MyZone & The Tingle In the Toothpaste - Emmett Williams

Because every time I record a podcast and I release it, I feel like something else has happened. And it's helpful exactly when it's just recorded right now. Um, you know, we're still kind of in the thick of a pandemic and just trying to reopen. I'll let you tell, you know, what you what your side or what you're seeing from that. But uh really interesting time to be in the fitness industry. Consumer needs are changing. Yeah, it's just it's it's not boring to say that, right?

No, it's not. And by the time this goes live in uh in three or four weeks, Eric, I hope that not too much has changed other than good things, of course.

Yeah, yeah. Me too. I I always like to start just by hearing, you know, your story. I I was you know reading some of your bio and and you know, you you've done a lot of things, man. You you've walked a lot of different paths, but maybe if you could, you know, give us your your entrepreneurial journey and how did you end up and with uh with MyZone? And yeah, give us walk us through some of that.

Yeah, look, I um first of all, I began in the fitness industry with a marketing company called Creative Fitness Marketing, and it was based in America, Australia and New Zealand, and also the the UK. And I was based out of Australia, I became a partner in that company. I think I was I was 26 when I first took on uh equity in that company, grew the company, and seven years later started to diversify. I formed partnerships and built gyms, I purchased gyms that were turnaround opportunities, I then uh imported gym equipment into Australia, Star Trek, Hoist, and Woodway into Australia for a short amount of time. And so I guess coming into my zone in 2010-2011, I had both the operator experience out in Australia, I had the sales and marketing experience through creative fitness marketing, I had the equipment experience through the example I just gave you, and it gave me that broad understanding of the drivers in the fitness industry. Those businesses brought me to America probably four or five times a year. So I had a network over here, I was at many of the shows, I was presenting at the shows, I was an eager student around the industry. Um, and it was 2000, it was late 2010 that my business partner Dave Wright, who was uh based out of, he's an Australian also, but based out of the the UK, he uh he turned around and said, you know what, I've been looking at these products in the industry, these heart rate products, and they feel good. What you do is you put a belt on, a heart rate belt, and then there's this big TV inside the gym, and it gives you feedback as to how you're progressing and how much effort you're putting into to exercise. And I don't know, it just feels really good. I think it adds to the experience. And so that got the conversation rolling, and one thing led to another, and we realized that what was already created out there, and let's face it, heart rate has been around for over 30 years. You know, the uh the Scandinavians first developed it to help them with um endurance training to optimize their aerobic capacity and the anaerobic threshold and to perform on race day, you know, that's where the technology came from. But we looked at the technology, spoke to some operators, realized there was a different way of applying this technology. We went on a dog and pony show in America and started to get uh garner feedback from leaders in the industry and said, Hey, what do you think if we did this with a heart rate belt and we had a TV up on the wall, and then we had this website that you log into to have a look at your metrics, what do you think about that? And most of the the feedback came back around uh Garmin and Polar, who had been doing it for years. But when we adjusted the story and said, Yeah, but it's not really about uh the endurance athlete, this is more about the regular gym member. That's when the pennies started to drop. And and Eric, it it's worth mentioning that back in 2011, Fitbit was a baby company. Fitbit had only done something like eight million dollars worth of revenue in 2011. It was just emerging. So this whole quantified self thing was still a year or two off. And so it's not like we we looked at the technology and said, oh, wearable technology is about to take off, let's jump on it. We didn't do that, we came about it from an authentic um perspective inside the industry, realizing that you know what, that the biggest problem in this industry is that members join up in January, their head and their heart are aligned, they think it's a great idea, they're passionate, they do it, but by Valentine's Day, or certainly by um St. Patrick's Day, the head and the heart are no longer aligned. The head still knows that it's a good idea to do exercise, but the heart is finding it hard to find the passion to get out of bed at six o'clock in the morning and execute on the workout, and and that leads to disengagement, which leads to attrition, which leads to a loss in revenue. We knew that was the biggest problem. And so what we we felt was that this tracking technology, by adding to the experience and giving you a sense of progress, a sense of achievement, a sense of community, a sense of win, by doing that in the short term, that would help drive habits and behaviors, and that would help drive engagement, and that would help drive drive retention. And so that's really you know where we came at it from. And just to land the plane on this one, Eric, because we understood selling gym memberships, because we had a company doing that, because we understood the gym floor experience, because we were importing and distributing equipment, and because we understood the four-wall economics of a gym, because we had six or seven seven of them in Australia, and my business partner Dave Wright had six or seven in the UK. Because we we got it, we were in a position to apply it better than this new technology coming to town, which was Fitbit, and we really sort of grew at the uh at the same time, albeit they were in the mass market and we were in the focus niche market of the fitness industry.

