Justin Marston: Tribe Fitness & Building Community Digitally

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 on aging, genetics, and biometric data from MIT Tap to Harvard. Inside Tracker is a personalized health and wellness platform like no other. So what's our secret? First off, 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 your. 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 to Insight Tracker today. InsightTracker, because change is an inside job. This episode is also brought to you by Morpheus, the world's first and only fitness intelligence platform built by coaches for coaches. Look, there is a ton of fitness and health data being collected on you and your clients, but are you leveraging it? 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't until now. Morpheus arms coaches with accessible, intelligent, communicable client insights to save coaches time and ultimately increase your value and earn more money. By collecting lifestyle data from 90% of the current wearable market and combining that data with cutting-edge proprietary technology, Morpheus provides an accurate and reliable recovery score for all of your clients served up on a simple and elegant dashboard. No more guessing, just the real, honest data alongside the insights from Morpheus into what to actually do with it. 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 trainwithmorpheusm-o-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. Boom. We are live. Justin Marson, welcome to the future of fitness.

Thank you. Great to be here.

Yeah, excited to have you, man. You um cool company, cool product, great timing. And you also have a I love talking to entrepreneurs who kind of come outside of the industry in. It brings uh, and if anything, it's kind of a mark of the times that we see people who have been successful in other sectors come into fitness, which means that there's something attractive going on in our industry to get people like you. So uh it's always fun to get different perspectives because we do talk to a lot of lifetime people who have been in the fitness industry like me for so long. But getting people like you have this diverse background uh brings a lot of value. So I really appreciate you having you on. And a great place to start, Justin, would be if you could just give us your backstory, man. How'd you get to where you are now and how'd you start Tribe?

Sure, yeah. So originally from the UK, I moved here, gosh, 14 years ago, I think it is now. Actually, it's yeah, 15 years this year. So 15 years this, yeah, 15 years this year. So I think I've lived in Austin all that time, and at 10 years they tell me that I'm allowed to call myself a Texan. So I'm now I'm fully qualified and certified as a Texan, having lived here for long enough.

Congratulations.

Yeah, so I can yawl. I've practiced yawling. But but yeah, been here since then. I moved my first company here, my first two companies that I did within the enterprise security space in software. I so had a bunch of government customers and then some financial services customers. And then I decided to go from enterprise to uh consumer, and I worked on a kind of a construction remodeling platform. And you know, so yeah, I was working that and then kind of COVID hit and I was deciding what I wanted to do as my next gig. And three years ago I'd had the idea for Tribe, but at the time the technology and you know the opportunity wasn't really matured yet, but several things changed going into by twent the time 2020 arrived. So I said, hey, I've got a great team, and you know, I think this will be this would really help some of my friends. Like the idea three years ago came from seeing some of my friends running studios, watching Orange Theory Fitness grow, watching Peloton start growing, and you know, seeing metrics, seeing tech have more of an impact on fitness. And my friends who are running studios saying, Hey, I wish there was some kind of platform we could use that that would help us on the tech side, you know. So that's and not you know, specifically around metrics and the the experience of workouts versus like you know, not gym management or billing or scheduling, client, you know, member management, all of that's been done really well by a host of companies. So it was really the the focus was this kind of you know, the workout experience and how technology could help in that.

Yeah, and it is interesting. I mean, there's there's so much software solutions now in the band. I mean, I I look at just membership softwares and how many I went through in my gym ownership days are so many. And I feel like you know, Tribe is is striking a very specific need. And uh, I'm gonna let you explain it. So what is exactly that Tribe does? Who are you focusing on? What's the problem that you guys are kind of honed in on?

