Erik Korem - AIM7 & The Future of Pickleball

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[00:02:19] We're live. Eric Corm, welcome to the future of fitness my friend. Thank you for having me Eric. It's nice to be on with a fellow Eric. Yeah it is. Eric with a K. You, Eric with a C, me. But we can still be friends.

[00:02:31] I think that's absolutely important. Yeah. No dude it's really... I've been looking for this and your reputation proceeds yourself. You have a great podcast. We'll get into that too, which people will check that out. And you're really... You're devoted to the industry like you've been a performance coach

[00:02:46] for quite some time. Like you're the real deal. And you find yourself at a very interesting intersection of things right now between human performance and health. Right? Pickleball, which is going to be a huge part of our conversation today. And artificial intelligence, like there's just this seemingly...

[00:03:04] I mean I'm sure this is how you planned it 10 years ago right? A hundred percent. An AI pickleball human performance. Yeah man. So let's start with this. You do have a pretty cool background I mean from the NFL and a bunch of different things.

[00:03:18] So let's start with that. You know give us a brief overview of how you got to be here and then we'll get into AM7 and what you guys are doing with the pickleball. Well first of all, I'm very thankful to be on your show Eric.

[00:03:29] I've been listening for a long time. I can actually remember the first time I heard an episode several years ago. I was on a treadmill and I was looking for something in the industry and I got hooked. So it's great to be here.

[00:03:42] Yeah so my background started in human performance back in 2005. I started as a traditional strength conditioning coach. I was a graduate assistant at the University of Arkansas and I was very fortunate one day a coach walked in and he said, do you want to train these athletes?

[00:04:00] And it was several Olympians in the sprint events. One of whom was Veronica Campbell Brown. She's an eight-time Olympic medalist, three-time Olympic gold medalist. One of the few people that ever won the 200 meters back to back. And I got to travel the world with her for almost 14 years

[00:04:17] while I was doing college and pro sports. And I started seeing how the rest of the world was developing athletes and I realized how far behind we were. They had these institutes of sport, especially the Australian Institute of Sport.

[00:04:31] These countries were innovating on what's something called high performance which really the term isn't used quite appropriately. A lot of times here in the States it's starting to get used in a better way but they were integrating physiology, biomechanics, performance psychology, nutrition all together under one roof.

[00:04:49] And then they had a high performance director and Australian rules football is really well known for doing this. Probably the best. And so that's kind of where my mind was like, I want to bring sports science and high performance to the US.

[00:05:01] And that was a pretty ambitious goal. And then in 2010 I was hired by Jim Boe Fisher at Florida State to be the speed coordinator because my background in track and football. And after the first season he's like,

[00:05:14] hey Eric I want you to be the director of football operations. Basically the GM of this $200 million dollar football organization. I'm barely, I just turned 30 and I said, all right coach, I'll do it but name me the director of sports science as well.

[00:05:31] And he just kind of laughed. He's like, yeah, call yourself whatever you want. That job didn't exist. And so I was very fortunate. I got asked to go to Australia for a month by an expansion Aussie rules team called the Greater Western Sydney Giants.

[00:05:48] And I went with a colleague and we spent a month exchanging information. We helped them with a very specific problem they had. And we were like, we want to learn everything about sports science and high performance we can. So we brought back athlete tracking units.

[00:06:02] So we were the first ones to really track athletes in a game at Florida State and in practice. And we created a model for the game of football. So these devices were like the size of a deck of cards and they connected to GPS satellites.

[00:06:18] Catapult is the name of the company. And this is early, early days that the UI was terrible. So we had to hire a former NASA propulsion engineer to help us organize the data. And what we did was is we were able to say

[00:06:31] like this is what a game is. And this is what practice looks like. And this is like what a week of practice. And what a training camp looks like. And like, first of all, we're just killing our players. They were just showing up to game day exhausted.

[00:06:46] And then also like, although everybody on the field had different positional requirements, we were training everybody the same, which makes no sense. Like a lineman, an offensive lineman would sprint 50 yards in a game, typically from the sideline to the field. And a Core 4 Special Teams player playing receiver

[00:07:03] could sprint 750 high speed yards and cover 7,000 yards, but everybody did the same thing in the off season. Nobody would treat a business like that. Like HR doesn't train the same as computer science. Like they're your engineers, right? You go through different training.

[00:07:18] And so we changed a lot of the way that we trained. Coach Fisher let us kind of change a few things with practice. We were doing it to hit the field. We were doing it to his credit. We did an unbelievable job at managing our players.

[00:07:34] And we had an 88% reduction in injury the next year. Wow. Our team won a championship. The NFL flies in a bunch of people and they're like, what the heck is going on here? And quite literally opened up like this multi-billion dollar market for sports wearables and data.

[00:07:51] So my career just kind of took off in that direction and was fortunate to go to the University of Kentucky and run high performance there. I got a doctoral degree while I was there and met some just amazing people.

