Motosumo - Fitness Gamified - Kresten Jensen
Future of FitnessMay 06, 202000:32:5422.62 MB

Motosumo - Fitness Gamified - Kresten Jensen

In today's episode, I am interviewing Kresten Jensen to discuss the topic of technology in fitness. How Motosumo has grown from three friends to a full-blown company. 

Todays's episode features a special deal. If you are a fitness professional or gym owner looking for ways to improve client experience, visit futureoffitness.co/deal. There you will find a discount code and a place to sign up. 

Kresten is the founder and CEO of Motosumo; a fitness app that allows people to participate in group training and to connect with one another. 

Tell us your story, how did you get into this? (03:25)

  • Kresten says he has always been keen on sports and fitness. The whole idea started when two of his friends came over for pizza and they started building on this idea.
  • They were looking at similar concepts and felt that they could produce something more interesting. 
  • They thought if people were bringing their phones on a bike ride or a run, they could actually tell people how to move and provide insight into their power and efficiency. 
  • They approached their first investors, and as soon as they got the go-ahead, they jumped right into it. 
  • Creating an app to generate an income is tricky, because people look for free apps, and there are numerous fitness apps out there. 

Where is the company now, as far as health clubs and gyms go? (07:37)

  • Kresten says the company now has more than a thousand gyms on the platform, which was a big milestone for them. 
  • They reached the thousand mark by the new year 2019.
  • He's always a bit cautious to give exact revenue but to provide a range; it's around $2000 per gym annually for the full service.
  • He adds that at this point in time, they are still using more money than they are actually accumulating. But he is confident that this will change very soon.

Gamification, social networks, and events are powerful qualities. Did you implement these qualities intentionally? (09:43)

  • He says initially, the social part wasn't part of their vision. It was meant to be used as a tracking tool for the individual. 
  • However, some more visionary team members convinced them of the benefits of connecting people. They were sceptical at first, but in no time they started seeing the positive effect of social connection.
  • When he started thinking about gamification, his initial thought was to do something where people could compete. However, an advisor told them that the majority of people are collaborators and not competitors. People want to be part of a team. 
  • Although these qualities were initially not implemented on purpose, they definitely are now. 

You started out as a group of friends with an idea, and now you are running a whole company. What was adaption like? (17:32)

  • He says one of the biggest factors for him was the fact that you can't be involved in everything, and you definitely can't be an expert at everything. 
  • When you're only three to eight people, you know what everyone else is doing. But as the numbers grow, it's hard to keep track of everyone, so management systems and communication procedures must be put in place. 
  • The most challenging mental shift for him was that he had to let go of things he knows nothing about, and things that shouldn't bother him in the first place. 
  • He jokingly says that he believes he has been quite a nuisance for some of the company members because he wants to be a part of everything and be involved everywhere. 

How do fitness professionals take advantage of technology like yours? (20:05)

  • He says regardless of what your profession is, you can find the app useful, and it's really easy to use. It takes 5 minutes to install the app and you can get started right away.
  • Once you've got the app, you just activate your gym on your phone. Since we are already using our smartphones for everything else, this is the sort of technology where you shouldn't be afraid to get started.
  • They have a ten-minute explainer video, and if it takes you more than ten minutes to understand how Motosumo works, it's becoming too complicated.
  • If you really want to take advantage of this, it's more than just downloading the app; you have to immerse yourself and see what the app can do for you. This will allow you to add value to your group fitness