Yeah. So we would say that we're like Apple Fitness as a platform. Uh so we're focused on online workouts, both live and on demand. And so today people might be using Zoom or they're using Vimeo for that, but they're not really designed for fitness. So if you take those platforms, you could go use them for a rock concert, a meeting, uh company all hands meeting. Like there's no features that are specific to fitness. And so what we're doing is something, you know, as a we're doing something as a platform that's more designed for online workouts, similar to what Apple, Peloton, Tonal, Tempo, Mirror have have been creating. And uh, yeah, so that's there's a bunch of pieces, and I can unpack that with you over the rest of the core. But that's sort of the the vision is we want to create, we've seen this whole wave of digital fitness companies growing explosively that are doing direct-to-consumer subscription models with centralized content and some amount of connected fitness technology that's enabling it. And uh so our thought was look, we want to help all of these local studio owners who are trying to compete with that. They're trying to do online digital workouts as well as workouts in the studio with more kind of metrics and connectivity. But there's no platform for them. So it's really an unfair fight. And the irony is when you're in the studio, you have a great sense of community, a great sense of accountability, all the things that have made boutique studios really thrive, especially in group class settings. But when these studios are doing their classes from home, it doesn't feel premium anymore because the technology, the video is not that good, it's not in sync, and you know, there's all kinds of problems with it, or they're just doing video on demand, which feels like it should be free on YouTube. And so, you know, like I say, we said, look, we're gonna build a platform that helps all of these smaller studios and and studio change, local studios, create more compelling online workouts that feel more interactive and have higher production quality. And that's really the goal of the company.

Awesome. And when did you found the company, Justin?

Yeah, I founded it in March last year. So right as COVID started taking off, I guess fortuitous timing. But yeah, I started it in March. Um, but I'd had the idea and worked on some prototypes back, yeah, probably 2017. At the time, as I said, like digital was starting to see importance, but it wasn't like a burning hot issue as it obviously became in 2020. And then also there were issues with the fitness wearables. So, you know, one of the ironies of this space and ecosystem is back in 2017, Fitbit was its own little island and Garmin was its own little island, and you know, like they didn't really share data, and there were all of these attempts to reverse engineer and get heart rate data and metrics off them. And then when then Apple showed up, and um Apple brought out the Apple Watch, and then ironically, drove open standards and open access to data, which is something that Apple's not very well known for, really. But you know, allowing an ecosystem of apps and getting heart rate data and stuff off Apple Watches meant that suddenly these other walled gardens had to open up. And so then it was possible to support a lot more of the the wearables that people already owned, rather than just being stuck with, you know, oh, you have to get this special heart rate strap and ignore the $400 watch you bought, which you know is not just, I don't think is a good model.

So yeah, it's interesting. The wearable market has changed drastically. So for something I've been really into for the last four years is wearables. And I guess you maybe uh this would be good, is give us give us a typical use case, right? Of maybe a boutique gym owner, right? The like what would the what they were doing before, and then how tribe changed the way they connect with their clients.

