FitTech Summit Edition: The Future of Home Fitness - Sami Asikainen with Natalia Karbasova

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 futurofitness.co to subscribe and learn more. Hey listeners, this episode of the Future of Fitness is brought to you by our good friends at InsightTracker. Do you want to add more years to your life and more life to your years? Of course you do, which means you need to make a change. And that is what Insight Tracker is all about. Founded by leading scientists in aging, genetics, and biometric data from MIT Tufts and Harvard, Insight Tracker is a personalized health and wellness platform like no other. So what's their secret? First, Insight Tracker uses its patented algorithm to analyze your body's data and offer you a clearer picture than you've ever had before of what's actually going on inside you. Then Insight Tracker provides you with a concrete, science-backed action plan for living a longer, healthier life. And it tracks your progress every day, every step of the way. For a very limited time, Insight Tracker is offering future fitness podcast listeners 25% off store wide. Visit InsightTracker.com slash future to get your offer code and try it Insight Tracker today. And perhaps more importantly, are you saving yourself time and making more money because of it? Well, I'll answer that question for you. You're not, because you can 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. But wait, it doesn't stop there. 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. Please go check out our wonderful sponsors. And if you get value out of this show, I ask you to do three things. Please go subscribe, give us a favorable rating, and share this episode on social media or wherever you like to go chat with friends. I am your host, Eric Malzone, and once again, welcome to the future of fitness. All right, and we are live. Welcome back to the future of fitness for another special edition with the Fit Tech Summit. I am joined today by Sammy Asikanen and of course Natalia Karbasova. Welcome to the uh the show.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Hi, I'm excited to have I'm excited to have you guys. We're going to talk about your story and your business, of course, Carbon Trainer, but also what's going to happen in the gyms. I mean, this is the question that seems to be coming about all the time. I'm talking to people about it all the time. What you know when we come out of this pandemic, the new normal, all these words that we're tired of hearing, right? What's going to what's the gym business going to look like? And then we get introductions of technology like yours, Sammy. It's going to be really fascinating. So I think generally a good place to start would be give us your backstory, Sammy, and how you got to where you are and how you started this company Carbon Trainer.

Sure. Happy to and happy to be on the podcast, Eric. Appreciate it. And Talia as well. Yeah, my backstory is if you go way far back, what got me interested in fitness in general was just I was an overweight, chubby kid. And I just started running when I was like 14, 15 years old, and and then slowly got found found the gym through college and university. And then said, you know, I I really think that that I should spend more of my time at the gym. So I had the idea to start a gym. So I actually built out a circuit train gym in the early 2000s and built a second one and sold that business, but realized that all the answers weren't there. And I was also equally fascinated by technology and saw the explosion on the internet and the dot-com bubble and just burst and was starting to come back and said, I really want to do some things in there. So really spent a lot of time looking at what was happening with Facebook and started a digital agency and another digital agency, built those into really large businesses. We did a lot of e-commerce really early and helped build build out offices all over the world for digital agency and so on. And we fast forward a little bit. I've done a fair bit of angel investing around enterprise and things like that. And spending a lot of time at the desk, to be honest, and programming in the early days, and you know, started developing a whole host of health problems like back problems, just uh pulling my back from getting up from sitting down. That's not quite the story I really am proud of. But you know, you spent three weeks on the couch and said, I've got to do something, I've I've got it, gotta do something else. And I spent you know tens of thousands on physio along the way. And I had a had a good friend of mine say, Hey, you're too young to have all these back problems. And and I said, No, you know, like I'm doing, you know, I'm running, I'm doing B90X, I'm doing, you know, Beach Body, I'm doing all this stuff. And he's like, no, you need to go try this thing called CrossFit. And it's like, all right, like how hard can it be? Like, I'm I'm you know, do a lot of push-ups, I'm I'm I'm good. And so I went and that was, I would say that was the most humbling experience I ever had for a workout. That that put me on the floor in the best possible way.

