Dan Uyemura -Social Media Strategies for 2021

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness industry podcast for over two years and running. It is 2021, and I am your host, Eric Malzone. I have the absolute pleasure of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. Stop by futurefitness.co to subscribe and learn more. This show is brought to you by Level 5 Mentors, guiding entrepreneurs to achieve the highest levels of freedom in five critical areas: time, money, relationships, health, and purpose. So here's the deal. Entrepreneurs and business owners undoubtedly walk a different path, which means they need a different set of metrics. The great news is that level five mentors is actually quantified it. Yep, that's right. If you go to level5mentors.com forward slash survey, you can take the freedom assessment, get your personal score, and see how you are stacking up. That's level5mentors.com forward slash survey. And don't worry, it's free. Well, I'll answer that question for you. You're not, because you can't until now. Morpheus arms coaches with accessible, intelligent, communicable client insights to save coaches time and ultimately increase your value and earn more money. By collecting lifestyle data from 90% of the current wearable market and combining that data with cutting-edge proprietary technology, Morpheus provides an accurate and reliable recovery score for all of your clients served up on a simple and elegant dashboard. No more guessing, just the real, honest data alongside the insights from Morpheus into what to actually do with it. The Morpheus platform also provides live heart rate training for your clients that can be tracked and shown anywhere. In the gym, in a home, outdoors, with personalized heart rate zones for each individual client. Combined with custom alerts, in-app messaging, and other amazing features, this is the ultimate coaching machine. Go to trainwithmorpheus.com to learn more. That's trainwithmorpheusmo r-e-us.com.

Dan, welcome to the future of fitness. Oh man, you caught me mid-sip on a cup of coffee. Thank you so much for having me. Um real excited to be here and talk about future of fitness with everybody.

Yeah, man, it's exciting to have you. I think we're we're talking before recording, of course, about different types of facility and gym owners and different types of how people approach sales, but there's also that 2020 has really developed a tech side to business. And I also see that there's two different types of tech entrepreneurs within the fitness industry. There's people like yourself who have been in the industry for a very long time at every level, know it. And then there's people from the tech side who know nothing about fitness profession and kind of the inner workings of a coach or a trainer or uh a gym. So it's good to see. And luckily for that second group that I was describing, we need people like me uh to come in and advise. So I'm very thankful for them. But you, on the other hand, you've done it all, man. You started push press, and we'll get into that story. And but really, it probably best comes from you. Give us your backstory, Dan. How did you write on?

Yeah, I've been a lifelong entrepreneur. I was a kid who had a brownie stand at the corner of the park on weekends in the summer. That that type of kid. I went to school here in Los Angeles right during the like beginning of the internet. In fact, I remember moving in freshman year and they had us like log into email, and it was what was called Pine back then. And for anyone who remembers Pine, it was a terminal window where you had to like issue all these commands to check your email. It was super unuser friendly, but I remember being enamored by that right from the onset. So the the natural progression of an entrepreneur as the internet's starting is I got into starting internet businesses and I got into developing for the internet businesses fast forward. I don't want to bore everyone with all that, but I find myself 25, 30 pounds overweight because in the tech industry they just put pasta dinners in front of you to keep you coding all night long. And I'm 35 years old and I have a midlife crisis. And I basically quit, I was working for MySpace at the time, quit my job, opened a gym. I at first I joined a gym, which happened to be a CrossFit gym, lost the 25 pounds in what felt like days was probably months, became totally enamored with CrossFit, saw again the future of this was in 2009, saw where this was gonna go, and quit my job and opened a gym. And then once I did that, I realized that the software was not really that. What I knew could be built for businesses was not being representative of what was available for gym, so decided to build the software.

Yeah, it's interesting. What I opened my very similarly, I think in 2008 I joined my first CrossFit gym, which was the Lane Fitness in San Francisco. So shout out to Chris. And then I also went back and forth between Kelly's gym, Kelly Starts gym, and then his gym, and learned a lot. And then I I came, I'm like, gee, like these guys, like they're growing really fast. Like this, I think I can do this. And that's what started me to move down to Santa Barbara and open a gym in 2009. And of course, we won't bore people the details of gym ownership for that period of time, but we saw a big swell in popularity and then it leveled off. I don't know, what do you think around 2014-15?

Yeah, it was just I think I don't know if the popularity leveled off or if the number the competition caught up.