Resources

Connect with Kresten on LinkedIn

Visit Motosumo Website

SPEAKER_00

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, where we talk with entrepreneurs, researchers, and practitioners in fitness, wellness, and the health sciences. I'd like to give a big thanks to our sponsors, Level 5 Mentors, helping entrepreneurs achieve the highest levels of freedom in time, money, relationships, health, and purpose. Also, certified course creation, helping entrepreneurs create accredited online certifications that are not only lucrative but highly scalable. Go to level5mentors.com or certifiedcoursecreation.com and learn more. I am your host, Eric Malzone, and once again, welcome to the Future of Fitness. Hey Fitness fans, this is Eric Malzone, your host. Thank you for listening. I have a special deal for you. So the app MotoSumo, if you go to featureoffitness.co forward slash deal, you will find the discount code and a place to sign up. So if you are a fitness professional, a gym owner who's currently running virtual classes and you're looking for a way to improve the client experience through a social aspect, gamification, and all kinds of cool features at a very, very low cost and a very, very easy way to implement. And I suggest trying it out. I am taking nothing from this. I just want to make this very clear. I just think it's a great offering, and I think it's a great answer to some of the challenges we're facing right now as the fitness industry through this pandemic. So go claim it futurefitness.co forward slash deal, and you'll see the discount code and the way to sign up. And it's no rest of two weeks, so you can try it out. And after that, get a nice discount as well. So featurefitness.co forward slash deal. Enjoy the episode. Boom. We're live. Kreston, welcome to the show, my friend. Thank you very much. Yes. I'm always you know, I always get excited for my podcast interviews, especially when I get to talk to people who are CEOs, founders of tech companies, and I I just really enjoy our conversation. So this is gonna be a lot of fun. Kreston, I start everything out by asking a question about your story. How did you get to where you are? How did you found your company? What's what's your backstory?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I got into this industry by accident. Okay, at least on the working side. I've always done sports. I've played soccer, I've done triathlons. Right now I'm playing foot tennis some evenings. Did you say foot tennis? Yeah, yeah, I I did. I wasn't sure if I should mention, but it's kind of a niche sport that just came to Denmark a couple of years ago. It's more like foot volley, I would say. But yeah, here I said it. I'm honest. Uh it's out there. Yeah, I just say foot tennis.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. So just we'll we'll get back to your story in a second. Yeah, I just pulled up some photos of foot tennis. So it looks like a larger ball. Is that right? Or is it the same size?

SPEAKER_01

It's almost the same size, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

This looks incredibly difficult. Do you have a soccer background or a football background? Okay.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I I've played since I was a small kid. So that's that helps a lot.

SPEAKER_00

Wow. And is it one-on-one, two-on-two, teams? Like how does this work?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, they're single, double, and and triple. So everything's possible, and it's also mixed genders as well. I will tell you that the single is pretty hard. It's a lot of ground to cover, and I'm getting too old for that right there. But Google and triple is quite fun.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I look at it, the first thing I see is me pulling my hamstring. So I don't think I'll be trying that anytime soon.

SPEAKER_01

You should probably defend Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. Well, that's awesome. Okay, foot tennis. Just got educated. So yeah, back to your story, man. Tell me how you got into this.