Sam, do you do you remember what your sorry to interrupt, do you remember what your first CrossFit workout was?

I I don't remember the name of it because I wasn't really familiar with the name, but remember there was a a complex of deadlifts mixed with probably box jumps or box over burpees or something, something something like that, something around around that. But I do remember the weight of the barbell and it was 140 pounds, and that was a devastating amount to lift on uh my back was done, like it was fried from just having one round of that, and I watched those people around me just demolished that that workout. But I went back probably two weeks later and and kept doing it and did it all the way up until the end of COVID. And by the time COVID hit, I could rep out you know 350 pounds. So long journey, no more back pain, I'll go with that's strength. It turned me into a strength training advocate, but just like everybody that's you know spending money on physio, I was like, man, you gotta get your body in shape. And along the way, you know, you get married, you have kids, and getting to the box became very hard. So I said, I've got to start building out some home equipment so I can't, I don't you know, get out of shape again. Um, and I started looking what we can buy. I need you know, a warm-up device couldn't fit a rower in the house at the time. So saw this thing on Kickstarter called Peloton. I bought it off Kickstarter, and that was a great warm-up device, and then you know, just bought some road plates, started doing you know, kettlebells, bands.

Right, some and you also did the crowd, your own crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, and you raised over 300,000 K. You actually originally wanted to have just 50k as the goal, and you once said that you didn't set out to build a tech company, you were just looking for your own frustrations and for for the way to overcome them, frustrations of being stuck at home. So, are you still frustrated?

But me, I'm frustrated like everybody else with COVID, but I'm one of the fortunate ones that have something at home with CARBA trainer that I can get the programming, the tracking, the accountability that I need to do strength training. So, to me, I'm one of the lucky ones here. Um, and I have also, you know, a lot of equipment. It's been very hard to get dumbbells and kettlebells and things like that. So I've already had that uh luxury, but yeah, setting out to remove as much friction as possible and to save as much time as possible has been a really big goal. I've tried everything from a whiteboard to a TV and just wasn't making the cut. And so we we ended up building, building carbon trainer just for that reason.

And what is it? So explain. I mean, people can obviously, if you're listening, don't stop and go look now, go look after the interview. But tell people what is it exactly that carbon trainer does? What was the, I mean, you were kind of getting into what was the problem that you're solving, and then how is the technology, what technology did you decide was the right fit to solve that problem?

Right. So I I think Peloton did a tremendous job of getting cardio into the home in a way that was really engaging and immersive and was just looking, I need a great complement for that to do the rest of my workout. You know, I need some, I need engaging content. I also need what was really I became addicted to in CrossFit is kind of like being able to not only get the workout done, but keep track of what I'm doing and keep me accountable and honest. And you know, if you go to a great CrossFit box, you have friends that you work out with and they keep you pretty honest and and keep pushing you, and then also being able to keep track of how you're doing over time. So this idea of progress tracking, like being able to not get stuck at one particular weight and see see the kind of progress you're making. So these were the ingredients for carbon. And the way it turned out is that how do we track you know strength training movements? How do we track the other things you do outside of cardio? We said, okay, you know what, there's technology out there with computer vision that we can track that. And we also said there's some workouts, some exercises you can't really track as easily. And so we added sensors that you can attach to your weights. So the core product, Carbon Trainer, is an AI-powered fitness mirror. It's about two inches thick, turn it off, it's invisible, you put on the wall, you turn it on, you get the content delivered, you get all the progress tracking and adaptive workouts, and then you can get your strength training, CrossFit, you know, that type of thing done on the product. And then if you want to take it um a step further, and you have you can bring your own weights, and I have a lot of my own weights. You can bring you can put our sensors on them and they become smart as well. And then you can bring all your equipment in there, and then you can track all of that as you work out.