Yeah.

So before like we opened LAX CrossFit, which was like LAX Airport, and people were driving 15 miles, 10 miles, or they maybe they work near us and they live 10 miles away. Now, and then within three or four years, there was gyms every mile, so it became much harder.

Yeah, man. I was actually I was at your gym. I did a Ido Portal.

Oh yeah.

Uh that was right after I left.

I actually left it. Yeah.

That that was interesting. That was uh that was actually some of the sorest my legs have ever been because it just seemed like you're doing all these animalistic movements, and then at the end of the day, you've done like 2,000 squats. And uh yeah, that was hard. Anyway, so fast forward, man. So tell me about PushPress. Like, where is it now? Where it's been in years of development, we've talked about this. Walk us through the story of Push Press and some of the challenges of being a software developer in the fitness space. And you know what let me start with this. When you decided to start PushPress, what was the problem that you set out to solve?

Well, it was basically what I stated earlier. I knew where things were going with technology. I knew what was available in terms of technology, and I just didn't see it represented in the landscape for fitness management software. That included things, and this is again, keep in mind, this was in 2010 when we were kicking this around, but API first technology, the usage of digital signage and mobile apps. And again, 2010, iPhones were early, maybe have been out a couple five five years or so. There weren't a lot of things out there that were representative of of where the technology was going. And that's why we decided to start pushbress.

So since that point in time, there's a lot of CRM solutions out there coming to the fitness industry, right? And there's a ton. What's walk us through the journey of how you've kept up with competition? That's something that seems to be it must have been a huge challenge in some sleepless nights with so many people coming into the market. What's been your take on that over the last nine to 10 years?

Yeah, there's a few. One, if I would have known how hard it would have been, how hard it was to build a gym management and billing platform and how many things that it would require, I would go back to my past self and not nudge myself away from it. It's one of those things. It's okay, so it's not unlike opening a gym, and you've been there and you get this, right? Like you look at what you look at what's going on, and it's, oh, this guy's got hundreds of members and they're paying hundreds of dollars each per member, and this guy probably is buying a Ferrari every month.

Yeah, yeah, the simple math. Yeah.

Yeah, you do the simple math, and in your head, it's so easy. And it's that times a thousand for a gym management software. I'm like, oh, like mind body's got 50,000 clients and they're charging hundreds of dollars. It's gonna be so easy to just make it right, not true. I would I I've actually helped people who have started companies in that were competing with PushPress. I've helped them and they would ask me, like, why are you helping me? You're gonna be my competitor. And I'm like, because this is so hard and you don't understand how hard it is what you're about to do, that I can tell you everything I know, and you're probably not gonna, you're probably gonna have a hard time. Yeah, it's like everyone thinks building a gym management platform is easy. And we live in a world of perfect efficiency. Everything that's get that is easy gets done immediately. So I always tell people, like, if it was so easy, why isn't why aren't there a whole bunch of them? There's none. Even push press has its flaws. And to answer your question, like the challenges, there's all these different routes you can go. It's choose your own adventure life. Some companies raise a bunch of money up front, millions of dollars, so they can fund their development. The problem with that is you get handcuffed to investors, and investors' objectives are quite different than what a gym gym owner's objectives are. Investors just want to make money and lots of it, right? So the minute you get in bed with investors, you have to change your direction and your mission changes. We haven't taken money. And we've purposely done so because we want to be able to represent gym owners, because we were gym owners. And the challenge that comes with that is you just don't have resources. So you're trading, keeping your mission intact for time. It takes longer to do everything because you don't have 50 engineers building stuff. So you guys never took on an investor.

That's a big deal, especially now, right? What walk me through that? I'm sure there was times when people wanted to invest. What was your decision-making process? I'm like, no, no, we're gonna take maybe the longer road. Like, well, yeah, I can't imagine some of those decision making and some of the nights that you had to stay up thinking about it.