SPEAKER_01

As I said, sports already always been a big part of my life and fitness as well. I've done a lot of indoor cycling, especially when I did triathlon. So you could say I have an interest for it, but it really sparked when I had two of my friends come over for Pete's. And we were actually just setting out to build something of our own. And all three of us have a background doing sports, but we also have a nerdy side. So the two other guys have PhDs in astrophysics and uh human physiology. So that's above my level, but I have an engineering degree and yeah, just a lot of interest for creating new stuff. So we discussed what we could do, and then it was right after Endomondo, the Danish Sports app, was acquired by under Armour, and they were tracking people outdoors with the GPS, and we found actually there were a lot of perspectives in that. We were looking at and saying, hey, could could we do something a bit more interesting? Could we dive deeper? And we looked at the sensors inside the phone, the motion sensors, the one that tilted screen from portrait to landscape mode. And we said, okay, people are actually bringing their phone for a bike ride or for run. We can tell them exactly how we move. It's gonna take a lot of modeling, it's gonna take a lot of hours to do the algorithms, but but we can actually give them really interesting information on their power and their efficiency. And we managed to do that. Actually, we didn't use the phone sensors in the first place, but we used some that were quite similar. And after some time, we went to the previous Endomondo investors and said, hey, we think we can create Endomondo version 2. And they were on board, and that's how we got the first investment and jumped right into it. But as you can hear, there's been quite a shift since then because making money on consumer apps is tricky. I think people basically just got used to anything that's in an app is free. It's changing a bit, but I think that's one thing that makes it tricky, and then competition is tremendous, right? There, I don't know, there must be at least a hundred thousand fitness apps. Yeah. So trying to get to the top of the chart, you need a marketing budget which is completely different from most startups, and or you just need luck. So we thought luck was probably a bit of a bad bet. So we um yeah, that that that's not really a plan, is it? So we looked at the gyms and said, hey, a lot of gyms are investing in you could say advanced equipment with sensors and connect uh systems, but that's all in the phone. Like, what if we just did it for indoor cycling? What if you can just walk in, put your phone on the handbars, and it would track how you are riding a standard bike. And then we could connect everybody, like a mobile game. Let's create a group experience here, let's let's make it fun as well. We thought, well, everybody's got a smartphone. A lot of the gyms got old bikes. Let's just do that. And that was really the starting point also from getting our second investor on board, Romentum, which is at Amy's tech and gaming fund, that brought in a lot of perspectives on how to translate the best from gaming and social networks into fitness. So that kind of all came together in an app and website that really holds all this tracking, all these games, all this group engagement for instructors. And it has basically just built from there now. We are connecting to every bike. So it doesn't mean that if you have a tech bike, you can't join the Mozesumo family. Of course you can. And we also connect to all heart rate monitors. So now you see like Zumba classes, uh CrossFit style classes, these kind of things, using it for just intensity-based workouts as well, where you don't need to wear the phone at all, it's just your receiver. So it grew from kind of a really nerdy tracking ambition and into what I would say is more like a group gaming experience for what I would call regular people who just want to have fun when they're in the gym. That's really how I came into it. And we started three guys with a really nerdy background, and we're 20 now. It's been a really interesting journey the last four years or so. When did you found the company?

SPEAKER_00

How long ago was that?

SPEAKER_01

We really started looking at the tech almost seven years ago. That's really some time, but it was a project which we did next to our regular work for quite some time. So I think if you look at the first investment we have four or five years back, that's really when it started to take off.

SPEAKER_00

Where is the company now? Like, where are you guys looking at as far as total health clubs or gyms on board, total users, the what kind of revenues you guys putting out there now? What does the company look like?

SPEAKER_01

Well, to date, we've had more than a thousand gyms on the platform. So I think that for us, that was a huge milestone. I think we just crossed it by new year. In 19, we had a little more than a thousand gyms on the platform, either indoor cycling or other group activities. So that's kind of how we measure our reach. Some of them were, of course, you could say, in there for our annual charity event, and some have been there for other events as well. But I think that gives kind of an indication. And in the startup industry here, I'm always a little concerned to give exact revenues, but anyone can go to our shop and see that it's around $2,000 per gym per year to have the full Motosumo service. So yeah, that gives you an idea of the range at least. We're still burning a little more cash than we're earning, of course. That's why we have the investors on board, but it could very soon be the time where that changes. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00

And are you full-time in this now, Chris? Is this your big thing?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, definitely. The 15 of us are full-time, and then we have a few very talented student workers as well. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

On you could say 40% time. That's awesome. What a great journey. And it's, you know, it feels like I know it's been seven years. We probably feel like you're really just getting started, right?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, especially the first couple of years, it was we never thought of this as being a real company, right? It was a project on the side of our regular business. That's been a big change for sure.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. I look at some of the qualities of what you're talking about. And I know that retention, it's a huge advantage for gyms that sign up with you, right? Retention's a big focus. And overall, the industry is really shifting from lead generation, client acquisition to retention as a focus. It's really on the main stage now. And some of the things I really love about like some buzzwords that I've heard you say, number one, gamification, social network. You mentioned charity events. These are all some big buzzwords for me that I've learned over the years when doing any kind of community, whether it's, you know, a virtual community or a gym community or even like a mastermind group or something like that. These qualities of having a gamification social network and events, and especially tying in philanthropy into it, really brings people together. And I think those are powerful things. And I'm curious if these are things that you came across or if you implemented with intention or if these are things you just kind of saw growing and then leveraged even more.