[00:08:03] And I say the genesis of AIM 7 really kind of started then. And yeah, so got to go on and lead performance science for the Houston, Texas started sports science there. And the idea for AIM 7 kind of got birthed, I would say in 2019.

[00:08:19] I mean, so it sounds like maybe this was the beginning really of like load management, which was what we will call today, right? Is that correct? I mean, now it's ubiquitous across sports. It's even arguments nowadays I hear about like, you know, is it valid?

[00:08:34] Are we giving it too much credit or re-leaning on the data too much? Right? But it's definitely no matter what it is, it's part of a lot of larger conversation. You nailed it, Eric. The problem back then is it was no restraint.

[00:08:51] And nobody was willing to think about things differently because the thing that you always heard was, well, we do it this way because we won back then whatever it was. You know, I worked for Nick Saban and he did it this way

[00:09:04] and so we're going to do it that way. Nobody challenged convention and to Nick Saban's credit he did a lot of things differently towards the end of his career. But if you just think about it from a biological perspective, the human body is either adapting or maladapting.

[00:09:22] You're presented with stress. The human, you know, you're either adapting to it and the tissues become a resilient biological systems gain more capacity or you're getting you're maladapting you're getting sick and injured or the worst case you die. And so it makes sense that we would want to

[00:09:40] in some structured way, increase the amount of volume of load that somebody is getting exposed to. In NFL training camps now they've got this down to a science like good friends of mine, Tom Mislinsky works for a group now that they're tracking all the way across the league.

[00:09:58] He's a former strength coach. He's brilliant and they really know like, hey, day seven to day 10 we see a huge spike in injuries because you come from doing nothing to running 150 plays in practice after four or five days of that. Guess what?

[00:10:12] Your body starts breaking down and you get injured. So guess what? If you just give guys a day off, you just regulate the training load and slowly increase. You're going to reduce your injuries significantly. It's not rocket science. So it's super interesting, man.

[00:10:26] I mean just how you got to where you are. So you started in seven what you said 2019. So my monkey brain math that's what five years right? Well, we officially incorporated in 2020 but the idea started in 2019. So it's iterated a few times.

[00:10:44] So maybe just walk us through that. Like what was the original goal and purpose of it and then how to get to pickleball? Yeah. So I was very blessed in 2019 a friend of mine, I was about to defend my dissertation and my buddies like Eric,

[00:10:58] you need to do this thing called the Presidential Leadership Scholars. And I'm like what is that? I looked it up. It's by the two Bush foundations, Clinton and LBJ Foundation, and they came together to two Republican presidential centers and two Democratic centers.

[00:11:15] Centers and they pick like 60, 70 scholars a year. You get trained by the former presidents and their administrations and I'm like there's no way I'm getting into this thing. You know, I'm the sports scientist and I got picked and it changed my life.

[00:11:29] I mean it really, it changed everything. The way I saw the world, the way that I started thinking about how I could use my skill set to help other people and my network, that was part of it too. They give you exposure to a network that's just unparalleled

[00:11:48] and I'm on a bus ride on the way back from the LBJ Ranch for the friend now a board member, Mark Hadar. And Mark's an unbelievable tech founder and I told him this idea I had for a consulting company based off of a model for high performance

[00:12:03] and he was like this is really cool. But how could you expand this idea to anybody in the world without training client hours for dollars? I was like well, I'm an expert in wearable tech. He goes now go back and work on that.

[00:12:20] So I started noodling on this idea of like, huh, you got a bunch that we got all these people with wearables now. I have an expertise in wearable data. It's just data, 7000 steps or seven hours of sleep. It's worthless.

[00:12:35] I mean we solved, we already experienced this with athletes but we'd experience all the problems along the way, right? Like all the scar tissue how not to deliver this to coaches and stakeholders and end users. So a buddy of mine land in Evans and I got together

[00:12:51] and we're like let's do a pilot. Let's see if we can predict some things with Apple Watch data and some other unique datasets. And we were able to predict people's energy and mood states multiple days in advance. Then we had those models externally validated

[00:13:07] by some researchers at NC State and we're like okay, we got something here. So we raised a little bit of capital. I went full time in 2021 and it was a grind. I'm not a technical co-founder. I don't write code. We started building this solution.

[00:13:24] It was for general health and wellness. It took us a couple years to build the tech. We were never VC backed. It was just, as you know, the world then from a VC perspective was just, there was just throwing money at things.

[00:13:38] And it was very hard to find really great engineers because the cost of an engineer was so high because they were getting paid exorbitant amounts of money. So there's all this, you know, all the things you go through. Right?

[00:13:51] Started with an MVP, which was a text messaging service where we'd suck in people's wearable data and text them recommendations and they're like, oh, this is amazing. And there was a gentleman who, his F Martin is his name. And he lives in Silicon Valley

[00:14:08] and he's one of the co-founders of Anthos Capital and he was one of our MVP users. He said, Eric, if you can package this in an app, you have lightning in a bottle. I was like, okay.