But it's actually interesting because until you hit a point where, and we're not even there yet, but until you hit a point where you don't need anyone's money, nobody's offering you money. So, yes, we've had people come have that have come along and they didn't want to invest in us, they wanted to buy us, which again would dramatically shift our direction because we would no longer control who we're representing or what good we're bringing to the market. For the amount of inertia that we've had to overcome to get to where we are, no offer has made even remotely close to sense. And it wouldn't make sense for them to offer us the type of number we would want because we've put in a ton of work to get us to where we are. Long story short, like we've had interest in investment. We it's just not high on our priority list enough for us to because here's the thing that again, a lot of people don't realize. For me to go raise an investment round, I basically have to stop everything I do with this company and go and meet people and pitch and and have meetings for three months straight, which means I'm not focused on this company at all. And then this then begins the rat race. Once you do that, these investors, I don't want to bore everyone with the the how this works, but put it this way, think of the stock market. If you invest in a stock at $10, you need something to indicate that now the stock is worth $11 for your portfolio to be worth more. So if you invested in push press at some valuation, let's call it $10. If I don't go and raise another round or sell my company, there is no markup of the asset. So the minute you take investment, the investors want you to take the next round so they at 50% more or 100% more valuation or 200% more valuation, so they can go back to their accountants and say, look, our portfolio is now worth 200% more on this investment. So not only do you waste three months raising money today, but literally the minute you you're done raising money, they want you to start doing it all over again to raise money again in 12 months. So you go from running a business to just raising money, is what happens.

Yeah. Yeah, I've seen that play out quite a few times actually. Yeah, I it strikes me that we actually haven't talked about pushpress. So for the audience, what like what is push press? What do you guys do? Obviously, your software solution for gym owners. Tell us about your competitive advantages, who you serve. Yeah, give us the goods on that, man.

I'll sum it up as quick as I can because none of your listeners really care about pushpress at this point. We're gonna get to good stuff, trust me. PushPress is a gym management software. We're founded and run by gym owners. We make it a point to hire gym owners, specifically our clients who have succeeded so that they understand the business, they understand how PushPress works, and they understand our mission, which is to help gym owners. So, what we're trying to build is an entire ecosystem, a platform, if you will, of software technology that allows you to leverage code, robots, automations, whatever you want to call it, to free up your time while making sure your customers and your leads and your potential customers are getting great experience. And that's a routinely great experience is only built through process and procedure. And that's what software does for you. It automates process and procedure.

You've specifically, I would imagine a large percentage of your clients are CrossFit or boutique gyms. Am I accurate in saying that?

Boutique gyms, yeah.

Yeah. Where do you think having gone through in my gym ownership days, Zen Planner to Mind Body to Wattify, back to Zen Planner, just all the time? A lot of these just have so many features that you end up just getting lost really in not using a lot. It sounds great when you're signing up and then you realize that you never actually set it up properly. What do you think with that segment of the market, the boutique gym owner, what do you think are the most important pieces of functionality that they want and value?

Yeah. So in general, 80% of all functionality is the same for most gyms. You need billing, automated recurring billing for your memberships. You need to be able to set up membership plans, you need to create a schedule. Uh, you need to have reservations and check-ins against that schedule. You need to assign coaches to coach that schedule. The reservations and check-in part I call access control. You need some type of financial reporting. That's a sweet spot of all of them. Where it gets really where it starts to feel like you did you described, where there's a ton of features that you don't really know how to use, is when you venture off into the 20%. Uh a martial arts studio that does a free GE intro operates completely different than a CrossFit affiliate that does a private training first philosophy. So that's where the trap was set for most software. When they build it, they're just building a sprawling piece of software that handles every single use case that comes up. And trust me, when the next fitness modality pops up that we don't even know about in a couple of years, it's gonna have a different sales cycle and a different business operations than anything that's out there today, probably. And then they're gonna have to build that too. And that's what starts to make software feel like the sprawling suburb mess where you're just features everywhere and confusion everywhere. And that's what we're trying to avoid with push press.

Nice. Yeah, I mean, that that's definitely especially something as big as a mind body. It's it's like the infusion soft of gym management.

Yeah, and for what it's worth, I don't even think it's their fault. But like they were conceived before iPhones were around. So imagine like you've built your whole platform around something, and then something's so revolutionary as an iPhone comes out, and then it's what do you do, throw everything away, or do you try and just tack on top of it? And we're talking like they've been around for 20 plus years now, they're killing it, they're doing the best they can, but it's like when you have that type of longevity, they've gone through three different tech cycles in 20 years.

Yeah, that's crazy. The iPhone was what, 2007?

Yeah. And I think I think Mind Body's first version came out in 2002. So, you know, there was no such thing as an API when they were thought about, when they were first conceived.