SPEAKER_01

I think initially, this was definitely the whole social part, wasn't something that we came up with originally. It was a tracking tool for the individual. So it wasn't part of our first vision, but we've had some more visionary people on our board that kept saying, look at the ecosystem, look at the social effect this could have when you connect people. And we were a bit skeptical about it. But when we just saw the first few signs of the impact when we started connecting people on their phone, just not even with group displays or anything, we could see it had a huge impact. When we started diving into that, that was actually a point where we came across Promentum as an investor, where one of their partners had been the guy behind Hitman and other super popular titles. And even one of our advisors was the producer of Subway Servers, which I think is the most downloaded mobile game ever. And when they kind of opened our eyes to what you can do, that's when it took off and we started implementing these things on purpose, you could say. Because there are just so many things which I had never put any thought into where they explained it. Like I've always been super competitive. This is just to give you an example of what kind of thoughts they got into our heads. Um I've always been super competitive. So when I was thinking gamification, I thought, let's let's do something where people compete and I can beat the rest or at least get in top five. Let's do the leaderboards, let's do that stuff. And this guy, Yeva, who uh who was the producer of stopway servers, he said, what do you think the distribution is? People that are competitive and collaborative. And I was like, Well, everybody's competitive. And he was shaking his head. And no, no, the vast majority are collaborative. They want a game where they collaborate, they don't want to compete, they feel alienated if you put competitions like that up there. It's fun for top three, but what about bottom 47? What do they feel? I was like, that that makes sense. I hate losing as well. So he said, you can do something collaborative. And then we're like, but then you then you lose the competitive guys, at least, for sure. Said, no, no, that's not the case. What happens is that the most competitive ones, they are gonna say, hey, I I want to be the one who contributes the most to my team. I want to be the most collaborative. So they are in as well, and that means you can basically get a hundred percent of your audience on board if you design the experience to be inclusive and make sure that it's okay to gamify and compete, but you want to collaborate around it. You want to be with others, you want to achieve something or at least lose with a team. So that's just one example where yeah, it sounds very simple when you hear it, but I was blown away by the thought process that some of these game designers and community designers put into their experiences. So it wasn't on purpose initially, but now it's all on purpose.

SPEAKER_00

It's so fast. I mean, I'm like you, Cress, and I immediately think gamification, like, well, I gotta win.

SPEAKER_01

So that's the only game.

SPEAKER_00

How do I win? Yeah. How do I win? And the collaborative efforts, you know, it makes a lot of sense too, just if I reflect on my experience with that kind of viewpoint, it makes a ton of sense. So, how does maybe if you can, if you can, describe like how that collaborative gamification comes out in the user experience? What is that, what does that actually look like?

