like design eye and like visual representation eye so he basically got a high-speed camera and took like the movements of a cleaning jerk and a snatch and broke it down into

14:39like frame by frame what your feet should look like from a top down position you know from all this stuff put it on a poster it looked awesome and uh we sold it to the Comm actually we gave it away to the community but it was like $10 shipping and the shipping only cost us $3 so like we made $7 a thing we sold like a thousand of them because everyone wanted it in their gym but we also it was a double dip cuz we're like this will get our brand into to the gyms

14:59as well so you had push press on the yeah it was a push press poster so it was like got them aware of our brand but we made like seven Grand which and at that time was like massive money the second thing we did is we built a timer which still works to this day like the timer's still out there but what happened here was like Chris designed so many things for us to build and we couldn't keep up we couldn't code as fast as he designed and so he was like I got nothing to do we went to some conference where it was like a bunch of developers were there and we met some

15:25guy from like Vietnam who does mobile development and Chris is like I have this idea for a timer can you build it and he's worked up a bunch of mocks and the guy built it and Chris had like three months of nothing to do so he just like Managed IT we built this timer and it was it's still it's still awesome it's still I think it's like one of the best timers out there still it was like 10 years ago it a it's a workout timer so so here's the hook it was like a workout timer and you know it it was specific to CrossFit so you can easily build like count down count up timers

15:49blah blah blah but the hook was like I was building all these Connections in the space so I'm like I went to all the like celebrities on the CrossFit world I'm like Hey we're building a timer can you add your voice to it and so we built like this language pack where it count it goes like 3 2 1 go and then the person can say something motivational like hey you're you're halfway there keep going and then we had like 20 different voices on it and so people really like that cuz the voices were on it one of my early members at my second Gym came in and he was an ad Network ad

16:13specialist and he's like dude show me the numbers on this timer and we were doing like a million workouts a month like it just we just put it out there and we didn't do anything it just it just like started getting used getting a million workouts a month and he's like yo if I put ads on this like we can make some money and so he did and you know for the first like six months he was like actively cuz I guess it's like you have to actively manage the ads I don't know and we're getting like 30 grand a month on it like pretty decent money and that like funded the company for a while

16:36but then he he got busy he stopped looking at it the ads started crashing the timer like it just made it a terrible experience so we ripped all the ads back out and like all the ad Revenue declined but like for a good year we were probably making like 20 to 30 grand a month on this timer that we had built for free yeah and it was the same thing we built the timer cuz we wanted Jims to use it so they they would learn who push press was yeah yeah so if you reflect on that first chapter of push press what was the most challenging moment and I'm sure a lot of

17:08software companies had this point where like you get enough clients using or customers using your product where it would be foolish to walk away from it but you're not you don't see a clear line of sight to the type of growth that makes you go like hey I can actually get paid to do this cuz it's just all volunteer work and Sweat Equity right and there was a time in 2017 where I remember turning around to Chris in the gym and I was like hey I think I'm going to hang it up I'm going to give up on

17:32push press and I'm going to just focus on the gym because I I see how the gym can actually pay me to make a living here and I'm tired of working three jobs basically and uh him and Brian I think kind of talked me out of it at that point like dude just give us some time like we you know we've got clients we've got customers there's fit I don't really remember exactly how they talk me out of it but I remember being pretty much like I think I have to like give up on this but I didn't want to and I think ultimately that was it so like there those moments will come when you found a

18:00company where it's just like you you have to just kind of like see it through there's something about your guys's philosophy that that resonates with me it's just like you're the durability and like until you really are dead you're not dead and you can find a way to get through it but you've you just have to know it's going to suck yeah do you remember how many clients you had at that time probably like a couple hundred couple hundred yeah so you had real customers real usage but it's just like not there yet just didn't feel right

18:30this this was probably after we were making after will said no to the 10,000 come back at 100,00 you know it's like you have these like demoralizing moments where like dude we got a 10x from here even for you know and like I don't even see how we're going to get there so yeah there there's one I think key tenant to operating uh any business and it's just like um if you stay alive long enough you will be able to start to manufacture luck we didn't know it at the time but