[00:14:21] So took us a couple years, built this tech, got a private beta, soft launch in September. And it was just kind of slow going as far as the growth. We didn't have like tons of capital to throw behind this. And we're iterating the app is sticky.

[00:14:36] People are sticking to it. They're using it. They're getting results. We, our data was showing that after 90 days, people were getting double digit improvements and things like their mood, 20% reduction in stress, better more energy, better sleep. So all the things that we thought we could do

[00:14:53] by pulling in their wearable data and then providing very personalized recommendations for exercise, recovery and mental fitness, it was all working. We just weren't growing as fast as we needed to. And then I got introduced to pickleball.

[00:15:05] And a friend of mine was kind of part of that group with major league pickleball and dooper. So there's a gentleman named Steve Kuhn that started all that and major league pickleball. I'm sure a lot of you heard like Gary Vaynerchuk

[00:15:20] has a team, LeBron and Tom Brady and Scotty Schaeffler. And then there's this platform called dooper, which is phenomenal. It's like a rating system for pickleball. And their CEO took a look at our product. And was like, look, if you just focus on pickleball,

[00:15:37] like we'll partner with you and you've got this is a, this is a blue ocean. And we looked and there's nobody serving these pickleball players. And there's a big problem in pickleball right now. A lot of people are getting injured.

[00:15:53] So I think UBS did a study and they found that there's almost $400 million in injuries last year. And it's not because pickleball is inherently dangerous. It's that like we talked about earlier, a lot of people are finding fitness through pickleball.

[00:16:07] Or they go on the court and it's such an addicting game because of the community nature of it. It's great exercise. They go from playing zero to five times a week and they're blotting Achilles or they hurt their back. And so there's no,

[00:16:20] they have no way of regulating any of this. And they're not doing the basic fundamental things like you would do for other sports, like warming up, cooling down, doing resistance training, right? All the things to help you stay healthy and on the court.

[00:16:32] So we built a comprehensive system for this. And then we layered our core IP underneath it. So they not only do they get the warmups and the cool downs and the mobility training, they also get personalized mental fitness recommendations, very specific recovery recommendations.

[00:16:49] And our retention rate right now is like, we launched this nine weeks ago and our 30 day retention rates 81%. Which is if you know anything about B2C apps, it's like through the roof. And so we found an audience that loves, that needed to be served,

[00:17:05] they could use our service and we're just out there helping them right now. Awesome man. I mean, it's, it's a, I'm reflecting on my experience with Ed Morpheus, but Joel Jamison on it from earlier. Yeah. With that. So work with him for a period of time.

[00:17:20] We still talk quite often as that thing involves. But same thing is kind of started as like a broad, this sits on top of your wearable data. There's no particular application. So it seems like, and he's starting to find success in just doing conditioning plans.

[00:17:36] Funneling it towards that. And you're seeing success in funneling it towards one specific problem or need. Cause it seems like those days are kind of over of like we can't just generalize wearable data. We have to come with a very specific solution that we're looking to offer.

[00:17:50] I mean, would you say that's accurate or is that just something that I made up? No, you're exactly right. It's kind of like if you're for everybody, you're for nobody to start like Strava, right? I think about Strava success. They started with cycling, right?

[00:18:03] And then when they moved to running, hell, the cyclists got mad. But now they're in 31 sports. They're helping a hundred million people. I think a hundred million downloads or something crazy like that. That's awesome. And so you got to start somewhere. And you know, pickleball is an audience.

[00:18:19] I think 45 million Americans played in the past 12 months. There's over 800 courts being built a month. These people need help. And we've done some very unique things to call out the problems in the sport. Like we have this whole campaign called Be Weird Warm Up.

[00:18:36] And it's been catching on like crazy. Our social media is growing fast. It's like you want you find that audience that needs you and loves you and you can serve, you just need to go all in. And then when you've really saturated that market,

[00:18:50] you can kind of expand the envelope. And the core idea behind name seven is doesn't end with pickleball. It's we actually are building data models that we can license to other folks. We can sit in the back end because our goal is to impact a hundred million lives

[00:19:07] and we can't do that ourselves. We want to work with other people. And so those discussions actually are starting now to help other platforms provide personalized wellness solutions. But pickleball is like, we're all in. We could spend the next three years

[00:19:23] just serving this community and growing it globally. Yeah, man. Let's talk about pickleball because I know I haven't talked about it. Not in a full depth like we're about to get into it now, but the guys that fit inside or do a great job covering it,

[00:19:39] Apple Tech will cover it as well. So it's like the trend of this is no, it's not a secret anymore. And I even just anecdotally, I'll go to my gym at the Whitefish Wave. Love shout out to these guys. Great gym. But it's like all of a sudden,

[00:19:53] like one day I'll go in and I can't find parking. Like what is going on right now? And it's like, oh, it's pickleball hour. It's like the two hours where the pickleball league gets together and this place is just packed. And you see like, what do I notice?