Wow, what a story. You know, I I'm always curious too, and maybe you can give me some insights on this. I feel like Australia has a very special relationship with the fitness industry. A lot of innovation, a lot of leaders, just a lot of brands seem to come out of Australia. Is that is that am I off or on with that?

It's it's funny. I was uh I was running uh on the trails last night and I stopped. Believe it or not, there was a rattlesnake in front of me, and I stopped to get some video for the kids, and a runner came up behind me, and I got talking to the runner, and we ended up running the second half of the trail together. And he said he was from outside the industry, but he is a landlord of a gold gym, right? So we got talking about the fitness industry and uh and whatnot from his perspective, and he said the exact same thing, and I surprised him when I told him that America and Australia, from a per capita perspective, go head to head when it comes to obesity, and he couldn't believe it. And I said, Look, everyone, well, not everyone, but but in America there is a perception that that Australia does lead the way in terms of fitness and an outdoor lifestyle, but just keep in mind we have our our bad stories as well. But yeah, so to come back to the industry, I think because of where Australia is located, it's a long way from the Northern Hemisphere, both Europe and North America. That breeds a culture of curiosity. So you'll notice that Australians per capita do a lot of travel. You'll always see Australians when you're traveling the world. Australians will attend the conferences in America and Europe, and and that curiosity comes from uh almost FOMO of hang on, we're we're a long way away down here. We don't want to miss out on the trends, on on what is happening, and we pride ourselves on on keeping up. And in in some ways, you could argue that Australians then oversteer. And and I agree with you, when we launched My Zone, we thought America would be the first market to adopt a technology like ours, and it was, it was quicker than Europe for sure. Probably that felt five years ahead of Europe back in 2011, but Australia was tracking at the same pace. So that is, yeah, that's an interesting insight that you picked up on. The the Australian market tracks very closely to the US market when it comes to technology and fitness.

Yeah, yeah, it's it really is interesting. It's hard, it's hard not to notice, really. Let's talk a little bit about my zone. I'm curious to really dive into the actual product now. Is this um it's a combination of both hardware and software, is that right?