18:53like Co was kind of around the corner and that was like our like I wouldn't our L our lucky moment I guess like we couldn't have created but that was a moment for us to like really rally into yeah let's talk about that cuz um you guys accelerated growth during Co which is very ironic when all these gyms were shutting down so how did that happen so I think the fir the like immediately when it happened I was like oh it was like existential oh my God right I think it was two things one I was part of a mentorship group at the time and I was on a call his name is Dan Martell I was

19:23on a call with him and he was like he said something that I will never forget to this day he's like never waste a good crisis and I was like what do you you mean and he's like like these are the moments when the winners win you know and then I thought about it and I really reflected on it I'm like yeah dude like you don't win races on straightaways you win races on turns and so that mindset shift like changed a lot for me we had just released free um our free version without knowing that was going to happen

19:44so that that was incidental luck right in terms of timing but I think what really accelerated us was we were like okay and I just decided at that point like we're putting the foot on the gas with Co and we just did everything we can to like circle the wagons protect our gyms protect the indry like it didn't even matter if you were a client of ours or not and we just got really vocal right this was right around the time I started a podcast right around the time we were like learning how to express ourselves to the market and so

20:08you know we gave money away to people like we got a PPP loan and we uh turned around and just gave a lot of that away to our gyms to help support them we just turned it into a grant a lot of the ways I like to think are kind of like how do you create a good scenario and everyone wins but you get something out of it like we got a ton of publicity but we got we gave money away and my argument to my Founders was like well we can either spend money on on Google paid clicks or we can just give the money to the gyms let's give the money to the gyms you know you can kind of like

20:33create a lot of Goodwill moments if you think like that I think what was the impetus to creating that free product that happened to come out at the right time yeah well the right time this was just pure luck honestly but the free product was was born like so a lot of this is just born from the we understand our our customer and the industry really well cuz we come from it and we understand like when you start a brand new gym 250 bucks a month is a lot like that's your first two members right off the table gone when you might be trying to like fight to get 10 members you know

21:01so it's like that hurts so really it was just like if we know opening a gym is the most painful time financially but we also know that's the easiest time to get on a software system and learn it why not lean into both of those and just say like we'll give it to you free UPF front and then we'll create a situation where like as we grow trust as we build your business you'll you'll become a paying client because we're so customer-centric and we always have been a lot of our energy and our our payment comes from the energy of our customer so and and really I think a lot of gym

21:30owners flaw at this because it's like they don't make enough money to live but they they show up every day cuz our customer energy makes them feel full uh we were probably a lot the same so it was the revenue was growing the customers growing like we were bu like we were making some key hires and some and doing some good stuff but like just the energy around the company and the community and the people's response to our co co reaction or proactive steps very filling to us so I think I think we we were we were amped at that time so you then go raise your series a so safe

21:58happens William finally invests yep what is that Journey from there on for a year or so yeah so I think I think the um I guess the overarching theme from like that from like 2019 or maybe even 2018 through is just a continuing reinvestment in education so in 2018 is 2019 we joined SAS Academy which put me in rooms with other Founders you it's same thing it's like you're sitting across from a table I I remember this actually this happened here but this

22:23happened at first SAS Academy went to we were we were just at a million in revenue and I remember being at the table thinking I was like like badass cuz I was like cuz they were like say your name say your company say how much revenue you're at I'm like we're at a million like super cool and then the guy next to me is like oh yeah we're 14 and they're like we're at 18 we're at 26 and I was like oh my God like we're nothing and that happens here too like I'm like we're at 15 and they're like we're at 100 we're at 260 we're at whatever and you're like oh wow we got a long way to

22:46go but like so getting in those rooms list just having mindset changes of like oh that's how you approach marketing oh that's why you want to do sales this way like changes the game then we we got mucker and will would just bring me in every month just sit down and be like okay let's focus on something what you you know like I never had that before like someone actually like let's get real tactical and focus on something that changed the game for me right and then being with mucker got me more exposure to other CEOs who are going