So yeah, 2007 was a really interesting year for technology. That's when everything's springboarded. But anyway, that's a whole other episode. One of the things I was really interested in talking to you about, can we we chatted about prior was social media, man, and how that interacts. It's like this thing. I think there's a certain percentage of coaches and gym owners who love social, they love to influence, they love to be engaged in it. Me personally, I'm making constant efforts to withdraw from social media. It doesn't really make me happy. This is before social dilemma came out.

Let's talk about let's dive into that because um it I'm gonna guess it's not making you happy because some type of political or thought is being is invading your space that is personal, right?

Yeah, it's well, it really comes down to, and I think the fundamental thing is it forces comparison. You're constantly, you see something, you're comparing yourself or your situation or whatever it may be with these images. And the only one I really use is Instagram. I do like the connection that I have with people. Like I love seeing what my uncle's up to in Seattle and if he's skiing this season. Like that's kind of cool. I love being in touch with family back in Italy or New Jersey on the Italian side. And that that part of it's really interesting, and then my close friends. But yes, the political environment, geez, man, it that's wild. We're seeing stuff that and I think we can call a lot of the world's problems right now from um a social standpoint is really down to media, social media and of course news. But yeah, to your point, yes, that's a huge part of it.

Yeah, and that's fair. And honestly, it is a threat to the social media environment. My answer to that would be for your business, for your gym, interact with social media for as the tool it needs to be for your gym. I don't, I almost do not at all interact with social media personally, and I didn't even make a conscious choice with it. I think, similar to you, I found too many negative interactions with it personally that I just chose not to interact with it personally. But I do use it as a broadcast mechanism to let people know about push press, to let them know about things we're doing, to congratulate people on my system, things like that. And I'm able to separate that from my personal identity and my like what's happening. Every once in a while I'll get sucked in down the rabbit hole of some nonsense someone's posting. But I just have to remind myself that's not what I'm here for. Wrong tool, wrong place.

Yeah, and that takes some discipline too. I do. I use it obviously for promoting the podcast. I have someone who uses my social media to make sure that the posts are getting up on time and I try to avoid it. The one thing I I have used very successfully is LinkedIn from a business development standpoint. But even over the last year, man, LinkedIn has just become this spam. Like that's all you get. And they LinkedIn really has to do something because that is just getting that's way that's already out of control. That being said, if you can, even if you can divide it into, I guess, business use and then non-personal use, where what do you think the fitness industry looking forward into 2021, the remainder of this year and next year? What what do we have to be aware of? Where do you think it's all going?

Yeah. Let me actually address one thing first that I think is a key like cornerstone foundation of this conversation. If you can't tell, I've thought about this a lot. What has happened over the last, I don't know, since humans have hundreds of years, right? Think about it this way. 400 years ago, Eric, if you had an idea that you wanted to tell people and get out there to people, what would you do? Let's say in the 1800s.

I don't know, man. Handwrite books or newsletters. Right?

Like pre-printing press, you might have to go stand at an intersection somewhere and just talk out loud, right? Yeah, hear ye, hear ye. Yep. Then the printing press came, and okay, great. Now you can get books out there, but you got to get these physical things printed and delivered, and people have to want them and understand that they're blah blah blah. That's where libraries came in. So that we're seeing technological advances, and all it simply is of information spreading, right? Internet came about, great. So now there's Google, you can put up a web page. Social media basically allows you to broadcast. We've seen this with Trump. If you have a social media following, you don't need to be on TV. Before, like to get to broadcast to millions of people, you'd have to get a TV station to agree to put you on TV, which is unless you're somebody, was impossible. So you really had no way of distributing ideas before. And now what social media is is a platform where people, anybody who takes the time and energy to do it, can spread their ideas to the people that are paying attention to them. And that is such a powerful concept. Because when we talk about technology, you have to understand the purpose of technology is simply leverage. That's all it is. It's leverage. And being able to put out a tweet and broadcast it to 8,000 people at the second that you do it is leverage times 8,000.

Yeah.

Yep. So that's like the cornerstone. I like everyone has to understand that is what social media does for you. It gives you leverage. It's what all tech, it's what PushPress does for you. It allows you to buy back your time and spend it on things that are more important while the computer system is doing other stuff. Leverage. I wanted to open with that to make sure everyone understands the concept of leverage is huge because that's the only way you can create value at mass scale or attract and do anything out the further away from one to one you go. The more leverage you get, the the faster you can grow something. And that's that's why social media is important.