Yeah. So what they're doing now in digital is probably Zoom. There's very few options to use for live workouts for local studios. So they're probably doing Zoom and they're probably using their laptop, and uh maybe they've got some kind of headset microphone, and uh they're either shooting it in the studio, maybe they were shooting it from home. And uh that's that's kind of like what they what most that we talk to have been using for live workouts. And I think the problems with that are Zoom is designed as a video chat technology. So none of the none of the Peloton, tonal, tempo, mirror, none of those companies are using Zoom. They're all using different types of video technology. And Zoom is obviously amazing. As a video chat platform, it's really good, but they prioritize audio over video. So if you're doing a workout that's to the beat or to like a dance workout, uh a ride workout, like a spin class, it the video and audio does go out of sync. Um, and that makes it very hard to follow along. And then the quality of the video, again, because they're super optimized over real-time communication and having chats like we're doing right now, where you can jump in and say something. It's not like um, you know, Apollo 13, where we have to say, are the rockets working over and then wait 13 seconds to get a response. Like that wouldn't work well in a live interactive class. And it wouldn't, and particularly in business meetings, it wouldn't work well because you want to feel like it's a conversation, not like you're talking to a pl uh a rocket the other side of the moon. So that's Zoom is prioritized for that because it's their primary use case. But that's what they're using right now. They're probably playing Spotify music over it and hoping for the best. Um there, you know, there's no metrics, so there's no real idea how they're doing, there's no access rights over who can see my video, etc. etc. Like it's a video chat platform. So what we've what we've built is it's a it's an online workout experience that has video. So the coach has a video stream, but we're using Amazon's so Amazon has a lot of servers that they run in data centers, and they have a lot of services that they use that they offer that a video streaming service or a file storage service. And so we use those services the same way that Peloton, Tonal, Mirror, all of those companies are using them. Uh, we use their more broadcast video service. So that means the video quality is better and the video tends to stay in sync. The audio and the video is in time with itself. So if you're doing a dance workout with music, it works better. So we're using that, and that's that's again the use case is I want to do a class with 20 people. And so part of the difference is the video quality is better. We then do participant video where you can see other people who are working out, but you I I can decide if just the coach gets to see my video, if everybody can see it, so there's some more privacy options. And then we hook into wearables, similar to again, like every one of the digital platforms. They have they work with some kind of heart rate monitor, or they work with an Apple Watch, they have an app for that. So we have we have apps for Samsung Tyson, Apple Watch, Garmin, Fitbit OS, uh, and Android Wear OS, which is in Fossil and other watches, as well as supporting the Bluetooth heart rate strap. So you can see what heart rate zone you're in, you can see a leaderboard of what heart rate zone all of you, the other people in the workout are in, you can see kind of calories burned. So it's a bit like the Orange Theory fitness leaderboard, or you know, again, all of these other digital platforms that are doing something like that with wearables, but it's yes, it's in a it's running from wherever people are on a leaderboard. So, you know, they can all be working out from home. And then we do it live and on demand. So let's say that, you know, I've done, I want to do the class live, that's great. I can see my friends working out and I can you know see how I'm competing against them live, but I can also do that on demand. So let's say that Kate wants to do the class that was the eight o'clock class, but she wants to do it at two o'clock in the afternoon. She can do it at two o'clock in the afternoon, she can compete against, you know, all of her friends in the leaderboard who did it earlier that day or you know, sometime earlier. And she can also see them. So we record the participant videos and have access rights around that too. So, you know, you feel like you're part of a real class, even though, you know, it's actually on demand. So that's kind of what we've, you know, that's the the first kind of iteration of what we built. And our focus on on where we're taking the product is improv bringing more interactivity into that workout. So more features, more mechanisms to bring the experience of working out as a class instead of watching CNN and being with 18,000 people you don't know on a ride. And uh so you know, try and bring that feeling of an intimacy of a class and different ways to interact with the other people you know who are in it. And then we're also doing stuff to raise production quality. So, you know, better video support for multiple cameras, better video audio synchronization, things to make the production quality feel, you know, more like a professional service and less like you know, something that I made in my kitchen. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes total sense. I you know, I'm curious about that. I mean, the wearable integration is really nice, right? So you guys work with all the major players, the Fitbits, the Garmin's, the Apples, the Googles, or is there um anybody you're not working with on the wearable side?

Not in the main brands. I mean, you can go get some, you know, you can go get something from Amazon slash China that is very kind of proprietary, and you know, they're still living in the universe of five to ten years ago where you make your own app and it's all a it's it's an end-to-end solution. But I all of the major kind of brands are using one flavor of these main operating systems, and uh they've all opened up because if they didn't, they'd die. So they've all opened up to third-party apps now.

Yeah. Yeah, I've seen that too. So I'm curious, if I'm a coach or a gym owner, one of the questions I would have for you is okay, obviously the the service you guys provide, the platform does a lot of work. What do I need to invest in? Do I need a good camera? Do I need better audio? What do you guys recommend?