[00:20:05] I walk by, you see a lot of wrist braces. You see a lot of knee braces. You see people limping. And I could just tell by having someone of a coach as I am like, okay, a lot of these people

[00:20:17] have really done a lot of sports up until this point. So what is, give me the state of pickleball, dude. Like what is going on with the sport? How big is it getting? Well, the largest demographic is over 45. The sports been around for quite a number of years,

[00:20:34] I think almost 80 years. The fastest growing demographic is 18 to 34. And it's very diverse. It's an equitable sport because it doesn't cost much money to get into the game. Now some of these paddles are very expensive, but we can talk about it in a minute.

[00:20:47] But there's, you know, the amateur levels or the amateur leagues are growing. So there's, I'll kind of give you a big overview. There's the PPA that just merged with the MLP. So major league pickleball and the PPA just merged. Pickleball brackets and pickleball tournaments.

[00:21:05] There's a gentleman named Tom Dundin and they've kind of bundled up a bunch of things. And they've created a group that kind of oversees all that called the UPA United Pickleball Association. And then there's the APP, which is the Association of Pickleball Players.

[00:21:20] And they're primarily owned by InterSport. And InterSport is a sports marketing group. They're kind of the geniuses behind a lot of these marketing efforts for Chase Bank and Rocket Mortgage and Heineken and Mike Politski is the president of that group, awesome organization. They're primarily serving the amateurs.

[00:21:40] The PPA is all the top, most of the top, pickleball players and they're getting paid really big salaries. Like Ben Johns, the number one player in the sport, Heaven Annoley Waters, it just came out he was making two and a half million a year just on salary.

[00:21:56] That's going to blow a lot of people's minds when they hear that. But I mean, I was at the U.S. Open for pickleball in Naples, Florida. There was 3,800 competitors. I saw that, I could be wrong on this, but I was there, it was packed.

[00:22:14] For day, I was almost, I was there for a week with Megan Fudge and Ryler DeHart. Megan's a former college tennis player, so was Ryler. He was a coach for Alabama and Florida State and was a U.S. national team coach.

[00:22:28] They're a husband wife, they've got two kids, they live in an RV, travel around the country. She's one of the top, she's the number one player at APP. And I was in it for a week. Like going through exactly what these players go through supporting them

[00:22:44] and man, I think there was almost 50,000 people there that came over the week. They had grandstands, there was TV crews. If you haven't been to a pickleball, I'm talking a good pickleball tournament, you are missing out. I was in Atlanta recently for the major league pickleball.

[00:23:01] I'm no joke, I'm hanging out with Matt Leiner and then Gary Vaynerchuk's over there with his team and then Larry, oh where? The famous wide receiver for the Arizona Cardinals, Larry. Yeah. Larry Johnson, why am I blanking on this? The best hands in the league. Yes. That's right.

[00:23:19] Larry Fitzgerald. Yeah. Yeah, Larry Fitzgerald. It's a shame that I did that. I worked in the NFL, my goodness. He shows up, you know, B. John Robinson was there and the athleticism of these players, it's just like, you know, I worked in the NFL,

[00:23:34] I worked with Olympic athletes, they're these are world-class athletes at the top tier. And it is exciting and exhilarating to watch. But you could, the thing about pickleball is you and I can step on the court, pick up a paddle, and within 10 or 15 minutes,

[00:23:51] we can be dinking and playing and having a good time. And people are finding fitness through this sport. And if you track it, and we're getting a lot of amazing data on the game, we're actually building the first data model, we're putting all the skill sets

[00:24:07] that we had in place now. We're about to do some incredible things. It's like, you know, doubles play, which most people do, you know, for a decently fit person, it's like zone two. And people will go for an hour, hour and a half. Singles, you know,

[00:24:23] your heart rate's getting up into, you know, zone three, zone four. I don't play singles. I prefer doubles. It's a lot more fun. But you're only 14 feet away from your opponent. So there's something called the kitchen, which is this kind of area in front of the net.

[00:24:39] And the game, what happens is unlike tennis where you kind of play back on the court in pickleball, it's a rush to get to the kitchen. And then the ball, you're only 14 feet away from somebody at the highest level, the ball's coming at you at 70 miles an hour.

[00:24:52] So your reaction time has got to be really good. And so it makes it a very fun, lively game. And it's a community game. And, you know, people are just there to help each other, you know, there's, I've just met so many wonderful people everywhere I go

[00:25:13] that are just welcoming, they want to help you play. It's just, it's a cool game. I mean, one of the things I've heard in from my friends, right, who play, especially like one of the things I've heard a couple times is like the fire department, right?

[00:25:28] Things like that where you get like, nobody ever say any names or what department is in. And anybody's like, this saved our department. Like, yep. People were starting to like, there's a lot of animosity, you know, within the station, in the department. He's like this, getting people together.