SPEAKER_01

Well, so one thing we don't do at all is leaderboards that are ranked. We don't put a ranking from one to thirty up there. It just doesn't happen. Um, our competitions, what we've built are all team competitions. So if you compete, you are on a team. You're never alone. It doesn't happen. And then to all of them, we try to add an element of fun that could make you smile. So, like even if you lose, there's at least something to laugh at. So if you lose, you receive a, for us, at least we think, a fun smiley on your phone and something that cheers you up. So these are just some of the elements that you try to think about. Like, how do we maximize probability of people thinking it's nice to contribute? And there's a probability they will win at least at some point or smile at some point. Like you don't want to give 45 minutes all out, and then you get nothing from it. You should at least achieve something during that class, giving your best. So we try to close the gap here so that you don't go through a class without that happening as well. But now I'm just telling what the people who who really think about the product in the company, they what kind of thought process they go through. I'm definitely not an expert myself in this, but I think it's fascinating to listen in and tune into those conversations. Oh, it's extremely fascinating. Maybe I should just put the parallel to fitness. We discussed soccer before and gamification. What does it mean, groups and community? So if I have to put it in a very simple way, I would say look at your local football club, look at your local team. They have members that have been there for 10, 20 years, some that have been there for a lifetime. Their average membership time is definitely not six months. So, how is that possible when I go to my nearby gym and I sit in an indoor cycling class? The average membership is maybe nine months or something like that. It's 30 people sitting next to each other doing the same thing. It's just like playing soccer on a team. Like, how is it possible that the lifetime of a membership is one-tenth of what it is in your football club? Well, basically, it might just be that these social connections are not made. You're not putting in an effort to do something with them. So, what you're doing and what the guy next to you is doing, that's kind of irrelevant. It's not coupled in any way. Whereas if you play soccer and you just play for yourself, you're certainly not gonna win. Getting those dynamics into group fitness is really what we're looking for here. The game doesn't just increase intention or retention by itself, it increases by making the connections between people, by making them feel they contribute to either a greater good or to a group. Like even if you're the worst guy in our competition, you still help your group win compared to if you had done a little worse. So it's not that gamification is an answer by itself, it has to drive some human mechanism. I hope that made sense. It's so very clear in my head, but it's sometimes a little difficult to explain the analogy here. It makes sense.

SPEAKER_00

It makes sense to me. I talk about it often, and I'm a lot of fun at dinner parties sometimes because I always bring up how we're technologically more connected than ever. Yet people are pretty lonely because people aren't engaging in communities or they're not socially connecting in a healthy way. And it's interesting time because I'm reading a book called Solve for Happy. I don't know if you've ever heard this book, but it's fascinating. And one of the things it says is, you know, in order to be happy, you got to find things that are constructive and that make you laugh, right? So you could go out and have three pints of beer every night, and that may make you temporarily happy and it may make you smile, but it can be destructive over time. Something like this is actually quite different. This is both constructive and good for you in all the right ways, and it makes you smile and it gets you part of that community. It hits a lot of really key factors and what it is that drives people and makes them happy and gets them into a good habit. And I think it's just this kind of stuff is good, is good tech when I look at humanity, you know, from a perspective. This is the kind of stuff we want, right? We want people smiling, we want people exercising and moving, we want people connecting with other people, and you know, ultimately it it comes down to mental health more than anything. So I like it, I get it, I like it, and I I know that you may not have it as perfect as you want, but you seem like the kind of person is gonna constantly strive to do the right thing. So I think it's great, man. I really do. Thank you. As you grow this thing, going from like uh, you know, an engineer with a couple buddies over pizza, because I read that story too, to where you are now, you know, investors and staff. I mean, that's that's a big shift, right? How have you personally adapted to the changes of a couple guys with an idea to actually running a company?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, well, some people would say poorly. Uh I'm I'm still allowed to show up in the company and I'm grateful for that. I think the biggest thing for me personally has been that you can't be in everything that's going on. And you definitely cannot be an expert on everything that's going on. When you're just three guys, you know exactly it. That even goes until you're maybe seven, eight people, you know basically exactly what everybody else is doing. But when you approach 15, 20 people, it's just something different. I think one thing is, of course, management systems or procedures or ways of communication that need to change and you need to coordinate a lot more stuff. But I think for me the hardest part was just mentally letting go of things I don't know anything about and things that I shouldn't care about. I think that was a challenge for me. I bet there are quite a few people in the company who are like, yeah, you should have not cared about this, or you should have shut your mouth. And this meeting, it's clearly one of my weaker sides. Yeah, I think I've been a pain in the ass for too many people in the company wanting to know everything and wanting to be involved in everything. I hope I'm doing better now.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, well, I mean, that's natural, right? I mean, it's your baby, you kind of create this whole thing. And, you know, we look at it when I work with clients too. We look at it kind of four different categories. As everybody has a couple, whatever you want to call it, we call it unique ability, zone of genius, whatever it may be. And we work really, really well. We're super happy and passionate, and we're kind of working on those areas. You know, for me, it's relationships and networking is my golden area. It doesn't take me any energy to do it. I love it. And then there's kind of a next level down, there's there's excellence, things that you're probably really, really good at. You probably made a name for yourself at, but maybe you're not quite as passionate about it. And then you have a next category down of competency, things that you can do, and you may do okay, but you really don't like it. And then finally there's a category of incompetency, which you just you suck at it and you shouldn't do it and you hate it anyway. Um, right. So there's different levels. Yeah, it's easy to let go of that, but the hard the hardest one is the one that's excellence, which is kind of right below where you're like, well, I I can do it really well, but I don't like it that much. And that's the area where a lot of people get in trouble because you're probably already known for being really good at it. For me, it was like fitness coaching. I was, you know, it was a good coach, but I wasn't super passionate about it anymore. And when I learned to let that part of me go and move on to what I really enjoyed, it it just felt like this huge awakening, really. Anyway, that's kind of the existential journey, right? So if I'm a fitness professional listening to this, Krestin, I'm wondering, okay, here's more tech, right? What am I going to do about it? How do fitness professionals take advantage of technology like yours?