23:09through you know like I get to talk to if you're starting a business it's like how fast can you change your mindset because you don't know what you don't know so you need to be around people who have been there you know and and again that continues on today like we just did this stuff this week where like I'm listening to people who you know their current problem is like how do I get from 100 million to 300 million a different problem set that you have to be aware of early so I think investing in your education is super critical as a Founder

23:32[Music] yeah what do you charge your customers what types of products are you selling what is the economic model of push press yeah I mean in general the basic idea with a vertical SAS platform is you want to build enough Goodwill and trust with your customers because you're handling you're helping them handle their business more efficiently to the tune that you can help them in every way that can be digitized or maybe not maybe not even digitized there is now a concept of service as a software have you heard of this mhm yeah so uh that's kind of how

24:02we see ourselves these gym owners have opened Fitness facilities all they really care about is helping their customers get in shape find fine Fitness and fine Wellness they do not care about accounting they don't want to do payroll they don't want to find someone to service their rowing machines they don't want to do any of that stuff they just have to and so I think the value ad that any vertical SAS can can bring to their Niche and their industry is to strip all of those unnecessary jobs that get created when you open a business away and either you know give them ways to

24:31systematize it create process around it or even automate it or just take it away that's my vision for vertical SAS and I think that's why we were talking about this earlier this concept of trying to understand what the Tam is for vertical SAS is a fallacy because the Tam is literally as big as their expense their expense line and their p&l in my opinion for each gym yeah let's talk about that a little more because there's this notion in vertical Market software in any business that tries to go after a

24:56niche market that the T is not big enough to build a great business I'm sure you've heard that PTSD yes um what are your views on that I just saw the CEO of service Titan talked about this yesterday if you can open up the p&l of any small business and look at where they spend their money and understand like which of these can be productized in software you actually have the right to take all of that off an owner's plate and and turn that into business because as long as you're providing more value than your charge and you're you're doing so in a way that creates more Goodwill

25:27and more Trust as you sell more products you're actually doing them a service by bringing it all into one house in especially in the SMB space these owners want I heard this term recently I love these owners want one throat to choke like they want one relationship that they can trust and buy into and have full confidence that you know they can hand all of that business off and then just focus on what they want to focus on if when you think of Tam in in the simplest sense of like oh there's only 100,000 gyms in the world and you can only make $150 per gym CU that's what

25:55your software class that's wrong because it's like what about insurance and what about payroll and what about health insurance and benefits and Banking and servicing and lending and you know payments like there's a million pieces to the stack that you can provide value to that are just like overlooked by this Tam conversation yeah so which part of the stack are you addressing now and what are some areas that you want to get into in the future I want to get into all of it Tay all of it and and it's

26:22purely from the lens of like the it will help JY so much if if they can control it all from one Central Dash word right and the relationships like we we bring Network effects to the to the equation here like I can pre-negotiate better rates for water than they can get from their local distributor because we we will be negotiating on behalf of everyone in the network right so um right now we we've we built our whole uh system around payments which is a whole another funny story because when I was pitching people back in 2014 on push

26:49press they didn't people didn't even know what payment like they they didn't even count payments it didn't matter but payments are so critical to this entire stack we do some of their frontend lead generation website development local SEO marketing um and CRM tooling yeah it's funny we built a branded app which allows every gym to have a branded app in the app store and we thought nobody would use it but what we come to find is like almost every gym buys it because

27:13they actually want to stand out against Orange Theory like this single gym has no way for them to have their own app otherwise and it's really cool for them to be able to say like oh yeah we sit next to Orange Theory in the App Store so we do a branded app we have a we have a platform called train which was basically an early test of this uh App Store concept that we're building into push press that will allow for the mod this is the the fix to that one form field that creates you know that solves

27:37everything for everyone is building modular apps you know may or may not come with the price tag but extend the functionality push press in a very specific way you mentioned the customer support being such an important part of even the early days um how how are you carrying that on as the company grows let's talk about that you have to deal with board members sometimes who like push you on things that you know are nonsense to to kind of lay the to lay the thing there's like these ranges that you have to operate your business in so