[00:25:41] We put a court in, you know, at our stations and it's really brought the camaraderie back. And like that, I was like, wow, who would have ever thought pickleball? You know, kind of funny thing I was thinking about when you were talking, I'm like,

[00:25:52] now that Ursa just rebranded Health and Fitness Association, it's kind of funny that now Racquetball is coming back because that's what they are in Ursa. Well, I was like, that's kind of funny. We've had people for interesting time. Racquetball reach out to us about they see what we're

[00:26:06] doing in pickleball and like, hey, would you work with us? And we're like, one sport, well, we'll just got to stay focused but we'll get to Racquetball later. But yeah, it's like I can't name the institution right now, but one of the premier research institutions in this country,

[00:26:22] a neuroscientist at one of these universities was using our app. And she's also a teaching pro and she started to understand the data set we're collecting. She's like, hey, could we do research on the health implications of pickleball and partner with y'all? So we just submitted

[00:26:38] proposal for a it's a it's a for a pilot and then, you know, then eventually we want to go for a nice NIH grant because there's a lot of things I think we do it for health equity too. Introducing pickleball into low income areas, getting him some coaching,

[00:26:54] paddle, bringing families, you know what I'm saying? Like, let's see how this game affects the health and wellness of communities and the courts are just popping up all over the place HOA's now we're coming together, you know, they're building them like in master plan communities

[00:27:11] and then I know people that are going out and working with the cities to build them and city parks. So I'm just super excited about the future of this thing and I don't think it's going anywhere. Don't think so either. I really don't. And I mean,

[00:27:24] there's people like I've yet to try it, right? And I'm sure I will at some point this summer. I mean, it just seems to make a lot of sense because most of my friends do. So what let's give let's give into your tech excuse me. Okay. 47 now,

[00:27:38] let's say I go to start pickleball, right? And I come across your app explain to me like the customer experience. Why do I find it? What's like, give me the whole the whole thing. Yeah, you can get it in the app store. We're an iOS only right now.

[00:27:54] And the app is pretty simple. You open the home screen. It says pre-match, post-match off court training. So you click pre-match. And there's a breathwork tool you can do to help kind of ramp up your nervous system. You can do it in the car.

[00:28:10] So we're starting to like, you know, just kind of dose this stuff into people, right? And then it's like a dynamic warm-up. Step by step, video dynamic warm-up, where that's the first place we're starting. We want to get people to warm up.

[00:28:25] And because there's a lot of implications for more, not only is it, you know, help prevent injury, but it's dosing a little bit of mobility and things that when you compound this over time are really going to help people move better, improve their movement literacy,

[00:28:38] help their joints feel better. So those warm-ups, you can do them full court. You can do them if you just have a little five by five area, like if you're in a tournament, we're about to start creating tiers of warm-ups, beginner, intermediate, advanced, and then start implementing tools.

[00:28:52] So people can be like, oh, I got a foam roller. I've got a massage gun. I've got bands, you know, glute bands or whatever. We've already filmed all the videos. We're just working on that. Then it's post-match, breathwork tool to help kind of calm down your nervous system

[00:29:07] and then cool down. You know, just like four or five stretches that kind of we can rotate through a whole library of them. And then we have like personalized recovery protocols. So we have things in there that, you know, kind of the fitness lovers are going to like.

[00:29:23] Like do you have a sauna? Yes or no? Do you have a cold plunge? Yes or no? Do you do contrast? Yes or no? Do you have this tool, that tool? And then we will tell you which one is better and how to do it for that day.

[00:29:34] And then off-court training, this is where like I'm really proud of the system we built. We have customized resistance training programs that change daily based off of how much stress you can adapt to. So the core IP, one of the pieces of core IP

[00:29:54] that we have that sits underneath our product is we're helping people from a 30,000 foot view build more capacity for stress. People talk about managing stress. That's a fallacy. You can't manage stress. Like think about it, like if you're driving down the road and you get rear-ended,

[00:30:13] is that a situation you could manage? No. I can't manage Eric if you get upset with me about something. What I can do is build the capacity to adapt to more stress with less cost. That is what we're trying to do with athletes, right?

[00:30:30] When we were measuring all this biologically 12, 13 years ago, we noticed that the best in the world, Olympic gold medalist, first round draft pick, they could be exposed to tremendous amounts of psychophysiological stress and they would adapt super fast. And then you would have an athlete

[00:30:47] that was just slightly below them and you would see a total different adaptation curve. So we're like, how do we bring this capacity for more stress? This we call it adaptive capacity. That is truly the unlock for health and longevity. Okay. So we baked this into this system

[00:31:04] and we don't even have to talk about it. So part of it is the right dose of stress and the right dose of rest yields adaptation. The controllable things with stress. So for instance, resistance training, we can adjust your volume and intensity and even if we recommend

[00:31:21] a resistance training program that day. If you click I want to do aim seven, pick my workout. We can say here's an aerobic workout. You like to do the elliptical, get on the elliptical for 35 minutes in this specific heart rate zone. Like it's very dialed into the type,

[00:31:36] intensity and duration. So there's layers to this and then even mental fitness. You know, you can go in a little bit another layer like aim seven. What's my mental fitness recommendation today? We may recommend a gratitude journal. We may recommend a mindfulness intervention or a specific breathwork tool

[00:31:52] because you're stressed in the moment. So it's very easy on the home screen, pre-match, post-match, off court training, but then you can kind of peel back the onion. You know, and it's really interesting as we talk to people that are kind of,

[00:32:08] there's kind of some range built in the product which means that like somebody's new to fitness, they'll just kind of follow the prompts and go through it. Somebody that's a little bit more sophisticated, I'm talking to a customer like, what are you like? I went right to sleep.