Sammy, I have a question for you. We know that home fitness is booming right now, and of course, home fitness is nothing new, but with the COVID uh pandemic, the home fitness solutions have become actually almost the only possible solution for lots of people to work out. You just said something which I think is very important that you can just put the thing on the walls, just make it invisible, and forget about this equipment when you're at home, because lots of us obviously don't have that much space at home. So, what how do you think it is the the factor of the of the shape of the uh equipment is important? Should it like be integrated seamlessly into home or should it also be able to stuck out to be part of the of the uh interior design?

I think if you look at the evolution of anything from shoes to to mobile phones, the design becomes on cars, especially, design becomes exceedingly important. And if you're giving up valuable space in your house, especially if you have an apartment, space is at a premium. And so if it looks like a piece of you know heavy fitness equipment, and especially if it's taking up floor space, you're gonna really think hard. Is that the right one for you? Um you gotta make a pretty heavy commitment to go into one direction or another. We wanted to be able to track the widest of variety of exercises in the smallest amount of space. And so, and then we also wanted that if someone's gonna make an investment in into this kind of product, that you can't outgrow this product. So whether you start from just doing body weight you know push-ups and then eventually you get a bigger house and you you want to get a garage gym, you can put carbon in your garage and do you know, you can you can heavy barbell deadlifts or squats, and the the product keeps working all the way through. And then for for most of most of the people that ordered carbon, they're they have they have significant others that they have to consider. So they don't just think, okay, I just do I do CrossFit or I do strength training. You want to do mobility, you want to do yoga, you do these other things. And we think that the way that we've gone about making a beautiful device and a very large screen, high resolution, really bright, making it an immersive experience with great sound, it's important for the longevity of these things. I don't think people are gonna buy a new fitness product once a year. I think this is maybe during COVID, but I think in the long term, people are making decisions that they're saying this is the thing and this is the product that I'm gonna see myself able to use five, 10 years, as opposed to five, six months, which is mobile phone thinking.

Yeah, that's interesting. I agree. And I I looking at what you've developed, it is beautiful. The technology looks amazing. I haven't had a you I haven't got to use it yet. I would imagine one of the challenges you faced is the shortage of equipment, right? Outside of carbon train. It's hard to find a barbell. It's it's really hard to find a dumbbell in 2020. If you try to find a dumbbell online, you were gonna pay something like $100 a pound. It was ridiculous. How has that supply chain thing either made it harder for you guys to get into the market or how has that affected your guys' business?

I think in terms of it's obviously driving some demand for us because we sell integrated dumbbells and barbells, integrated dumbbells and kettlebells with our sensors in them. And we're fortunate enough to have a team in China that's directly, you know, at the source, you know, of getting products made. However, we're not immune just like you know, anybody else from Peloton, everybody else, is that to get them over to the United States with COVID is challenging. And that leads to obviously frustration from us and customers and everybody else to just to get these products to them. It's very challenging in this environment to get through a port, for example. There are backlogs, you know, in LA. Still, I I check the shipping updates, and the container ships are just sitting there weeks on end. So I think we're gonna see we're gonna see that smooth out, fortunately, by probably by the end of the year. That's what we're seeing. And you know, maybe holiday is still gonna be pretty heavy, but I think come January 2022, you're gonna see it you know be pretty, pretty much back to normal. But I think everyone is just excited to get you know, get working out.

Yeah. And so let's can we talk about the home GM market overall? I mean, you're coming in, there's obviously the monsters in the market. There's Peloton, also bought pre-core, like just making huge moves. A tonal is just on a huge rise. And there's a lot of different ones who are hitting the market. You obviously feel confident that the market is substantial enough to come in and compete here, right? What is what do you see as the total size of the market? And maybe after the pandemic, do you think it's gonna continue? What's your vision moving forward?