Yeah, yeah. So the way we look at it is like an orchestra of activity. And that orchestra is working together in concept to deliver on a promise. And so we're using a mix of hardware, being a heart rate belt, being a computer uh platform installed at the club, but we're also working with software being the in-club display and also the smartphone app and also the administrator portal on the back end to deliver on a promise, which is to make members feel good about exercise. We know that if we can make a member feel good, then they'll be far more likely to do it again. The analogy, one of my favorite uh little anecdotes from The Power of Habit, for those who have read it, will remember that Colgate, they have put some citric acid in their toothpaste to give the brusher a tingling feeling after the behavior of brushing the teeth. Now, that tingling feeling does not, it's not required to clean the teeth at all. It's required to make the customer feel good for running that behavior. Um, when you get a tingle, a little bit of dopamine is released in the brain. That is what makes you feel good, and then your brain associates brushing your teeth with feeling good. So the next time you get triggered, which might be at the end of the night turning the lights off, that is your trigger to brush your teeth again. Because it felt good the prior time and the time before that, and the time before that, you now have an urge to go and do it again. A little bit of dopamine is released in your brain, you get this urge and you want to do it again. And that is how all good habits and bad habits are formed. It's about the size of the reward, and the bigger the reward, the stronger the urge to do it again. That's how we become addicted to chocolate and alcohol and smoking, but it's also how we form good habits like brushing our teeth, but also like exercising. If we can put some tingle in the toothpaste, if we can give you a sense of satisfaction and achievement immediately after the behavior of exercise, then you are far more likely to want to do it again on Wednesday night and come back to the gym and repeat. And so that's what the orchestra of activity is designed to do. It's designed to give you feedback in real time so that when you're on the heavy ropes and your heart rate is moving from the green zone to the yellow zone up into the red zone, it feels like the crowd is going wild and you're a running back and you're you're running running across the lines. That's the feeling that you get, that sense of achievement and progress. The the post-workout email, um, a little bit like an Uber or a Lyft post-ride email, uh, receiving that is a sense of win. Wow, look at me. I just burned 800 calories. I earn 135 MEPS, which is our point system. This is what my status ranking is. It just feels good to get that email, to see your name move up a leaderboard, uh, to progress with the status ranking, to get someone to give you a like or a comment, post the workout. I spoke before about seeing a rattlesnake last night on the trails, and I used that photo on the My Zone app and attached it to my feed and said, Oh, something like this is this was my running partner today, and uh my my feed blew up because as people were scanning through the workouts, liking workouts, there was this big rattlesnake, and and I've I've had many, many, many comments about that. And and that that helps create community. It means that I know that other people are watching me, and we all do more when other people are watching, and that is the essence of my zone to create that reward, that tingle in the toothpaste, so that people like me have the urge to do it again and we sustain our behavior. And from an economic perspective, that speaks to lifetime value, retention, net promoter score, those good things.

Oh, that's great, man. Great, great description of what you do, very articulate. And my first interaction with my zone wasn't even an interaction, but I was at a health club in uh Big Fork, Montana, and I was taking a spinning class. And um, I think my wife and I were the only people in the class under the age of 60, for sure. And they were thrilled, like they're you know, really kind of adapting the technology was new to them, and they were just you know really excited about it, just added this this extra element of fun, of you know, just more engagement in the process. And you know, I'm I'm curious. So cycling has always been the kind of the king of group, right? Exercise, I think. Um, has been for a very long time indoor cycling. What what are you seeing now? Is there any like functional fitness, or how are you guys applying this to different models, or do you see big opportunities in other models besides the spinning and the cycling?