28:00like you guys want gross margin in general to be like 75 to 85% rough or 75% or better right and for those you don't know gross margin is basically like your Revenue the amount of money you spend on servers and you know things that make the product happen and then customer support because they're keeping the lights on I've built my company intentionally around the fact that customer support is a go to market strategy so I don't think it should be part of gross margin that's the argument I will forever make our customer sport

28:25team and the the way our people interact with our customers kicks out pass so much that it turns our customers into raving fans that become a referral it's a turn reducer and a referral creation and I'm sure you saw it when you're like investigating us it's like what gym management software should I use and it should be a whole bunch of people saying push press absolutely hands down use push press an interesting way for Founders to think about this is like there are industry standards for most businesses to run their thing but that

28:48doesn't mean you have to do that and I think it took me a couple years working with you to understand that I don't have to do everything you say I respect everything you say thanks you know but but yeah every business is built different right and like uh you know respectfully like you don't live you don't live and breathe push press to the not even close to the tune that I do so it's like the stuff that we you know the big picture you know the industry you know the trends you know the averages

29:11but fight for a long time to say like our customer sport team needs to be overstaffed well trained highly tooled and and amazing even if it means our gross margin is 70% for now yeah yeah which I think we actually talked about at length at some point where I actually told you guys don't worry about it right and I think that was really good alignment the early days you were extremely customer obsessed maybe out of necessity but you came from the gym industry so you understood your constituents really well how did you maintain that culture until today when

29:42you now have what close to 100 employees yeah so I mean it starts with like understanding what you want to build your business around and what you feel is important part of this is I felt it was super important because as a gym owner it's it sucks to like call into your you know your software and have them have no clue what being a gym owner is like like I don't even know how how you support that but on the other hand of the equation I realized I was a superpower like if all of our big competitors were just oblivious to what

30:08it was like to run a gym why don't we lean all the way into that and just know what it's like to run a gym so we and and also out of necessity because we were broke and we're bootstrapped we had to hire whoever would work for us and most people that really really want to work with us are people who are passionately Mission aligned so like yeah I'll work for like way less than I should work for because I actually believe in what you're doing too there's something speci about that mission alignment understanding the customer paino and then you know having the the

30:33support from you know the companywide support of saying like we lean into this that has created something magical with us where you know our team even our Engineers are like they're not gym owners for the most part but they're like through osmosis or whatever they're feeling that customer L Obsession and they're becoming that you know and it starts to build some cultural things like now our VP of engineering is like when you onboard as an engineer you

30:56spend two weeks in customer support and you get to learn how they get their teeth kicked in when you make a bug right like you have you have to live that customer Journey with them so it's it is affecting our entire culture in in a very positive way we're an empathetic company like we 100% believe in our customers and and anytime a customer has a pain you'll see like people are running towards the fire the flip side of that that's dangerous is that creates potentially a hundred different

31:19directions people need something fixed in every day because there's like different things happening different gym types everything so it's like you have to develop this muscle of saying no and also being balancing your empathy of like ooh that that's painful but we can't do it right now and I think the mistake we made before was like every paino gets fixed that's a problem in multiple ways one the focus becomes fragmented in terms of like what the

31:43company's doing but two it ends up creating like Frankenstein code where it's like oh I just bolted this thing on real quick to fix this thing oh I just bolted this thing on to fix this thing and then your your software sucks in the end because it's like just a whole bunch of boltons and no real architecture you know yeah why did you start Instagram H content let's go so again this um this there the multi-pronged answer here the first one which is a recurring theme of what I'm going to you know always keep saying is like my competitors are not gym owners the CEO who who even knows what the CEO

32:21looks like has no voice has no passion is not there for gym owners I am so why why wouldn't I put that out there right but two I think we live in a so two we live in a day and age where people expect to learn about things that they want to interact with through various mechanisms and one of those is Media the younger generation maybe not our gen My Generation but definitely younger generation like they go on social media to learn about products they want to buy and do that's how they do research like

32:51we might use YP they use Instagram I also believe people buy from people especially in the SMB space so putting a face to the actual thing you're buying is important it's it's costly to build a brand that's why I want tracksuit to help me but it's very costly to build a brand but it it's much easier to say like I'm Dan I'm the founder founder of push press and this is what I believe and this is why I'm here for you and then the brand will inherit that Goodwill that I can I can build you know and I'm just saying what I believe so it's it's not hard and lastly straight