I think the market, you know, just the fitness market in general, we're just you're seeing a five, five percent, 10% increase a year just from the general interest of the population. So I think you're seeing just a massive trend compounding with a massive trend. I think what COVID has done is really accelerated what's going to happen. I think we're gonna see much more of that in the next five years. And I think what I find really fascinating is this concept of removing friction. You know, anytime you remove another 10% of friction from any anything, whether it's getting a taxi or ordering food, you're gonna get a market that just got a lot larger because it's easier now. And so, you know, if you think back when this is kind of dating me, but if you built think back 20 years ago and you're building a website, it was you need to know some specialized skills to be able to do that. Now, you know, anybody could just as long as they have a credit card, maybe even if you don't have a credit card, you can WYSIWYG your way, you can make yourself a nice visual design and get that live without anything. You know, it's probably a 20-minute exercise these days, and I think that's opened it up, uh, democratize it to a huge extent. So I think the more friction that that we as an industry are able to do, make it easier, whether that's commuting to the gym, whether that's knowing what to do at the gym, making it uh a workout program that's fun to do, any of those things are gonna create the market, make a market that's a lot larger. So I think this is really early and it's it's a really exciting time to be part of it.

And when you look at where Carbon Trader out of that home fitness market, where are you guys particularly going? Like what is the consumer? Who is the consumer that you guys are ideally searching for?

So for us, it's really about the enthusiast. We we think the enthusiast is what drives, they're the innovators in in this. They're they're the ones listening to the podcast, they're the ones that are trying the new workouts, they're going to the new gyms. They're also they're also they spend a lot of money on fitness. And I think those kinds of things, if you can convince those people that you have a great product, it's you used to ask what computer should I buy from your friends that are into IT or just tech nerds, and I think the same applies to fitness. And myself, background in eight years in CrossFit, I understand the mindset, I understand how those people think. And I'm a big advocate of the strength training side, and I think that adds a lot to how we think about the market. I've also done I've done marathons and trap funds, not at any kind of high level, I've just done them. So for me, I understand to be able to train for those things, and I think strength training also plays a big role in those. And I think we we we look at those segments. We want to help also serve military and police and these types of folks that you know really need the training to work and really we're focused on effective training.

I'm just wondering how this pie is gonna be divided in the future because I just can't see the scenario where one consumer or the same consumer will have like a carbon trainer, a tonal, or a peloton standing in the apartment. So how do you see the market segmentation in the future?

Yeah, I think we're gonna see some distinctions for sure. We're going to see the type of consumer is going to be different that buys a tonal or buys a carbon. I don't think the consumer necessarily is any different than buys a Peloton or buys a carbon or buys a tonal. I think if you buy a Peloton, I think you're still looking for that strength solution. I think you're if you buy a if you buy carbon, you're also looking for a cardio solution. You're looking for, is it a treadmill, is it a rowing machine, is it something else, or maybe you're using Strava to run. You know, maybe that's what you're doing. But I don't think there's that many people out there that are so one-sided that they're not interested in both cardio and strength. I think maybe it's a 70% strength, 30% cardio, but I think we've now swung from the the cardio 90s. We're starting to move to there's more strength out there than ever before. And I really, I'm really happy that Tone Love is putting such emphasis on strength. I think it's been underserved for far too long. I think if if I'd known about strength when I was a teenager, it would be a totally different story of me spending years and years just running. I think it's really good to advocate for the space and strength training in general.

Yeah, I agree. As a having been a CrossFit coach for so long, how many times I feel the question of uh will weights make me bulky? Drives you nuts as a coach. When we can when we talk about this particular segment of the market, the enthusiast and the you know, somebody who's into CrossFit or functional training, we'll just call it an avoiding trademark. They love community. Right. And I see the people who are solving, you know, not only for training, great training, home training solutions, but also solving for community digitally. I think that's a really strong piece of what we look at. Peloton, and they do have I didn't think they'd be able to do it. They oddly enough have a community online of people. Like I don't think people are gonna go to Peloton parties, but they've done some, they've done as good as they I think they can. How is how are you guys approaching the online community aspect of it?