Yeah, okay. So really, really good question. What I'll say is this that heart rate has been attached to indoor cycling for a long time because cycling is an endurance sport, and even outdoors, when you are riding, cyclists will use heart rate. Then you've got uh Orange Theory, right? And they have their own platform, but they're they've got a different point system. They are all about the orange zone. So orange theory of saying, hey, look, if you do high-intensity exercise and you get within a certain range of heart rate, we will give you points for that. And that's what they're rewarding. But we differentiate from both those scenarios. We will say, look, building your anaerobic uh uh threshold and your aerobic base, that is too confusing. I would bore you within 30 seconds if I if I went into the science of that. When I say bore you, I mean bore the general membership population. Sure. Then we look at Orange Theory and think, look, what they've done is is absolutely fantastic, but it's only rewarding high-intensity interval training. And so what we did was we looked at the heart rate science on one side, then we looked at what Fitbit and others were doing with a simple point system on the other side. And remember that Fitbit were all about counting steps, right? And we had people in the industry say this Fitbit thing will take off. And we said, okay, tell us why you think it'll take off. Well, everyone seems to be getting it. Okay, so do you think counting steps is associated with going to the gym? Well, it's a proxy for the exercise that you're doing. Okay, so how many steps do you get when you do 20 push-ups in a row, which is really hard to do? Well, you get nothing because the Fitbit doesn't move around, and yet you have done 20 push-ups. It's like, right, so what happens if you do a vertical jump up onto a plyo box that takes a fair bit of effort? You get one step for that. And the industry soon realized that counting steps was not correlated with dedicated exercise that we sell in the fitness industry, and it wasn't a proxy for it. So we sat there in the middle and said, we will build a point system that is perfect for the gym industry, and we will not bore people with aerobic and anaerobic science. And so we created a point system essentially where we said, in the gray zone, the 50s, you will get one point per minute, the blue zone, the 60s, you will get two, the green zone, the 70s, three points per minute, the yellow zone, the 80s, four points per minute, and the red zone, the 90s, also four points per minute. And what we essentially did was we created this golf handicap. And let's say that you're a super athlete, Eric, an ultra marathon runner, and I'm a beginner, and I have it, let's just say I haven't been to the gym in 10 years, and our coach in boot camp says to us, Okay, guys, high knees, I want you to get into the yellow zone. You would have to do high knees at three times the rate that I would have to do high knees in order to get into the yellow zone. And so what we're doing is we're democratizing exercise. We're saying, look, we don't care who the fittest person in the room is, we care what effort you're putting in relative to your own fitness level, and that's how you earn points. And so now all of a sudden it it leveled the playing field, and once that democratization was done, then the challenge was to socialize it through the smartphone app and the uh the big screen inside the club. And and essentially, we're now rewarding any form or any mode of exercise. If you go for a bike ride on a Sunday with the kids and you're in the blue zone, and that's okay, you're getting two points per minute. At Orange Theory, you don't get any points for that because you're down in the blue zone. But is it exercise? Absolutely, it is. It is uh dedicated exercise. If you're in a boot camp class and the instructor says, Hi knees, get up into the yellow zone, great, you're getting four points per minute. But then when you go down into the plank position, it may be that the uh instructor is working with our MZ instruct feature, which is a scenario where you can plug in videos to help instruct the class as to what that exercise is and to demonstrate it. And it may be that I look up at the screen, there is a person doing a plank at station six, I move into the plank position, I look up, and yes, that's right, that's what I need to do. I I keep my hips down and I and I hold my elbows as such, got it, and then there's a little square there that prescribes to me what zone I should be in at the end of this exercise. And because it's a plank, and because my body is horizontal, and because my heart does not have to work against gravity like it does when I'm standing up, my heart rate will be lower. And so it may be that the plank is the blue zone or the green, green zone, one of the cooler colours. But then when I move on to burpees, for example, it may be that it's the red zone, right? So at the end of this one, I know that if I'm doing burpees at the right pace, I will finish in the red zone, and so it becomes prescriptive. Answer your question, it really doesn't matter what exercise you're doing. You can be riding a bike with the kids, you can be shoveling snow out on the driveway, you can be hiking, you can be inside the club doing boot camp, you can be doing um traditional three sets of eight on the weight with pinloaded or free weights, your heart is still beating, and not to digress, but that's something that people don't appreciate. How much cardio you get done when you do three sets of eight. You know, your heart rate is up in the green zones most of the time. And when you finish a set, you finish in the yellow zone. It's good cardio. People just don't think of it as cardio.

Yeah, it's interesting. The actual wearable device is a chest strap, or are you guys doing wrist technology? What does it look like?

It it is a chest strap, uh, and we've got two different forms of chest strap. We we are working on innovations at the moment, but I must keep my lips sealed. That's all I'll say there. But our chest strap is the MZ3, which is our hero chest strap, has a number of pieces of technology in it. It has an analogue coil in it. Why? Seems old-fashioned, but 95% of the cardio pieces on a gym floor will pick up an analog signal. So that's why we put that in there. It's got an ant plus chip in it to speak to high-end bike computers and watches. It's got a memory chip in it. So if you're doing a tough mudder and you don't have your phone with you because you're crawling through water, don't worry about it. There's a memory chip in that belt, and it will memorize everything and then will upload to the cloud as soon as you get back to the car and open up the My Zone app. It's it's got a rechargeable uh battery and a Also got Bluetooth in it so it speaks to the phone as well. So that's the MZ3. The MZ1 has a few less features in it to bring the price point down.

Nice. So when a consumer buys it, right? Is it part of their gym membership? Can someone buy it independently of a membership at a gym? Like what is that? What does that consumer model look like?