So I agree with all that. And I think it is it's a force multiplier that's only getting greater and greater. But it people are it is a dilemma. What do you think if you were a gym owner? Right? I don't know. Do you still own a gym? I do not. Okay. Me neither. If you did, what would be your social media strategy moving forward?

Well, first of all, I would definitely make do everything. I would set up my structure around it as a gym. So similar to what Gary Veean then professed, it's like any type of any type of emotionally stirring content or anything you can build, I would make sure it gets out to all of the platforms I could, right? Um that's first steps. You you obviously want to hit the big guys, right? Facebook, Instagram, those are simple, well known, easily understood, and you can build your followings and understanding of your business from there. What I find super interesting is these new platforms that are emerging are just continually reshaping communication in ways that I don't think people understand even yet. TikTok is one that we can talk about. Are you familiar with TikTok?

I every once in a while my sister will send me, text me TikTok videos that my nephews do, and they're hilarious. But other than that, I don't really know what's going on, man.

Yeah, so what TikTok has created is this bad reputation of a social media platform where kids are dancing around the music and doing just dumb things, which is for the most part, for someone of myself and your age is worthless. But what it's evolved into, what people have figured out to do with TikTok, is how to condense a ton of information in an entertaining way into a 15 or second or one minute video. Because those are your only two choices, 15 seconds or one minute. So, for instance, let me give you an example. I like to cook, I enjoy cooking. And for me, finding new recipes is tough and finding new techniques is tough because I like how do you Google things you don't know? So I follow a lot of chefs. There's Michelin Star chefs on TikTok who basically show you how to make stuff. And in one minute, you can learn how to make a Michelin Star dish. Now, they don't tell you, you can't get into the details of how much of this and how much of that, but you can get an idea and then you can start to play. And it's done in a way that how many of you out there right now are you see it? Like these long form posts, these Facebook posts that are like two scrolls long and 4,000 words, and they're really trying to con I don't read them at all anymore, but I can tell they're really they have really something important to say, but I just don't have the time to read it because why everyone's attention has been shifted down to about three seconds. In my opinion, TikTok is going to be responsible for changing everyone's consumption of content into 15 minutes, 15 seconds, and you better be entertaining and it better be visually appealing and it better be quick and full of information, or I'm not watching it. Right.

So it's interesting. I feel like there's things are going one of two directions, right? Because first of all, I live a cook too. So it's any point we should probably chat. The there's what I would call the dumbing down is a horrible way to say it, but just our attention spans are boiled down to like 15 seconds. That's what uh you're saying here, which is true. On the other side of things, when you look at stuff like the Joe Rogan podcast, which is a long form show, two to three hours, and it's the most popular show on the planet. So there's also this thirst for in-depth conversations. And I feel like anything in the middle is a tough place to be.

Yes, I agree. However, if I launched a podcast today and I started dropping two-hour podcasts and nobody knows who I am, I will get no listens. Joe Rogan can do that because he has already created his identity and his value proposition. And there's so much brand in what he's done that people don't need buy-in to give him two hours. And on top of that, every minute there's a 15-second hit that is hilarious or interesting or funny. They don't just go off into diatribes for for 30 minutes of boring stuff. He keeps that conversation going.

Yeah, it is true. It's uh so here's an interesting experiment as well. It's not really an interesting experiment, it's just my life. The uh so I've done a lot of podcast interviews. I have this show, I have the Fitness Blitz Radio, I have the Black Diamond Podcast, I have the soon to launch Morpheus Radio. Fitness Blitz Podcast was exactly what it sounds like. It was 10 to 15 minute short interviews. I haven't released an episode on that. And then in contrast, the future of fitness is anywhere between three to thirty to sixty minutes. Sometimes we go above, so a little bit longer. Black Diamond's about 30 to 60 minutes as well. I haven't released an episode of the Fitness Blitz radio in a year and a half, and I had 350 episodes. The I still get with zero effort three to four thousand downloads a month on that. The future of fitness, which is longer form, I constantly have to be pushing. I have to be working for it. I don't know what that means, but it's really interesting to me that that 10 to 15 minute mark does there is something special about it. And people really like it. And then maybe it's their commute, maybe it's part of their workout, or they can feel like they're making progress because they're finishing one and starting another. So I don't know where that psychology leads, but it is a noticing movine.