Yeah, I I think it's uh if we talk to teenagers or in their people in their early 20s, the idea of a digital community that's it's almost like a non-topic for them. The younger you are, you're just used to digital first communities, whether it's with chatting with your friends and so on. I think it's tough for the older incumbents that are running traditional companies to realize that things have just shifted online. And I think all there's just so many great examples from chat rooms to sharing posts on social media to video chat or live streams and things like that, that it's inevitable that we're gonna be having a lot of those features that that that can enrich the community. I think without the community, I learned that from CrossFit, I would not have continued CrossFit for you know so many years if the community wasn't there. It's the key to to a lot of this, I think, in the long term. Because let's not kid ourselves, a lot of those workouts are pretty hard. And to do those in isolation, I don't know if I would push myself that hard. So I think even great athletes, they have great coaches. You don't do these things alone. And I think you we also need great, you need a peer group that that supports you. So absolutely, a carbon trainer is is focused on on the community side of it, and it's just it's about picking the right digital tool that works in our form factor and for our audience. Maybe our audience is not. That in sending sending messages via text. Maybe they want only video, or maybe they want only audio, maybe they only want social media. And that's really just we just get we need to get to know our community better and better. And that's going to work itself over time. But I think we have a great form factor for that. We have we have cameras, we have high-quality microphones, we can take anything from companion apps, and you can chat with their so all of that technology side, we can support all of that. And that's what we really focused on is getting the hardware right.

And still, this is not a real community that you have when you go to the gym. So the question is, how do you see this distribution of communities in the future between online and physical in-person communities?

I think we're gonna see, we're gonna see that sort of blend together. I I think there is there is a world that's coming, and I think this is post-COVID where we don't look at this as a home-only type of environment. I I'm I definitely want to go to the gym. I miss the gym. I miss being able to see people in person. And also I really would like all of that data and all those interactions to to carry from my home to the gym. I don't really like that I I can't bring those with me. And that's that I think is where I hope that the the traditional fitness community will say, okay, we want to merge these things together from like the connected home into the gym. We really want to see those things come together.

So when would we see the first carbon trainer gym?

That's a good question. That's a good question. I don't have too many comments on that, but I think it's definitely something we thought of.

Tell us more. No? Okay, we'll ask you half a year later.

That is the interesting thing. I mean, you look at, and here's a question. If I'm a coach or I'm a fitness professional, I'm listening to what you're saying, I'm like, well, this does sound cool. I want to be part of this future that he's describing, where it's people do come to the gym, but they're also doing something at home with carbon or you know, whatever, you know, insert home device here. How do I, as a fitness coach or a fitness professional, start to work myself into this ecosystem and then show value in the future? I think that it's like there's two points of views for most fitness coaches. Ah, this is all whatever, I can, I'm gonna resist it. And there's those who are like, if you resist it, you're gonna get run over by it. So I'm trying to embrace it. So for the second party, people who are looking to embrace it, how can they work with these at-home solutions, specifically Carbon Trainer?

But that's a great, that's a great question. And we've had a lot of those discussions from personal trainers to to gym owners. And the way that I I explained it to them is is how social media came, just early days of social media, how it did it, it and if you think of the music industry, they've really had to embrace it because it was game over. You you are actually able to fill concert stadiums better because the fans have a better connection to you. So they want to know more about this great coach. They want whether you're you're doing one-to-one training or one-to-many training, or you're just sharing information or just supporting your community and say, hey, good job on that workout, Sam. You know, that last workout was awesome. You did at home. That's really what you have to think of your customers as your fans. They're not coming to you because they have to, they're not paying next X hundred dollars a month to come and see you because they don't want to be there. Like they're coming because they like what you're offering, they like the environment, they like the people, they like the coaches. And I think if they didn't break, treat this as just another tool, another channel for them to either distribute their content or their views or support their community, I think they're gonna be very successful and they're gonna realize that they're gonna be able to drive more people, especially if you're a great coach, you're gonna be able to drive more people and expose more people to you. And I think it's just a willingness of looking at it that way that this is a great way to remove a lot of the friction because you don't want to send flyers or just an email to your customers and hope they read your email or it doesn't find its way into the spam box. I think you're gonna see a lot more direct relationships form and at a very uh low cost and being very efficient. And I think the users will get more benefit as well and be willing to spend more money at these fitness centers, whether it's from someone recommending go try this or go buy that or try this tool or try this supplement or whatnot. I I think there's a lot of avenues there that if you're early to this, I think you're gonna see a lot of success.