33:21out of Nal we live in a world where like you get free leverage like social media has created free leverage and in business leverages everything so like why wouldn't you take it if you if you can now granted it's an investment of your time it's investment of money but how else could you get a million people to see something in a month without spending millions of dollars right like you couldn't do that 10 years 20 years ago so for all those Reasons I'm I'm very very bullish on content yeah were you comfortable filming those things in

33:52the beginning absolutely not yeah AB not dude it's like as a Founder you've got to do stuff that you have to do M um and you feel like this was something you had to do had to do yeah yeah and even to the point where this is founder mode stuff but even to the point where like I bugged our marketing team to like hey get someone to work with me on this and they were just too busy doing other stuff so I just found my own guy and just did it myself you know yeah I felt like you you have to do it and it's

34:15going become increasingly more important as the years go by MH so you're building your personal brand how do you try to check once in a while whether this is working or if it's worth it really good question and is is it's one of those things where you can easily doubt yourself and in fact you're not going to see unless you're actually posting like and getting a million views on YouTube or something a lot of the results you get are intangible or hard to measure

34:40and the the tracksuit guys actually explained something in one of the breakouts so we did that I thought was great and it was basically it was the iPhone example so he gets up on stage and he says like everyone who wants to buy an iPhone the next 5 years raise your hand or not maybe not an iPhone but a smartphone right everybody raises their hand and you go okay everyone's going to buy a smartphone in the next year keep your hand raised everyone's hand or maybe half the people's hands go down right and he's like okay who's

35:05going to buy a smartphone in the next two weeks and then it's just like 1% of the hands stay up and what he said is like the 1% is who you're doing paid search ads for you're doing like direct paid marketing because they're in the consideration set to buy right now but the 99% of the people who had their hand up before will buy eventually and they need to know who you are what you stand for why your product matters you know like the things you're solving they need to know the general big picture but they don't need to know what the latest megapixels on the phone is you know like

35:34those are those are buying consideration points all of this content in my opinion is a channel not the channel but a channel that you can passively continually put out like who I am what I stand for why I'm doing this and and just let people know that you're there the T big Tipping Point for me with content was there's a mentor in the space that sent an email out every day day I didn't read a single email for years I didn't read one but when ever anyone asked me like who's the who's the best Mentor in the space I would say him

36:05and I asked myself why did I say that I don't know anything that I don't even know what he wrote like I just read subject lines and it's because every day he put something out I knew he cared that's it so I think I think it it Ma it just matters to do were there any concrete examples of it paying off like in a business context oh yeah that was the question huh I just totally didn't answer that I mean the the real short answer is no but I do go to events I I go to events frequently and at every event I go to multiple people multiple people will come up to me and say like I

36:34really love your content please don't stop doing that you know something to that degree I do get I've also gotten feedback of like oh I didn't know about push press we just joined and became a member but I found one of these reels you did blah blah blah so I guess that's kind of concrete idence but it's not there is no direct like I saw a real I bought push press it's usually like months later and it's just part of the like General consideration process my my goal with content is like I want my sales team to like get on a demo and

36:58have someone basically like I'm completely sold just tell me the information on how to buy like that's kind of the motion that I'm trying to build for them how would you characterize yourself as a leader like what type of leader are you I used to be uh very insecure like why would I be the leader why is my voice more important than anyone's uh every decision would turn into a committee like hey what do you guys think what do you think I am now much more becoming there are certain decisions that I will just make and I I

37:27don't don't feel bad about that anymore I don't feel insecure about that just because I see how much bureaucracy and Chaos it creates when I start asking for everyone's opinion and we start tallying votes and then we have debates and discussions that go nowhere it just doesn't help so I think I'm evolving as a leader I think no matter what I'm always going to be empathetic I'm going to care what people think I'm going to listen to people's opinions but I'm becoming much more um able to just say cool I heard all your opinions this is