Just think of it this way: it's a commitment. And if yeah, if I'm standing in line at the bank, I can start listening. Maybe I can get halfway through your podcast, a 15-minute podcast, while I'm just waiting in line at the bank. Like that commitment is so low, it fits into a lot of places. Like you said, a commute, I might be able to listen to two or three. But a 60-minute podcast, like then that commitment level gets significantly higher where I've got to maybe I'll listen to it on a run, but I might run three times a week. So if it's you, if it's someone else. So that's why these one minute, like I promise you, if you're on the fence with TikTok, find something you like that maybe isn't even fitness, like cooking. Dude, Traeger has a like tons of smokers on there, like so much cool stuff. Go in there, search it. And I promise you, you're gonna lose 20 minutes looking at one-minute clips. Like before, you're gonna be 20 minutes in. You're gonna have learned a lot of cool stuff, you're gonna saw some funny stuff. It's gonna be 20 minutes that you won't even realize you lost because it was so entertaining.

Cooking question for you. My wife are building a home. That should be done in spring of this year. Making some big decisions right now as far as kitchen appliances. That's my job. What uh what kind of range do you have?

Oh man, I'm I'm renting, so I have a gas range, there's nothing fancy. Like, I didn't pick it out. It's just getting away. What would you buy? I you know what? I don't even know. I haven't gotten that deep into cooking where I've honestly looked at ranges. I uh obviously gas range. It would be a gas range. I don't even know any brands. If I got to the point where I'm building a house, I absolutely would be a master of understanding that's of the yeah, I'm so deep down the rabbit hole right now, Dan.

It's like uh I'm jealous. Yeah, it's yeah, it is, but it also that's 3 a.m. wake up. I'm like, did I make the right call? You just gotta go with it. You know what I mean? Yeah, man. I know. Anyway, back to social media. There's newer social media platforms coming out. TikTok's fairly popular now, but we mentioned previously some ones that I really hadn't heard of. And what's interesting now, of course, is that today's recording date is the 19th of January in 2021. About a week ago, Trump was taken off Twitter, right? Twitter, yeah. Um now, like the different social media platforms are starting to really gain more mainstream attention. What are some of the newer ones coming out? What do you think of them? What do you are you using them? Give us some insights on that.

Yeah, it's and as dialed in as I am to this niche of the world, I don't even know all the ones are going out, and I don't even use most of them. But the newest one that has come out that I do want to talk about is called Clubhouse. And again, like I was telling you earlier in this, and we were talking off the air, fast forward a year or two, and I could either be completely wrong or I might look like a soothsayer. So we'll see. Let's see. A clubhouse is this it's a weird concept that I didn't get for the first two weeks I was on it. Basically, I dismissed it for a while. It's audio only. And you basically join a room and it feels super restrictive because you can't tech type anything to anyone, you can't communicate with anyone in any form or fashion unless you've been granted the ability to talk. And the person who started the room or the moderator of the room is a will give people the ability to talk. So there will be rooms that format pop up around interest groups, right? Again, I'm in software. I'll join ones that are either about software development or software building a software business or about fitness, one or the other. And what I've realized is the ones that are using it successfully are using it like a radio show. So it's basically there's you've heard radio, there's all kinds of different formats. You can do question and answer, you can do entertainment, you can do you know spoofs or money giveaways or things like that. That these are all things that are being done right now in Clubhouse. And I think if it can get over this hump, right now there's a lot of people experimenting with it and a lot of people learning how to use it. And if you this is one of those moments where if you want to be one of the early adopters and have that like land grab when a year from now, when everyone figures it out, now's the time to try it. But if it does get over the hump and it does get mainstream adoption, which are two big ifs, I can see this being pretty powerful, not just for me as a software company, but for gyms, because you could use it to talk about fitness to your local communities, right? Now, this is going to require massive buy-in because in order for software it works, because the worldwide can tune in and we can get a thousand people in a room and talk about software, that's easy. But to get a couple hundred people from your local community into a room will be much more difficult.

Is that the one like Oprah Winfrey got behind? Ooh, I don't know.