Yeah, okay. So our business model has been very much about going to market with the gym operator. That's primarily our model. That said, do we sell devices on Amazon? Yes, we do. Um, they are $149 for the MZ3. If you go to Amazon right now, it'll be $149. And you know what we sell to the operator for in the US at least is $60 wholesale. And so by being on Amazon and also being on our own website, we're creating that price anchor so that your members know exactly what this device is valued at. But you, the operator, you're buying it at $60 and you are uh then adding some margin to it or baking it into paid programming. So it's a value add, and the the perception is that it's worth a lot more than what you paid for it. Now, do we sell devices at $149? Absolutely, every day of the week. It's just that we're opportunistic with it. We haven't yet gone direct to consumer, even though we're uh we're online. Our our focus is working with the gym community. Awesome.

Out of curiosity too, I mean, are you guys looking at any other metrics, heart rate variability or yeah, I mean, there's a there's a lot of different metrics that people are starting to track now, right? Are you guys looking into anything else right now?

Yeah, look, there there are. And heart rate variability is an interesting one because what it does is it helps create a readiness score. And I think we think that a readiness score works well, particularly if you're an athlete. So you would put your device on in the morning, you would either get a red light, a yellow light, or a green light. If it was a green light, you could go to the gym and smash it. If it was a red light, basically your HRV number would be telling you to rest, that you're you're stressed out and you need to recover in order to perform to your to your optimum. Um so there is a use case for it. However, in the fitness industry, if we started giving red lights, green lights, and yellow lights, and let's say your member was about to uh turn up to Wednesday night, six o'clock boot camp, and they pay for a premium membership for this access to large group or small group training, and the technology says red light, don't do boot camp, go and do steady state cardio, that could be quite conflicting. So it's it's more, you know, commercially speaking, it it can be a bit of a challenge. We have looked at it. We uh, for those reasons and some others, we're staying back from it at the moment. But what we are doing is, and we've we've just applied for a patent on this, and this is interesting. We'll be we'll be launching it in uh the early fall, and that is using heart rate recovery to see how far your heart rate recovers in a two-minute period after doing a set of like a hardened set of cardio. And what I mean by that is you stick to a protocol. So you're in the green zone for the blue zone for two minutes, the green zone for two minutes, the yellow zone for two minutes, and then we elevate you up between 84 and 86% of your maximum heart rate, and then we stop you, and then we we watch your heart rate recover and we see how far you recover, the further you recover, the stronger your cardiovascular system. And the New England uh Journal of Medicine have turned around and said that heart rate recovery is predictive of mortality. All right, so of how long you are going to live, given that heart disease is such a uh you know, is the number one killer. So, what we've done is we've worked with the university to predict your fitness age based on your heart rate recovery. So that's not ready yet. You can currently do a fitness test with us, and we will give you a score on your heart rate recovery. Um, but we will soon be able to give you a fitness age based on that metric, and it will be clinically proven to be to be accurate.

Very cool, man. I like that a lot. So I'm just a huge fan of fitness technology, as you can tell. One of the I think uh you and I alluded to it before recording is you know, as gym operators and fitness professionals are moving into this, whatever, whatever the new normal is going to be, I think one thing we can agree on is that some sort of hybrid model, right? There's gonna be a certain percentage of people who just don't want to go to the gym for a long time, if not ever again. Maybe they have home equipment now. The landscape is changing quickly. And one of the things, two of the things that I love that you focus on as a company, and obviously with your leadership is that gamification, community building, right? How is your tech, your company, helping build that gamification and community in this new remote hybrid world that we're in?