So we support three different kinds of options. The first one is you just use your iPhone. And so then there's no capital investment. Ideally, you might have to buy a cable that plugs into the lightning port of your iPhone so you can connect the headset you've got with the music to it. But outside of 10 bucks from Amazon, there really isn't, you know, you can get going on that very easily. And so our goal there is to be like a fitness-centric and customized choice instead of Zoom. So just like you could pick up Zoom and get going really fast and easily. Similarly, with this, with Tribe, you can use the Coach app that we have, iOS and Android, and you just bring up your iPhone, you install the app, you go through some simple sign-up process, and then you hit the start workout button, and yeah, then anybody who's a member of your studio, you can send them a link, they can jump into that, um, into that workout with you. So that's like the the starting point, I would say, is an iPhone. The video quality is going to be better, but it's still going to be single camera. Then we we've also been creating an OSX app, so that would be running on your MacBook, and you could hook a DSLR camera into that. And we have specific recommendations around that. You really want to look at Vlogging type cameras where they have good autofocus. So you don't keep going out and in a focus as you walk backwards and forwards. And uh so I can talk about cameras a bit more in a minute. And then on the higher end, we're we're currently working a hardware box that's like a it's like a an automated mixing desk magic. Uh you hook multiple cameras into it, it's sending out a video stream to our servers, and then our servers can control which camera's live. And so we can switch between different cameras, and uh it feels like you've got a mixing desk operator there pushing the buttons just to get the different camera angles, similar to what you would see on a Peloton or a Tonal or a Fiton or one of these companies, but but it's all being done by software. It's yeah, it's it fakes out having a studio crew without having to go and actually hire one. So those are the three different points. And so you could spend anything from nothing uh to a few hundred bucks on a light, uh a couple of lights from Amazon that are gonna make the lighting look better through getting maybe a single camera and uh plugging it in your laptop through to spending ten thousand dollars on some nice lighting and some some cleverer cameras that fake out looking like a cameraman and then the switch box, which you know is gonna be right around 700 bucks. So yeah. So those are like the we cater from a small independent studio that's just put in their foot in the water to other studios we're working with who've got up to 30,000 virtual attendances a month into digital workouts, and they're investing in digital studio space and doing remodeling with fancy lights and all kinds of stuff to make that look good.

Yeah, that was that leads to my next question, Justin. Is where where are you seeing the most traction with this? Is it like the independent trainer who's now branching out on their own during COVID, or is it the the studios that understand that they have to have whatever we call it a hybrid model? What uh where are you seeing the most traction right now?