I don't know who got behind it, honestly. It just came up in the. You do have to have an invite, yeah. So they've they've done a lot of like really smart ways of ramping up the demand and making people talk about it, which is getting it off the ground right now. But for a gym, this is how I see it working. And this is what I want to do with push press is you create a room only for your your customers, right? And you seed it that way, and you and that way you can get local people in and you can talk about fitness with with your customers and you just do Q ⁇ A's. I know you don't get to if you didn't get a chance to ask me questions on how to do certain movements or get better at certain things or nutrition or you're making some food and you want to have a question about something, just ask me now, right? On this chat. And eventually, I think once it gets kicked off, and your members will use it probably as a way to just have fun and BS together too. But if it gets kicked off, you just start asking your members to bring their friends. And that's how you can start introducing your brand of fitness to your local community. And I think there's some power in that. Imagine if in your local city someone launches a radio show that is accessible to everyone in that local area, and a friend of a friend invites you in and you're like, hey, you know what? I've been trying to lose weight all this time and I can't do it. And then you can talk to them. What have you been trying? Have you been? What diet are you on? What are you doing? Blah, blah.

Out of curiosity, can you record things in Clubhouse? Could I do could we have this conversation right now in Clubhouse and I could take the recording and put it into a podcast?

I don't think you can record yet. I don't know if that's on their roadmap. It's very clear what they've done is they've launched a very niche and slim product that just hits one purpose and they're gonna enhance on it. They're missing the boat on a lot of really obvious things, in my opinion. But I bet they're gonna build all those things as adoption picks up. But so for now, no, you can't.

So is it so it's classified as social media? Is that right? But it sounds like I don't know. It it doesn't sound like the true the true the social media that we know traditionally.

It's that's why it's really it's out there, it's a little different. It's the best way I can say is so imagine like you were like, hey Dan, let's do this podcast, but let's let anyone come on and listen to it live. And while we're doing it, they can ask questions whatever they want. I love it. It just exactly. So it makes it more like a radio show, like a live podcast that's interactive. It's just something that hasn't been done before at all. So you it takes a while to wrap your head around it.

Yeah, I definitely want to go check it out. And to be quite honest, one of the reasons I started a podcast is because in my early 20s I worked at a radio station, um, multiple radio stations for about three, four years. Turns out really hard to make money. You did the simple math and you're like, I'm gonna start a podcast. Yeah, exactly. I never really expected to make money off a podcast. And but doesn't the money I do make is usually indirect from conversations I have, or maybe people who listen and contact me, a little bit of sponsorship and affiliate here and there. But really, I never expected it. I did it because I really enjoy it. I love having conversations with people like Dan Waymura and learning and having a relationship with you that I normally get. I was talking to Jonathan Levitt from Insight Tracker, who started his own podcast about a year ago. He's done 100 episodes and we were talking this morning. And one of the things that we both agree on is that for this time, for this 35 minutes and 53 seconds and going, that I am fully engaged in Dan. I don't have my text messages open. I'm not checking email, uh, I'm not looking at social media, I'm just engaged in our conversation. And I don't even do that with my wife.

Yeah, I was just gonna say, man, the other night we're I was watching TV with my wife, and I realized like I'm scrolling social media, I'm watching TV, and I'm having a conversation with my wife all at the same time. Nothing's getting my attention.

And that's super normal now. That is really normal. Like last time we both laid in bed and go to bed and we both on our tablets. I'm like, wow, how far a week? Like, when did this happen? It was like this, it wasn't like this a year ago. And then somehow it just slipped into this pattern. That's where technology is at every corner, and it's really hard to just be. And that that's a huge thing for me to have a podcast, is I really just get to focus on one person and the conversation, the nuance, and all of it. And it's a ton of fun.

So, how about this then? For a marital relationship advice. If you're having a hard time connecting with your husband or wife, just do a podcast with them once a day.

Yeah.

Exactly. I talked to her, so this is a funny story. At the beginning of the of towards the Q1 of 2020 when the pandemic started to hit, my wife just made some really interesting decisions. I think most people are like, started drinking more, started eating shit. She went the other way. She's like, you know what? I'm gonna give up booze and I'm gonna go plant-based. I was like, wow, okay. So this obviously affects me. I'm with it. I'll roll with it, sure. And I'm like, maybe we should just make a show because people would ask, so you guys are plant-based now? I'm like, practically. I still mean. I'm like, why don't we start a show called practically plant-based? And that could be our little thing. And yeah, we thought it'd be pretty good. I got a million ideas, Dan. That's not a problem.