SPEAKER_01

That's an interesting question because it's of course quite different for owners, managers, and then instructors that are in the group fitness classes. But I think for me to say something, you could say general, whether you're from cycling or you're from Zumba or you're even managing or whatever you're doing, I think the big thing is here that you can just get started. You just download the app and you get your gym activated in the app, and that can happen within five minutes. And then you can actually do it. So I think this is the kind of tech where you don't need to be afraid to get started. And then it's all right there on your phone where you're used to operate everything else. It should be like your remote is the phone, and you're so used to to do stuff on your smartphone that it should come intuitively more or less what you can do. Like we, of course, have a 10-minute explainer video in 14 sections, so it should be possible to do a 50-second bite at the time, and and then you should be up and running. That's really a key thing for us. If it takes more than 10 minutes to learn Motosumo, it's becoming too complicated, basically. And that's for the Fit Pros, for the members. Like if they can't just open sign up and press go within a minute, it's too complicated. So I think the way to take advantage of this, if you want to really add something to your group fitness, it's more about just download and start. Just try and see what it can do for you. Instead of laying out a lot of plans and considering stuff. That that's your next step. Just immerse yourself. That's really where I would like tech to go. Something you can just intuitively immerse yourself in, and then you can see what it can do for you. I think that's key for us at least.

SPEAKER_00

That must be a huge challenge, right? Is making something so simple that someone can use it within a minute. I mean it It's taken years. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

My nature is to make it more complicated, and there are definitely people. That are even making it more complicated than me. And then that's where the experienced guys show up and say, no, no, no, no. Simpler. Yes. What about this? No, simpler. But then you can't do this. It doesn't matter. Simply. Like it's they have been iterating this to me and the rest of the engineering kind of guys. I don't know how many times. And I'm starting to see it. We just did a small event in a nearby CrossFit. And when I saw what a simple guided onboarding could do, like they didn't have many choices. And yet they all ended up doing the right thing. And they were on board in two minutes. I was like, okay, one year ago, that would never have happened. We'd had to walk around, explain every option you had and how you couldn't set it up and all that kind of stuff. And still two of them hadn't gone like through it easily and would have done something wrong. And now suddenly everybody was on board. And this is also extremely important for the people that just before we started this interview, we talked about the 80% that don't go to a gym. Yes. When they finally do, please don't set up a barrier of registering like a thousand things, learning a lot of different complicated settings on a lot of equipment. Like you're then they're already gone. It's too late. Like it's too much. They have to be able to just press one button and then they are part of the group and they feel like they did it right. If the first thing that happens is that they can't figure out the settings, they're out. I'm even sometimes afraid to go to a new gym where I don't know the strength equipment because I don't want to look like it, like one of those guys who don't know how to do anything right. Like, and I'm used to going to the gym. Like imagine people going out and then, yeah, here are eight settings that you need to complete before you are participating in our indoor cycling class. I'm out. Like maybe I'm still there physically, I'm mentally out. And that's where I think that technology, if it's too complicated for the user, it has the opposite effect. Then you can't just immerse yourself. It's not just fun the first time you press play. You should have an emoji just for pressing play, and it should be a happy one. Right.