Yeah, I was just wondering when you're speaking about the gyms and physical fitness spaces, at least as of September 2020, Ursa reports 15% of gyms in the United States closed, and the industry lost over $15 billion in revenue. So that for me that brings up the question there's lots of capacity which is out there, space capacity. Would we see the home fitness uh operators moving more into the brick and mortar space as well to catch the consumers there as well?

I I think so. I think we will see that as a cautious play. I think it depends more on uh retail rents and and so on. I think we need to see a correction in the commercial real estate market. There's a lot of obviously there's a lot of liquidity, a lot of cash available at this point that that we don't necessarily have to see lower rents. But I think we're gonna need to see some efficiencies because rents have been too high. But I think there's an opportunity. It's just I think it's a cautious approach. I think most of the incumbents will not even, I would say the ones in our in our connected segment are gonna cautiously be trying these types of things. But I would like to see, I'd really like to see strong partnerships or brand new concepts incorporating these connected players working with traditional players because they have the expertise to to do a great you know consumer experience in the gym.

Yeah, the way Tona has moved into Nordstrom as well, just to catch the consumers that are coming to the offline experiences.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And this is one of those things that the these all these products, whether it's just a smart bike or something, all these are best experienced in person. That's why you're paying for it. You're you're you're you're gonna be working out to this thing. So it's uh you definitely want to have that experience in person.

A question out of curiosity, Sam, is the I know a lot of home fitness equipment providers and devices are looking now, starting to look at corporate health and wellness, which in North America is huge. Like it's a huge and growing industry. Do you guys have any vision of where you can be incorporated into that world?

We've had a vision. We we definitely have thoughts around it. I think that COVID threw a giant wrench in that. That's true. Um, and and so the real question is how does this how does how many people are working from at home? How many people are are really going to invest? And speaking of the corporate side, are willing to invest in new facilities to be able to bring people into that environment. I think they're gonna be hesitant to make large investments, and we're gonna see only those that are at the top end of the market, like the uh the tech companies that have to fight for talent, invest heavily. I think everyone else is gonna wait and see uh and see how people now are working. If it's gonna be two days at home or whatnot, but I think we will see uh a continued focus, and we saw this before COVID, and this really hasn't changed. We've seen employers give vouchers or money or whatever benefit package you want to call it for people to buy connected devices for their home because they want to give that sort of premium experience and help people stay fit, and also employee uh happiness also you want to really support that. So I think it'll be interesting to see how it comes back. I'm always gonna be biased in terms of getting something to the gym or getting it uh to a place where you can be face to face with people at least once or twice a week. But I think they're gonna there's gonna be caution in the market for another year at least.

You know, that's a good question because I think most of the hard home fitness devices are quite expensive. So the price point is around 2,000 euros. And uh you just only have as many people who are ready to pay for that. When the willness to pay on that level will diminish, I was just wondering about the new business model and the payment options, like the employers uh or health insurances subsidizing home fitness equipment. Do you know of any special cases? So probably you're working on that yourself.

It's been it's been the high-end companies that are already paying uh premiums for their employees. There's no, I wouldn't say that they're obese, at least that I would know of, in the in the middle of the market, that there have been incentives that have been added. But the the usual players, the usual high-tech companies have done this, and and for them it's a the $2,000 is a big expense. We've looked at it and said, I think financing is ultimately the tool that we can use that levels the playing field and gets these into people's hands at a reasonable price.