[00:32:22] I wanted to sleep things that you have in there and started using those tools like that's interesting. So there's a lot of, you know, right now we're actually working on simplifying the product and pulling some things out that our customers aren't using,

[00:32:35] but the data models are getting better, the recommendations are getting better, and you can kind of see where this is going. That's cool. And what do you guys, I know you leverage wearable data, but do you, yeah, because give it insight like where,

[00:32:47] what other data inputs are you guys getting in specific to the consumer or the user? Yeah, so we do integrate the Apple app we do integrate the Apple watch, the Oro ring Fitbit Garmin. We're not on Android yet. That'll be down the line.

[00:33:03] We also do some very unique things we call a calibration every day. And it's kind of like a modified Hooper McKinnon questionnaire. And we're understanding how people feel there's different different things that we're asking them on a daily basis that actually guide some of our behavior design model

[00:33:21] that's kind of woven into this product. So we have objective measures of wellness as well as subjective measures of wellbeing. And that's really important when you're trying to make a precise recommendation. Interesting, man. And is this, are you guys going on a membership model? Do you guys,

[00:33:40] are you white labeling it? Give us some, give us insights on the business side of things. Yeah. So it's subscription right now 799 a month or 7499 a year. Not very expensive. Yes, there are opportunities. We could white label this. We can license our models.

[00:33:56] That's where we really see the long-term value of AIM 7 is licensing our models and working with others and sitting in the background. And nobody really has to know that we exist. Our mission as a company is to empower people to live healthy and impactful lives.

[00:34:10] And so AIM 7 doesn't have to be the hero. You know what I'm saying from a brand perspective, but in pickleball right now, that's kind of where we're positioned and it's been a blast. I never would have thought this is where things would have gone,

[00:34:26] but I absolutely love it. And it's, we've met so many incredible people and we're just getting started. But the outreach, the number of coaches that want to work with us that are trying to get the product into their clients' hands, facility partnerships across the country.

[00:34:44] We got some really exciting things coming up with leagues. It's all I'm going to say. It's just like when you find the people you're supposed to be serving, it just kind of happens. You know? That's so cool, man. It's cool to see that because it is.

[00:34:59] I've been with so many different, I've worked with so many different companies and started up over time. And sometimes it's like, God, you're just really pushing that rock uphill, right? And all of a sudden there's a shift. Something unexpected happens or whatever,

[00:35:12] me or maybe you just had a hunch and you followed it. All of a sudden it's like the whole, the track's got greased and you're just flying in one direction. And how is your business, since you guys made this shift in your strategy and your partnerships,

[00:35:25] like what has it done for your business? Like can you share what you can as far as numbers? How have you attracted more investors? Have you, like how are your subscriptions grown? Anything you can, revenues, whatever you want to,

[00:35:36] I know you're private, so whatever you want to share. Yeah, I would just say that the user base is growing really fast. Granted, we really launched this in pickleball. I'd say nine, 10 weeks ago. But just in that time, we partnered with Dupre,

[00:35:53] we partnered with, we got multiple MPL teams, which is the 50 plus senior pros. We've got a lot of things I can't talk about right now that are being finalized pen to paper because we're it. And we have, it's not just me,

[00:36:11] there's a roster of people like Dr. Alex Arbach who's working with us, former senior developer, senior former head of wellness development for the Toronto Raptors. Dr. Peter Haberl, head of former head of sports psychology for the U.S. Olympics. Pertik Patel, head of nutrition,

[00:36:27] former head of nutrition for the New York Giants. Susie, right? Like we got a group of folks that are world-class. Dr. Chris Morris, head of performance science at the University of Kentucky. So we have a brain trust and we're helping bring credibility

[00:36:42] to the sport and really being the, I want to say, like performance body that they really need right now. And so that's some credibility that we're bringing to the sport. But yeah, investors are starting to come in. It's been really fun. You know, we're very scrappy.

[00:37:00] One of our core values is stewardship. And we want to be excellent stewards of money that's invested in the company and also the data that's entrusted to us. So we will never sell people's data. We want to build really great models.

[00:37:13] But yes, we have started raising some more funds. I think now is the time to really pour gasoline on this and go. So we're out raising money right now. But it's been an absolute blast. And I would say the thing I'm most proud of right now

[00:37:27] is the stickiness of the product. You know, an 81% retention rate after 30 days and it's kind of just flat. That's gnarly. I mean, it's like you're kind of watching for the drop off. And our social media is just growing like crazy.