So you're an entrepreneur too.

Yeah, exactly. And uh she said she thought I was crazy and never launched. I bought the domain name and started the YouTube channel and all that. But that was the goal. It's like we can just have a thing that's our thing, you know, that we work on together. Yeah.

What's interesting is how I went off on that diatribe about how social media is leverage. These are not original thoughts. I've lifted these from a gentleman and a philosopher named Naval Ravakant. And for the three people out there who have listened to me on more than one thing, I bring up his name, everything I talk about, because he was so transformational to my mindset. But one of the key things he talks about too, with the transformation of social media and the internet is niching down. Before the internet and before social media, you might have been into plant-based, practical plant-based living. And in your neighborhood, you might have been one of three people that you would never connect with because you had no idea. But now, if you launch that, you literally might create a movement of millions of people who are into the plant practical plant-based living. And that concept of niching down is important for gyms to realize because you could say, I am going to work on athletic development for paralyzed people who want to play sports in their in school. And I say that because literally my gym, my ex-gym partner did that for handicapped basketball players. There's a handicapped basketball league and all that, and she became a coach, like a training coach for them. The ability to niche down and not just be a general fitness person creates so much demand in a really focused area that it's something to think about.

And it's interesting. It took me a while to believe it. When you look at this, let's say this podcast, the future of fitness, B2B fitness industry. Are there others like it? Yeah. Yeah, there's some really good ones. I've been on some of them. I listened to other ones. I talked to a lot of the other hosts. That being said, it's never gonna be this mass market thing. It's never gonna have a huge following just because the total market is small. But it's consistent. And people, I know the people that are listening to it because I hear from them, and it's a very engaged audience. And I think that's something that really is hard for people to get to believe until you start to see it is that you don't have to have huge numbers to be influential. You can have your target audience, and it could be, I've seen podcasts that the host makes a ton of money and has a ton of influence off of a hundred downloads an episode, but it's so niched, they really got their audience. And I think that's something too for people on social media is like, hey, you don't have to have a hundred thousand Instagram followers. You just have to have the right ones, and that's easier said than done because people want the numbers. But I could go out and buy 10,000 Instagram followers right now if I wanted to. Does that mean anything? No.

Yeah, that's just ego stroking for sure. In fact, I was just in a I was just in a clubhouse talk when we talked exactly about this how having a couple hundred people that you're really engaged with that you can funnel, that you can build trust and funnel into your business because you can help them in a way that you understand is worth way more than having hundreds of thousands of followers that mean nothing to you.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree, man. So moving forward this year, you're gonna focus on Clubhouse. You're gonna play around with that. Anything else?

I am gonna keep focusing on Clubhouse. To be completely honest, as much as I believe the future of tick uh communication is in TikTok, for some reason I'm just gun shy to actually produce, make TikToks. I I think there is a level of production to them that I don't have the time to figure out. So I will remain a consumer of TikToks. And then other than that, yeah, just the usual suspects. And it's funny because the concepts of business, one cornerstone of it is you have to keep moving up and buy back your time by having getting things to help you do things. And I don't even see myself doing a ton of social media personally, but the company will be focusing more and more on that as a company. Awesome.

Dan, I want to respect your time. This has been really a great conversation for me. I truly enjoyed it. Once again, it's been 43 minutes of me just focusing on Dan and learning from you and having a great conversation. So I urge people to go out, check out the social media that Dan's been talking about. Go to well, where do you send people, Dan? For PushPress? Yeah, wherever. On the interwebs. Where do you want to do that?

PushPress.com. That'll do it. That'll get you there. Yeah. We're genuinely here to help. So just go there, check us out. Send start a chat with one of us and we'll figure it out.

Yeah.

You know what, Eric? Thanks for watching. You can cut this out.

Go ahead.

You can cut yeah, you can cut this out, but I I just read that you're a digital nomad and I want to know more because that's yeah, yeah, we can do that anytime, man.

Uh 100%. Oh, thanks for coming on, Dan. It's been a pleasure. Uh, ladies and gentlemen, Dan Wimura. Awesome. Thank you. See you guys. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This was your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minutes. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it. iTunes, Spotify, Catbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it and want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more or get in touch with me, simply go to the feature of fitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the feature of fitness. Have a great day.