So our primary focus is studios that are going through that hybrid transition. We do support individual coaches, and we do have a few that, you know, like Instagram influencers and stuff, where again, some of those folks have gone off and they're creating their own mobile app and trying to reinvent the wheel. And I would just say I wouldn't do all of that. Like it's building software is hard. It takes a lot of money and it takes people who are really focused on it. And I think in the eFitness space, just throwing up video on demand behind a paywall inside an app is not enough to generate money because there's so much stuff on like Pop Sugar and others are doing for free on YouTube that's really well produced. So if you want to create a subscription-based digital fitness offering, it needs to have more interactivity and it needs to have more higher production quality. There's no point, there's no point reinventing the Model T when everybody's looking to drive Mercedes. You'd be better to just lease a Mercedes. That would be the analogy I'd give. And then on the studio side, we're talking to we're talking and we're piloting with everybody from individual studios to ones that have got four or five locations to some that have got hundreds of locations. And I think all of them, you know, all of them are going through this thought process of what do I do now? Like I did something tactically with. for Mio and with with Zoom, but what are my what what's my strategy look like once COVID is over? And it's going to be over. Sometime this year we'll all have everybody who wants one and believes that they're a good thing will have vaccines. And and things will start returning to some degree of normalcy. And but I think people still are going to have that expectation of being able to have flexibility in their workouts and work out from home. I think the key things that studios have, there's two things that studios have that coaches don't have as much. So the those two things, the first one is the the main one is the physical space. They have physical space that is already interior designed and beautiful for doing workouts. And with that they also have equipment which can be useful but really it's however good the technology is, when you do a workout in your kitchen, it still looks like and as a coach, it still looks like you're in your kitchen. And so it doesn't matter how good the lighting and the cameras are, you can still see the sink behind you or you still see a sofa and a plant. It doesn't feel the same as looking at a workout from Peloton. But a lot of these studios again like they they have nice well-designed interior spaces. And so that looks a lot better in the background of a workout than you know somebody's sofa. And then the second thing that the studios have which I think is a key kind of secret superpower really is the all of their members know each other. And that physical space is a place that they can keep getting to know each other. There's more sense of community and community brings stickiness and lower churn rates so people don't cancel as often when they really get to know each other. If I don't show up to a class from Peloton, I don't get a call from Robin saying hey Fatty, why weren't you on the bike this morning? That doesn't happen. I've never had Cody ring me up and say hey you should have been there this morning man. I was counting on you. If you're part of a CrossFit studio, if you're part of a a spin or a bike studio like that actually does happen. Your friends are going to reach out and say hey I missed you today. What happened? Like are you getting lazy? And so I think that that social interaction and the social bonds that you get from being physically together with people is really important to fitness because ultimately when I'm watching Netflix I need self-control to turn it off. When I'm working out I need self-control to keep working out like it's a completely different experience. Video on demand and in an impersonal working out with people that don't know me and don't care about me, that doesn't have the same stickiness as the the community and the accountability and the relationships that come in local fitness. And so I think local coaches if I was advising local coaches I would say look it's great doing digital we're all about that we're going to help you do digital but I would at least be doing pop-up events or something or other workouts in the park. I don't know something that gets people physically together once COVID is reduced because purely doing digital it's harder for people to remember to keep those relationships. And when the relationships aren't there the churn rate goes up the perception of value goes down and in NIU it seems to be cheaper to get an annual subscription in NEO every time I look I think it's $30 now like that the so it to counter that you really need that community and interactivity that people buy into and it helps them meet their fitness goals.

Yeah. Man you just touch on something that's been uh a topic on this podcast for months now is how do you solve for community in the digital space, right? In this digital era it's everyone has a very different opinion of what things are going to look like in a year. Some people say that gyms are going to flood back and people are going to abandon their Pelotons. Some people say that the homework craze is here to stay and and then a lot of people like me in the middle I think people are going to now have more options and you have to figure out a way to do a couple things. A be the hub for them of their fitness and B, create community in all these different aspects. And it sounds like that's something you guys are outright trying to solve.