37:50what we're doing and is there anything that you're actively working on to get better at at this moment the the the real answer to this if you're looking start a company is like you're going to be actively getting better at whatever the biggest fire is at every moment of the company and it will never stop uh right now I'm trying to become better at the financial and operational end of things it's something I'm absolutely horrible horrible at I know very little of so just understanding like how does

38:14annual planning work and and what really got me into this was like for us to like think about a three-year plan and start to look at like what three years looks like I realize I had to build stuff now to be able to even get close to having this three-year plan and I liken a lot of this stuff to like farming I don't know why I always think about farming but you can't like Harvest your grapes if you haven't planted them and it might take a whole season for the planting the seeds for the grapes to grow and then

38:38another season for the you know the grapes to whatever and so when you think about that way it's like you really have to get ahead of all this stuff to be able to get the grapes in three years you know yeah my big Focus right now is like how do you become operationally more sound how do you run better meetings how do we do like better board meetings better monthly Recaps annual planning all that stuff is kind of where I'm at what about the the mission cuz in the beginning there was no mission to

39:02empower the fitness industry there was no mission that was that grand and then it became that and so how has the mission of this company changed over time the mission honestly has forever been something Loosely formed around like be I remember one of the first board meetings we came to here it was like or maybe it was the first CEO conference or whatever but we left with a mission of like we want to help a billion people become fitter but then we

39:28kind of were like how does how do you measure that you know it just became really weird or should they be you know like all this stuff so we've always had this loose idea of we're really here to make the world fitter and again this is part of like maybe some people have the skill something I'm developing but like in order to be a good leader you have to be able to pack a lot of amorphous ideas into very concrete like eight-word sentences you know what I mean like you have to be very clear and it's got to be memorizable and repeatable and I think

39:52I'm getting better at it but yeah that's why it like it went from something that was like very hazy into like we are just here to make the world fitter by helping our gyms become better businesses that's it do you have a view on what the fitness world would look like in say 10 20 years and how does technology play into that Journey oh that's big this can go so many different ways because the problem with Fitness is it's an IT everyone looks for easy buttons and fitness is not the easy button and so

40:17right now what you get is you get 10% or 5% of the people in the world who are okay pushing the hard button because that's what they're into doing it but we're missing the mark on the 90 to 95% of people who just want OIC you know or who want the Easy Button I'm actually starting to generate this thesis which we should talk about sometime okay that gyms should sell community and we should solve loneliness first and the fitness is the byproduct people show up at the gyms that they that we support because they're showing up for their friends as much as they're showing up for themsel

40:46and it's almost like church where church for the body you have this you know every day I go I pay my penants or whatever you know I do my thing and at the end of the result is like oh wow I got fitter but really it's like you're loneliness in the moment and the easy button is loneliness which I think is a is a real thing it's I don't know maybe weird to talk about but the community is something actually very impactful in these gyms so if we can figure out this easy button and you can flip it and get

41:1090% of people in the gyms like we could have literally like 20 times more gyms in the world just overnight so to me it's like there's a big growth opportunity if we actually attack the problem that's stopping people from coming into the gym yeah that's powerful how how do you want push press to be remembered after your time uh hopefully not remembered cuz that means dead or how do you find people to talk about push press yeah near 2300 um this one might not this so this

41:39might not answer the question directly cuz I haven't thought about that to be honest but it does it Loosely will so one thing I have noticed in the fitness industry that that annoys me is there are very few multigenerational companies and if you look across like I think Fitness is a tested tried andrue industry but if you look at other ones Automotive entertainment whatever like there are companies that have been around for 100 years and I know Fitness is newer to some regard but there is no 50-year-old Fitness Company really um I

42:04guess maybe like 24-Hour Fitness although they're kind of on the decline and and the reason is I think it's because the Easy Button problem oh well you know like what's the newest fad we'll do Shake Weights like okay let's sell those on TV let's do jazzer size and everything turns into like a DVD buy it now for $29.99 and it dies in a year and I think like what we need to start having in the fitness industry is like multigenerational companies that live because they're not built on hype and they're not built on fads but they're built on something real and that's

42:34ultimately like where my mind has started to go like this company definitely should outlive me and it should support an industry that is outliving all the people who open the gyms themselves