Yeah. Yeah, good good question. I think it all begins with strategy and the operator strategy. What you don't want to do is you don't want to buy a system like my zone and check the box that you know what, I'm now gamifying my membership, and I know that's a good thing because I go to trade shows and conventions, and I've now done it. What we advise our operators to do, and we're reaching out to them at the moment to do what we call half-year huddles. So in the middle of the year, we we bring them in, we review the first half of the year, and we preview the the second half of the year. This year, most interesting. But but either way, we ask them what their strategy is. And a lot of the time, operators can't answer that question, and that's okay. But an exercise we share with them is one that I adopted from Patrick Lencioni. The Advantage is the book that he he referenced this in. And it's known as strategic enters, and it's a very simple exercise. You you get yourself a whiteboard and you list everything that you deliberately do, every activity you deliberately decide to do, and every activity you deliberately decide not to do, and you get it on a whiteboard, you then get three colored markers, and you start drawing a line with the green marker through activities that appear to be in the same family as either. The blue one, the red, and you should have about two or three clusters of activities that tend to belong together. So in the case of a high volume, low price gym, like a planet fitness type scenario, it might be that they connect words like low price point, no contract, lots of parking, no fluffy towels, right? Limited amenities, these type of things. And if you drew a line through all of that, you would say, yep, that is high volume, low price, they are all consistent with each other. It may be that a studio turns around and they have candlelight inside the studio. It might be that they have a certain lexicon or verbiage that the instructors use. It may be that they have a rule that says no cell phones inside. And these activities work together to say one thing, which is be present, right? And when you realize that you've got two or three anchors, you label it, and then you ask yourself the question when you're at a convention or a trade show. If I purchase this product here, does it fit into one of my strategic anchors? Because if it does, it will be a strategic fit. And if it doesn't, it will be a white elephant and we will buy it, it will sit there, it won't find a home, it will no longer get time and resource and attention, and it will be a waste of money. So, how does that relate to my zone? If you are a club and one of your anchors is about community, or if one of your anchors is about getting fitness results, or if it's about exercise routine, if you are a club that uh that has a set of activities around exercise routine, then all of a sudden my zone is a strategic fit, you know, because the um the platform does create community a little bit like Instagram or Facebook. You connect with other members, you like each other's workouts, you attach the photo, like I explained before, and you are meeting the member where they are, yeah, which is on their smartphone, right? And you are now uh fusing that experience of digital with with physical. If it's about getting results, then all of a sudden, routine and doing the workload and sticking to the routine and and and sustaining it, that's all important. Then guess what? My zone fits that as well because it's giving you a goal, you're attaining a goal, it's giving you status ranking, so on and so forth. And so that that is how MyZone would would fit in. And moving out of COVID for the clubs that have a strategy of saying, you know what, we know that there could be a second wave of COVID coming through, and there could be another lockdown potentially. Even if there's not a second wave, we know that consumers are now aware of working out at home. They'd never done it before, but now they're used to it and they've realized that they can do it. So if that member comes to my gym twice a week or three times a week, they're probably topping up their exercise bucket with uh with one or two workouts at home. And rather than them going off and paying Chris Hemsworth $19.95 on the app that he has got, in addition to their gym membership, why don't we position as the authority in the members' life? Let's not get precious about them coming down to our brick and mortar business. It's okay for them to work out at home. And what we will do is we will position as the authority, we will program for them, we will drive their routine for them with triggers and rewards, we will create community, we will create the vision and the accountability. And if they work out at the gym, that's great. If they work out at home, that's great, but let's fuse it together and be the solution for them at a macro level.

That's great, man. Is that what you guys are formulating with MZ Remote? Is that the is that the focus with that that new product?