Yeah I'd be with you in the middle I do think people are going to come back to gyms and and to boutique studios because they have varied equipment because they have relationships there because it it's hard like you know I we're going to do a marketing video at some point. I I guess I can say this here one of my one of my ambitions to do a marketing video with the song All by Myself and have various sort of people dressing up as a clown doing other things on bikes to try and keep themselves interested the camera slowly pans around and it goes through the seasons. That Notting Hill movie where Hugh Grant's walking down the street and it's like winter and then it's summer and then it's you know like and all the weather keeps changing. It's really hard all by myself to uh to keep myself motivated and I do think that I I do think people will go back into studios. I see I see a lot of this as like the P90X praise. There was a whole bunch of people going around saying oh I don't need studios anymore. I've got this amazing DVD and it's changed my life and then a year later they're back in a studio. It's just really hard all by myself to keep that momentum going. So I think that I think that the ways that digital can help is yes working out with people that you really know not total strangers. I don't know who BigS36 is on Peloton and I don't care. Like I care about people I that I see and I talk to and I know about their kids. It's why Facebook started in one university and didn't try to blanket the entire universe at the same time because people already knew each other. And so the same's true in local studios. So I think people will go back to that. I do think there is an expectation of being able having more flexibility. And so for us in Tribe that means I want to be able to go into the studio and do the class that was first thing this morning but I was taking Little Johnny to school and so I couldn't make it then but I really want to meet up with three of my friends and go do that class at three o'clock in the afternoon. And so I think just increasing the flexibility for studio owners so that they get more use out of their coach time because it becomes part of a a library that people can do later and not just that moment in time and then the entire value of it's gone and people walk out the door. And then I think also again for people being able to work out from home it expands the physical space of the studio to people's homes. So you can have more members in it in a box gym when half of the workouts people are doing from home because they prefer it, because it's more flexible around their lifestyles, but they still come in for other workouts. And then I think that so I think the features there leaderboards, metrics, video, and then there's a bunch of other features that we have coming down the pipe that are all designed around making that experience more interactive and more compelling. Form analysis is an obvious one and then there's other stuff that's less obvious. And that's I would say I think it is in the middle but there there are some useful research findings out there from Les Mills and others about folks who who go to you know people who go to virtual classes they do tend to to also do live classes. There was another what I read that live class attendance increases by 12% when clubs were run virtual and live together. And then just you know even before COVID back in January 2018 there was a stat that 82% of club clients are already doing exercise at home and 63% of them are using virtual apps or digital platforms. And that was before COVID. So again I think it's the the flexibility of being able to say okay I I have both options. And then it also breaks the shame cycle like I think one of the greatest churn factors in studios is if I don't get in for a week then I feel guilty about it because I wasn't able to get in because my kid was sick or whatever else. And so you don't go there enough because it's more of a you you can't get there five times a week. And so then your fitness level starts dropping and so then you're you're less excited about it because you can't get close to your personal records that you had earlier. And there's this kind of shame cycle of I'm not getting in enough and I know I should be doing, but I feel guilty about it. And so I can't and I think that giving people options to work out from home as well means that their general fitness level and happiness level is higher even though they're only going to the gym, the studio say three days a week but if they're doing another workout in 20 minutes just between putting the kids to bed and figuring out what they're going to watch on TV, then you can maintain a higher level of fitness. And so I would say to studio owners you don't want to surrender the home all of those home workouts to Peloton and Apple. And we give you a platform to to do it in a higher brand, higher premium experience kind of way so that you can extend your studio workout and your techniques and your fitness tracking and your coaching experience. You can be more of of your members' lives in fitness versus just surrendering the home digital stuff to third party platforms. So yeah so that's I'm in the middle but I I do think that fit that digital isn't going to go away and the the the studios we're talking to that have a bigger picture of the future I think are a more accurate picture of the future are trying to plan what comes next. How do I raise my game? How do I raise my game without spending a ton of money? How can I do it cost effectively so that my members don't tell me it it feels amateurish when I do their homeworkouts.

Yeah man those are all really powerful points and I it's there's so many different ways you can tech I would imagine too you're probably seeing some traction with a subscription complete digital subscriptions. I've had uh Miranda from Street Parking and Shane from Dark Horse and the guys from Garage Gym Athlete all of these have been subscription models that have been around for a long time but when you add in a layer where you can actually do a group class with say 40 people up on a leaderboard with like array training at the same time that really adds a layer to a community that's already really strong.

Yeah I think we'll obviously see you know there are studios we're working with that have pure digital members that don't have any physical membership. And I think in that context again that it's an absolute must-have that it feels like a boutique class it doesn't feel like watching a video on YouTube. Nobody's going to pay $20 a month for access or very few people very few people are going to pay $20 a month $30 a month for access to an on-demand video library. And I've seen you know places that are up to $80 a month for access to their digital classes. But when you look at the class it's just a recording on Vimeo. And even if you do it live because there's zero interactivity and they can't actually see any of the people who are riding on their bikes at home, it feels like it's on demand even though it's actually live because the coach has no idea what anybody's doing or who's on the class or anything else. So that type of very impersonal digital experience feels like it should be free. The when we're doing some research on pricing and successful digital successful pricing for digital kind of fitness offerings and what the market's willing to pay. And there is a strong correlation with our interactivity. The more that I'm held accountable the more that I can race against somebody that I know the more that you know all a list again there's a a ton of other features that that we have in our pipeline for that the more you can charge because the more it feels like a boutique class. The boutique class doesn't feel like being one of 10,000 people where you can't really see anybody else and you're all sat there. That's not the nobody would pay $25 a class for that experience or $15 for that they go for the interaction.