SPEAKER_00

I love that. Yeah, it's it's really important to give people wins really early. I mean, it should be the first step is to get someone a win. Once you get that, then you're encouraged to move on. So how are you working? I understand spinning and cycling. I get that.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

CrossFit, explain that. How is that? I mean, that's my background, right? That's that's the world I came from. So how is that? How's an app working with CrossFit?

SPEAKER_01

Basically, you're not using the app during your workout.

SPEAKER_00

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

This might require that we dive a little bit into how the platform works, but I'm happy to try and explain it as briefly as I can. But this will be intensity-based workouts. I think everybody, at least those listening to this podcast, probably knows MySone. So you're you're wearing a heart rate monitor, and uh you will have your stats on the group display. And there can be challenges or rewards or even charities on that screen, instructions from the instructor. That's basically quite the same we do in these classes, right? So it's a parallel experience. For example, MyZone or Polar or Bigmetrix or whoever it is that creates a hard rate-based class. I think that the difference for us is that we would like people to just be able to walk in with their own belt. If they have an hardware monitor at home, their own phone, then they connect it as the first thing in the app, and then they press play. And automatically we put you on the right team. They put the phone away somewhere. Usually the uh instructor has set up a rack or something like that, where people can leave their phone, and then the data from the phone is sent to our server and displayed on a website which is always on in that uh, you would say in that group studio. So it's an intensity-based workout where the instructor can use their own phone to send out commands on the big screen, they can start challenges, they can uh they can send out emojis or they can control their music. So I think it's in many ways similar to my zone. It's just a setup where you can basically move it around. If people bring their phone to another studio in the cloud, well, then that's just where you're collecting all your data and you're displaying that on a screen. It's more an advantage for you could say the operator and for you could say tech staff or anyone who has to install it, that there is nothing to install. There is a screen that displays a website, and then members have brought their phone. Well, sometimes they bring their own belt, sometimes the club is selling their branded belts. Like we're not interfering with that. We're completely hardware-less business. So we leave that a little more open to the gym to decide what they want to do. I hope that makes sense. It's a well-known experience, but the entry barrier has just been lowered, in my opinion, quite a lot. Nice.

SPEAKER_00

The question that comes to mind too is I don't know, I don't think I asked this already, but what percentage of your users are actually in health clubs versus at home with their own bike? Like is there or is everything done in a health club? Like how how does what does that look like?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I don't have the exact numbers, but I would say we're maybe 98% or something like that. It is a group experience. It's not a a home experience. You can use it on your your bike at home. That's true. But it's much more uh it's much more a group thing. So it's instructors saying, hey, download Motosumo, just press play, and uh we'll do some fun stuff together today. And that's how our user base grows. It's not from individuals finding us in in App Store, because as I said, they will find maybe 90,000 other apps before us that are dedicated to individual use. Got it.

SPEAKER_00

So the people you're actively pursuing are health club owners, managers, and then fitness and the actual group class instructors, right? Because they kind of bring in the end users as well.