[00:37:45] We have some really cool things that some owned media assets that we've been developing and that are going to be coming out very soon that we've been recording. This is such a unique space to innovate in, specifically from a product standpoint. And then the media aspect of this

[00:38:01] that you can own that becomes a flywheel. We've been innovating in that space too. And so if you're not paying attention to pickleball, it's a big sport from the standpoint of how much participation is happening, how much participation you're getting and its expansion into South America,

[00:38:21] Australia and to China and to Europe right now. But it's not a huge market in regards to how many players are in the sport from a business perspective. And I don't know if people have just, there's some of these really big tennis companies

[00:38:37] that I think turn their nose up to this at first. They're now working as hard as they can to get back in and they could have owned the whole thing and that's created some wonderful opportunities for some very innovative companies in the space.

[00:38:51] And so if you're in sports and you're in tech, you need to take a look at this because it's such a sticky game. And if you create a wonderful community that's serving people, there's an awesome opportunity to serve folks and generate some good revenue at the same time.

[00:39:09] Yeah. Well, what's, you know, you just mentioned it briefly, but what other markets besides the US are really have really taken an early liking to pickleball? China is just they want to go full bore. And I think there's a number of reasons for that.

[00:39:28] Part of it is this most likely to become an Olympic sport and they're going to want to dominate that. It's just, let's just be honest, there's some political reasons for that. Australia, major league pickleball has moved into Australia.

[00:39:42] I think I just saw that Adam Scott just purchased a team. You're starting to see a movement into South America. It's already into Canada. I know some colleagues of mine who the director, the managing director for the professional pickleball registry,

[00:39:55] it's kind of like one of the well known certifying bodies that sits under the PTR, the professional tennis registry. They're moving into Italy. So you're seeing this game, the saturation, we haven't even seen saturation in the US. You just, just hold on.

[00:40:11] They're building almost, I think it's 800 to 1,000 courts a month. I'm seeing, because like we're innovating in the tech space. So people are coming to us right now. I'd be like, hey, we've got this idea. Let's talk about it. How can we partner? We're raising capital here.

[00:40:26] Let's kind of embed this solution with it. There's not, I think the area that people are, it's starting to get saturated is paddles and balls. So like, if it was me, I just wouldn't be a new paddle company coming in. Because there's some companies that are just,

[00:40:44] they got a head start, they got a couple years head start. And then the ball market, there's only so much innovation there. But there's other things on the periphery that haven't even been touched.

[00:40:56] And I'm waiting for like the Nikes of the world to move in to really start, but you're seeing Prince now doing stuff in Target. You're starting to see pickleball. What Taylor Swift doing pickleball. My favorite one was Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell. Do you see this? No. Okay.

[00:41:14] So they post on Instagram. In the, like it was like, you know, something to the point, that's something to the fact of, hey, we started playing pickleball and we're totally addicted. I guess this means that we're going to get injured like everybody else.

[00:41:26] And so for us, that was a great opportunity for us to shout back like, hey, it doesn't have to be that way. Be weird warm up, right? Everybody knows the problems, but you're like, you know, people are just picking up the game.

[00:41:39] They're loving, I think I saw there's certain musicians on tour. They kind of travel with this stuff because it's a community thing. So it's just super exciting to see where this is going to go. Clothing, technical innovations for teaching tools.

[00:41:54] I just think about all the things that happen with golf and other sports like that. It's all coming to pickleball swing vision, a computer vision company that won an Apple Innovation Award. I met one of the earliest investors in that company.

[00:42:07] They're doing some amazing things in pickleball and tennis. You're going to see some cool stuff that's about to come out. I mean, if it resembles anything like golf, the amount of money that someone will dump not just on the sport itself,

[00:42:21] not just playing around a golf, but on everything around that, between the lessons and the technology and the education and everything. Everything is a lot of money. And if it follows anything closer to that, my only gut instinct on this

[00:42:41] that gives me pause is that you hear all these big names coming through and they tend to follow fads, Taylor Swift and all these pro athletes coming in into it. It's like the Instagram comb, fad comes and then it goes. Right?

[00:42:54] I mean, that's my only possible knock on where this could go. And I'm not an expert. I haven't looked at any of the working numbers or anything like I'm learning today probably more than I ever have. So, I mean, it's like that would be my only thought.

[00:43:06] I mean, is that does that concern you that maybe it's just it's a flash in the paint. It's super hot right now and then it's going to come off. I mean, even if it does pop off.

[00:43:13] If a celebrity goes or comes or goes or if you know that that doesn't concern me, it's a community game. And if you get to the grassroots of what makes this game awesome, it's people create relationships and that and those relationships keep drawing them back to the court.

[00:43:31] So there's an app called Team Reach and everywhere I go across the country, they're like, Hey, Eric, can we add you to our team reach? This is our little pickleball community. I'm like, sure, hop on. And these people are just going, it's there's platform plays, there's community plays.

[00:43:47] There's so many unique things. And if you just go experience the sport, you'll see that I don't if Taylor Swift stops playing, it doesn't matter. You know what we're going to, you know, you'll probably see this at the White House soon.