Yeah sad man. One one last question for you because it's more of a point of curiosity for me but when you came into the fitness industry working in like you said multiple different segments what did you notice was different?

Yeah I think so one interesting observation is that like the the tech team sizes and skill sets in general in the pure eFitness businesses that have raised gazillions of dollars last year their level of game is higher than most of the existing incumbent digital fitness players that have been or players that have been working with local studios. The technology level the ability to build product in those pure play fitness companies is has been higher and they've raised more money they've got more momentum they're able to attract higher quality engineering talent and they just have larger teams whereas the some of the status quo companies that have been doing heart rate stuff or doing some type of metrics in the fitness industry and I'm talking here about the the solutions aimed at studios it they're just not they're not swing for the fences world changing companies. I don't know if that I don't know if that rings true with you but it's a stark contrast in my mind looking through the teams and assessing companies. So that's one observation I have is like that there really is a vacuum of great product and technology offerings in this space for local studios.

There just isn't anything there and that I find that quite surprising yeah it's I I agree and I look back on my career as a boutique gym owner and even the smallest feature would get me to jump vote for something new. Like when Wodify came out they had this ability to put everyone's picture on a TV screen in the class. That was it that was it we're like ooh that looks great I'll do that. And it was such a small feature that was based upon another yet again another membership software that really didn't stand out in any other way. So I think the boutiques and the the studios I think they're thirsty for innovation and and ways to get an advantage in the market. Yeah it's an interesting observation I certainly don't disagree with it. I think it's pretty spot on. Justin I know I want to respect your time I know we're button up but give us some of the insights man like what uh where can people get a hold of you? Where do people if you want to get a demo or how does it work with tribe do people get a demo or what what's the next step for them?

Yeah so uh website is www.tribe.fitness www.tribe.fitness and uh so yeah you can see some of some videos and some examples of it working there. The team if you go fill out one of the forms you can get a demo. Our pricing is pretty easy. We have the $499 $199 a month options and they come with a number of kind of workout packs and then at at volume we're we're about eight cents per participant per workout is the pricing. So if you're doing thousands and thousands of them a month that's where you're going to end up. Yeah so that's and that's that's our pricing base. So I would come through the front door always happy and excited to talk to studio owners I think my team's setting up some webinars to sort of show the product for me to show the product and then talk to a larger group of of studio owners at each time like once or twice a month. And yeah I would say come give it a trial we're doing a 90 day free trial right now and you can try it and not pay anything and see if it's working and yeah I think it it's it's just designed for purpose. That would be the main thing I would say again Apple fitness as a platform like we've designed it specifically for this niche. We're not doing member management we're not doing class management. We integrate with MindBody we're working with Mariana Tech. You know our focus is really giving you a better option than Zoom or Vimeo that's specific for live and on demand workouts.

Yeah and I love that I think that's what drives success in in a market like this too. So well done. Justin thank you so much for coming on I love hearing your backstory and you did a great job of explaining the the problem and the solution that you guys are providing. And yeah that was great. Ladies and gentlemen Justin Marston thank you for having me hey wait don't leave yet this was your host Eric Malzone and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minutes. If you did I'm going to ask you to do three simple things it takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way we really appreciate it. Number one please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it iTunes Spotify Catbox whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be, please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it and want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly if you'd like to learn more or get in touch with me simply go to the featureoffitness.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