SPEAKER_01

Yes, you could say they already have the end users, they already have the group classes, they want to do something. So average members are not just staying six months, they want to do something more, they want something to market themselves to stand out where they can do it without making any kind of investment. And that's really what we wanted to do. I think I didn't say that in the beginning, but when we set out to do this, the whole tracking project and the biomechanical modeling, a key part was really to make it accessible to everyone. And that's why it should be possible to do it with just your smartphone. And that vision has kind of carried through from when we came from individual use to group use. The point is still that no matter how crappy bikes you have from the 80s and what kind of, we say almost how old your smartphone is, you can join. You just press play and you have a group experience. It doesn't take more than that. And that has carried through. We've had many uh choices where we say, oh, if we just built this small sensor or this receiver, or we had these small things in the gym, we could do it more easily. And we were like, no, we're a software business, and then we just gotta solve the barriers that that might cause in development, and we gotta spend more time developing and not just putting in gadgets or things to the gym because that complicates everything already at that point.

SPEAKER_00

I love that you you guys are constantly striving for simplicity. I don't know why it makes me calm because I think about when I think about apps and things like that. I mean, I have a graveyard of wearables, right? You know, I bought them and like a lot of times they're just not intuitive. So I just give them a day or two and then I end up putting them in a box somewhere and they never get used. And the same with apps and all that. And I think uh the striving for simplicity is so essential. Chris, I asked this question at the end of all interviews because it sometimes it works out for the best. Someone listening may have an answer for you. But what do you, when you look at your business right now and the challenges you're facing as you grow, what's the biggest need that you have in your business?

SPEAKER_01

That is a good question. I think we want to work as different people, companies as possible. So every time we're looking into where we should go next, well, there's only one way to be inspired. That is when people show up and have either a new use case, a new vision for fitness, anyone who wants to do something new, like we really want to partner up with these people, work with them. It's like don't hold back. If people have new visions, no matter if you have like your own single health club or you are running a new tech company, we want to meet you guys. That's a big thing for us. Growing our network all the time and and seeing what's coming. That's just a big thing for us. I don't know if it's the biggest challenge, but it's definitely something on my on my mind all the time to stay connected with with the people that are trying to do something new. Well, I'm one of those guys.

SPEAKER_00

So we'll stay connected.

SPEAKER_01

That's why we got connected problems.

SPEAKER_00

Exactly. Well, Creston, I um thank you so much for for coming on. I I appreciate you taking complicated technological things and trying to make it you know as digestible as possible for for people like me. So yeah, I appreciate it. If people want to get a hold of you or or check out your comp where where do you send people?

SPEAKER_01

Well, to my email. So they can just go for crestin at motusumo.com. And if they can't spell my name, probably somewhere in the in the title for the podcast. But otherwise, also just go to our website. There's an intercom chat open all the time, and I'm sure they're happy to connect you with me, a LinkedIn as well.

SPEAKER_00

Great. Well, Krestin, thank you for coming on, spending some time with me. This is a lot of fun, and I'm excited to see you know where you and your company go next and the impact you're making. I think you have your heart in the right place. So I appreciate the work you're doing, man. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. Yeah, my pleasure. Hey fitness fans, this is Eric Malzone, your host. Thank you for listening. I have a special deal for you. So the app Motos Dumo, if you go to futurofitness.co forward slash deal, you will find the discount code and a place to sign up. So if you are fitness professional, a gym owner who's currently running virtual classes and you're looking for a way to improve the client experience through a social aspect, gamification, and all kinds of cool features at a very, very low cost and a very, very easy way to implement. And I suggest trying it out. I am taking nothing from this. I just want to make this very clear. I just think it's a great offering. Um, I think it's a great answer to some of the challenges we're facing right now as the fitness industry through this pandemic. So go claim at featurefitness.co forward slash deal, and you'll see the discount code and the way to sign up. And it's no rest of two weeks that you can try it out. And after that, get a nice discount as well. So featurefitness.co forward slash deal. Hey, it's your host, Eric Melzone. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Feature of Fitness. If you enjoyed it, please do me a huge favor by going to the website and signing up for our newsletter. The website is featureoffitness.co. Again, that's featureoffitness.co. We've got some big, big announcements coming down the pipe, and we want you to make sure that you are on top of it. Thank you again. Signing off

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