[00:43:59] But it's people in real communities playing a game that's easily accessible. What you're seeing though is these indoor facilities. The picklers, the chicken and pickles because like down here in Houston where I live, the weather is can just be brutal and these facilities are popping up all over

[00:44:19] the place. And so what do we do? We partner with facilities. They share the app. We can cut them out on SaaS revenue. So this becomes another way for them to increase the LTV of their customers. There's the fort that's being built down in Fort Lauderdale for the

[00:44:34] APP a 20 something million dollar facility. You're going to be blown away at which you're going to be seeing. And I don't think it's got staying power because it doesn't require a building unless you know, you've got bad weather part of the year. You can play with your friends.

[00:44:50] It takes 15 minutes to learn. So I don't see it going anywhere. But I think that it's definitely worth investing time and energy into to innovate and help these folks. Awesome man. You had mentioned in the email you're going to be attending. Are you presenting?

[00:45:06] Is it PickleCon coming up? By the time that takes place, it'll be this year after that. But yeah, give us some insights into what that's all about. Yeah. So I'll be speaking at PickleCon, which is like in Kansas City, they're going to have

[00:45:20] a ton of exhibitors are going to be at that. Like there's going to be an MPL events going to be there. Dupers going to be having a tournament there. I'm going to be speaking in a couple weeks at the World PickleVol convention in Vegas.

[00:45:33] And they're going to see Pranov is going to be speaking there. He's building the World Series of PickleVol, which is going to be a global tournament. Steve Coons going to be there. Tito Martinez, the CEO of Dupers. Like there's 5,000 attendees at this thing.

[00:45:47] First time, Carl Foster down at Boca, the Boca Raton Picklers MPL team, he's putting it on. This isn't going anywhere. And it's not like they're building these events that nobody's showing up to. Like people are flocking to these things. And it's really cool.

[00:46:05] And I'm excited to kind of put my expertise and our team's expertise to use in an area where we can really stand out and help folks. We got, we're just reverse engineered another problem and just going at it and helping people. Last question.

[00:46:21] So as an industry, this is why I asked this question. But like what's one of your biggest challenges right now? And as an industry, how can we help you if you, what do you want to hear from people about if they're going to reach out to you?

[00:46:33] Well, if you know facilities, we're just trying to make great connections with great operators. And then we're raising capital because it's time to go. Like there's a time to push on the accelerator and I feel very good like now is the time to do that.

[00:46:49] The cost of acquisition, we're not running ads anywhere and we're acquiring customers. The word of mouth is spreading and that's exactly what you want. And we have some really cool things. They're going to create some viral growth, we believe here in the near future

[00:47:02] with some media things that we're doing and some things in the app that's going to create some more product led growth. And we believe, you know, in the next 18 to 24 months that we can really have some

[00:47:12] really good market saturation and then start thinking about how we move into other countries. People are using our app in other countries, want to focus on the U S, but it's just going to naturally happen. And the partners that we're working with have global reach.

[00:47:25] They're already in these countries operating. So it's easy for aim seven to go right in. So yeah, those are the couple of things. I mean, if you're in pickleball and you want to partner, we want to work with great people and we want to serve and help folks.

[00:47:39] And yeah, we're out raising capital right now and we want to just really put down the accelerator. Awesome man. What stage are you in as far as capital raise? I feel like seed plus. We're not a series A company yet. Got it. Awesome man. I've loved it.

[00:47:52] It makes me want to go play pickleball. I'll do next week. I'll report back to you. Please. I'm excited for you. Yeah, I'm excited for you. It's just great. I mean, just to get this is such an advantage to the fitness and health market.

[00:48:07] Like we're getting new markets of people into movement, into community, all the stuff that we talk about that we know is really good for the wellness of our communities. So I'm glad you're involved in it. And it's really cool.

[00:48:19] How do people get a hold of your people on the reach out? Yeah. So aim seven dot com. You can download the app there. You can find us in the app store aim seven. It's pickleball fit coach aim seven.

[00:48:31] You can also reach out to me if you want to just email me Eric, erik at aim seven dot com. I'd love to connect. And I also have a podcast called the blueprint, which we've had some of the community folks on. Think of it as Huberman light.

[00:48:46] We're almost 500 episodes in its cutting edge science leadership and life skills like 15 minute episodes. And so some of your favorite folks in the world of leadership and human performance we've had come on. And it's been a kind of a labor of love,

[00:49:02] but now we're dosing in some cool pickleball stuff. So be on the lookout for that. We put out three episodes a week. That's the blueprint podcast. That's an awesome podcast. Yeah. Thank you. Eric, thank you so much, brother. This has been a pleasure.

[00:49:13] And I think we'll probably get you back on if you're up for about a year and see how it's going. I think we're gonna have some very big news by then. Keep up the great work. And ladies and gentlemen, Eric Corm. Thank you, sir.

[00:49:27] Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone. And I hope you enjoyed this episode of future of minutes. If you did, I'm going to ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way.

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[00:50:20] This is Eric Malzone and this is the Future of Fitness. Have a great day.