So here's the fun question, right? The visionary question. So you and you're gonna be collecting, you already are collecting a lot of data, right? There's, you know, I've talked to Ali O'Radi from Tonal years before he actually they blew up. And he was really excited about the data points they were collecting in this vision of maybe the internet of things incorporating the whole household and all this stuff. And I'm sure someone like you who starts a company has like this grand vision of 10 years down the road, what home fitness and health and all these things could be and how what we could expect or could look forward to. So if you had to really throw it out there and really be the visionary of 10 years from now, what do you think home fitness and health can look like? What do you think the consumer can expect?

I I think we're gonna see we're gonna see the whole paradigm start to shift from just data collection to um data becoming used to reduce the number of decisions that the customer has to make. So imagine this sort of I wouldn't call that an avatar, but this sort of virtual assistant that you feed data into. And whether that's on your phone or in a carbon or maybe in a bunch of devices, that sort of assistant comes with you. It knows that you did a run, it knows that you did you did a workout on carbon. It it it then and then you know you're staying at this hotel next. And so it will then say, Hey, you should do this now, you should you should maybe have a lighter meal today, like all these types of things. And we're seeing all these things slowly trickle up from it or a ring saying, Oh, maybe you should go to sleep earlier. And we're gonna see more of that happen. We're also gonna see the fidelity of the experience you know in the home get better and better and better. And one of those drivers is is what is really uh the cost of these sensors and these tools that we can use, and that's gonna bring the cost down of the end product, and it's also going to enable more things. It's gonna bring the I think it's gonna bring fitness closer to health as opposed to just being here's a workout device. I think you're gonna see a lot of health applications come out of this, and I think we're gonna see an omni-channel experience. And I don't think the omni-channel experience is going to be done by the way that the world is structured now, meaning the traditional separation between here's the gym provider, here's the home fitness provider. You're going to see a whole new class of company that understands that whole thing and takes it from the user's perspective and says, okay, what's what kind of software do we need to enable this to democratize this virtual personal trainer that just travels with you? And do we need to be in every single hotel? Do we need to be in every single gym? And that omnichannel will become far more invisible too. I think you're not gonna have to take up so much floor space, it's it's just gonna be available on your phone, in your headset, in your hotel room. It's like this type of thing, it's gonna become far more invisible than it is today.

I love that.

Omnichannel experience sounds super cool, but I was just wondering what that means for traditional gyms that are dying out due to COVID. They do try to use AI and the corporate technology in their work, but according to a survey, only 7% of the European operators are thinking or have integrated AI into their operations. And I was like, you know, I'm thinking of the movie industry when they're where the traditional cinemas have been ousted from the market, because if you're thinking of the price point, what a Netflix subscription would cost you, like $10, $15, and a movie ticket, which is also the same price for just one movie. I was just wondering where this wellness to play will come from to still go to the traditional gyms. I just don't see that anymore.

Yeah, I think you're gonna see the same thing. You have we have IMAX theaters and really great, almost like couches when you go to the theater, and you really want to go, you really want to go to the theater because it's an experience. The home experience of watching a movie is great. You have a 65, 75-inch TV, you've got got free food in your fridge, you've got uh amazing sound systems. So you got to show something that's a step above that. And I think the consumer, by not spending money on every movie, they're gonna spend far more money on one movie. Because if that experience is way better, they're gonna do that. And that's why you see places like Barry's Boot Camp or Gym Box in the UK, they're making it more doing interesting experiments around making it feel like a club and making it feel more personal. I think we're gonna see a lot of that come and differentiate. And I think the retail experience is a great, you know, if the the traditional gym owners want to look to how to do things, I think they need to look at you know, in the Apple store, they need to look at the at Starbucks. People know people come there to hang out, they don't just come there to shop. But I think the idea of you can if you can shop, you can just go to you can go to Amazon and just press the buy button. But if you want an experience, and I think that's what we're looking for. I think people that's what people are really looking for.

I just can't agree more with you on here because I think that gyms are also turning into third places where you start to hang out, you can will have different kinds of services from DNA tests or blood tests, just to make sure that you are on the on track with your overall health. And if we just think of Germany, because it just takes weeks to get an appointment at a doctor's and wicks more to wait, and wicks again to wait for the next appointment. So it's not efficient. And I believe that operators could really jump into the space and offer services around health that the traditional health system can't offer right now, and that might be their chance to survive and thrive.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the the the real challenge is the traditional gym model. I've been an operator. The traditional model is to get the membership numbers as high as possible and then make sure that you get people through the system as quickly as possible so that you don't need to get more floor space or increase capacity. And I think we're gonna we're gonna you're gonna actually want the exact opposite in the future. You're going to want people to spend as much time at the gym as possible, and really make it a place that people want to spend time at. Why have them get, you know, go to the change room, work out and leave? Like that that model is really outdated. There's there's also a social aspect. You want to you want to meet people at the gym, all those things you really can't do at home very effectively. You can really double down on that also pre-workout, after workout, making it into an experience where you're like, wow, I can spend two, three hours at a gym. And and I think that's where we're like, and also I think they you gotta a little bit of um make some bigger bets on some of the verticals, some of the trends that are coming. We see these boutiques, especially in the United States, that just come out of nowhere and they you know hundreds of locations all of a sudden, because they're taking a they're taking a stab at some new trend that's emerging. And that's really fun to see that boutiques are doing very well. I think the big box gym is having the identity crisis a little bit.

Yeah, I agree. I think the days of people just paying for access to equipment is probably going the way of the dinosaur. And it's funny to me because all the time I'm all of us are very much into the fitness industry, and I'll see uh a boutique I've never heard of. I'm like, oh, I'll look at their website. I'm like, they have 38 locations. Like, how did that happen? I've never even heard of them. So I think there's a lot to be said for the experiential focus, you know, high service, high price point. I think there's a lot of there's a lot of positive expectations for that. So I think it's a great vision. So you, Sam, are going to be speaking at the Fit Tech Summit this May. Can you give us some insights into some of the topics that you're gonna enjoy covering?

Yeah, there's there's two things that that have me fascinated. I've been uh in Silicon Valley, been in San Francisco, been in been in Europe, but really been an early adopter of technology for an extremely long time. And being also an angel investor in various tech stops, I've seen how different uh segments of different industries are are getting disrupted by software. I think that one thing that that we'll cover in the talks and the in the summit are are really that software is really gonna start to come for the fitness industry. I I think we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg of what software is gonna do to fitness. We're seeing like little inklings of things, but how these different different segments, like from commerce to e-commerce to payments, to things have changed upside down. They have traditional players, market caps are smaller than the the players that have come in. And I think we're gonna see a massive shift and to downplay software and say, hey, it's all about hardware, it's all about and from barbells to everything else. Software is going to drive all the value, and we're gonna see a lot of incredibly smart people uh come into the fold now that Peloton is the genie out of the bottle. You're gonna see a tremendous amount of brain power come into that field, and it's really exciting, and but I think also challenging for traditional incumbents when they start looking at what's happening uh or what's going to happen.

Absolutely. We'll also be talking about the um Peloton for X models in the home fitness market, but also about the verticalization of the home fitness market.

Yeah, very interesting.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to it, you guys. This is uh this has been a lot of fun. So, Sam, thank you so much for coming on the show and giving us your insights and talking to us about Carbon Trainer and where this whole home gym thing is going. It's I think if we had talked an hour a year and a half ago, we never would have expected the drastic acceleration of the market, but here we are, and the fitness industry is exciting. Can't uh can't say it isn't now. So absolutely, absolutely. Absolutely.

Thank you, Eric. We really appreciate it. And Tanya, thank you as well.

Yeah, thank you guys.

Thank you guys.

Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minnesota. 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, Castbox, 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 we want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me, simply go to the futureoffitness.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 future of fitness. Have a great day.