Yeah. Yeah, that's that's exactly right, Eric. So the MZ Remote is essentially where we are taking the in-club experience of the colorful tiles up on the in-club display. We're taking that experience, we're marrying it with Zoom video so that the members at home experience is that they they log into a class through the MyZone app, and on one side of their screen, their classmates and their heart rates in terms of heart rate, calories, MEPs, so on and so forth. On the other side of the screen is the instructor, they flick it up to the TV through Apple TV or Chromecast or or what have you. And even though they're not down at the gym, they're now having a similar experience to what they expect when they go to the gym. And that adds value to what is now a commodity. On demand, I mean you can go to YouTube and get a fitness class pretty pretty quickly, and it doesn't cost a lot of money to do that. Even the uh the live broadcasts, Jane Fonda style, are free when you go online. So, how do the operators differentiate? Well, what they do is they create the community so that you know that your classmates are up on the screen with you, and they create accountability from a coach so that when I'm at home and you ask me to do high knees, no longer is it just a zoom camera with 40 people and having to flick between screens to see who's doing high knees and who is not. Now our heart rates are up on the screen, and it's really clear if I'm putting in the effort required to get the results that I'm looking for. And if I'm not, if I'm in the blue zone or the green zone and you have called for the yellow zone, and there are 40 of us at home in our lounge rooms all doing high knees, you know who to pat on the back, you know who to give some extra encouragement to, and that has value attached to it because the member, they realize that hey, it's not all just about the programming, it's about the execution of the programming. And I do need a coach to push me along and to get me to put in that effort that's required to get the result, and I'm prepared to pay for that. And you know what? Having a community around the side, that's also encouraging because I I do more when other people are watching. So that community adds value as well. And now all of a sudden, you're differentiated from the free commodity content that is on YouTube or Vimeo.

Yeah, that's great, man. And I I think that's what you know, gym operators and fitness professionals or are looking for is that thin but really important layer of value on top of that remote experience. And that's uh, you know, that's where the technology comes into play. As you guys are moving forward, you know, once again, June 23rd, 2020. What's one of the biggest challenges that you guys are facing as an organization right now?

Yeah, well, look, we uh we came into the year with this growth plan. And the growth plan we use an AMPSOF matrix where you you look at your existing products in your existing markets, and then you look at your new products into existing markets, and then it's existing products into new markets, and new products into new markets. So it's this matrix, and we we list out what we're doing in in each quadrant to find growth. And we had a plan, just like everyone did, and that has been turned on its head. So our challenge going into the second half of the year is focusing on our existing customers and making sure that we help them get rebooted and get their strategies realigned and get them off to the races again because they're our core. And that means that we have to hold back on some of our growth because we can only do so many things at once. But in terms of what I can talk about at the moment, from a product growth perspective, yes, we had uh we had MZ Remote that we just spoke of. Yes, we've got that patented fitness test coming uh in the fall, so that's exciting. We have another feature that I, or another product that I can't talk about, but uh that will be exciting in the fall. And then from a geographic and market expansion perspective, we had just launched in Germany before all of this happened. So we'll be uh looking forward to picking up some speed in Germany, same thing in Singapore, and and then we're gonna stop there. We had some other areas of the world earmarked for 2020, and we've cut the budget on that and said, you know what, let's just do what we can do well, and uh and that will still provide plenty of growth for us.

Awesome. Yeah, and I've been seeing a lot of really smart collaborations too. Is there any types of strategic partnerships or collaborations that you guys are looking for right now?

Yeah, a lot in the background that I uh I I better I'd better stay quiet on. What I what I will say, what I will say is that we we play friendly, right? We we do. Our API goes out to many different vendors and operators out there. We're quite happy to share our data and we're very interoperable and versatile. I mean, at the you know, but people think we compete with the Apple Watch. Guess what? We've developed an app for the Apple Watch, and Apple have even said to us, the head of fitness at Apple, you know, they've turned around and said, look, if we read the My Zone Heart rate belt, we will take that reading over the reading of the Apple Watch because you guys are located in a better position on the body and it's a more accurate reading. Um, so we don't compete with the Apple Watch. It it we really do complement it. I have an Apple Watch, and when I go jogging or go do boot camp or yes, I I turn on the Apple Watch, but I've always got my MySone belt on because that's measuring what matters when it comes to exercise. We speak with Garmin and Polar, so it's not this lockdown approach at all. We've very much got an open uh an open uh uh uh frame of mind when it when it comes to other technologies.

Right on, ma'am. Well, I I have just a couple more questions, and I I know this question is cliched at times, but you've mentioned some really good books in this interview. Is there anything that you are reading right now that you would recommend to the audience?

Oh, good one. Okay, so I am uh have I'm just looking at it. I've let me take I've got the massage machine on top of it. So I'm I'm reading this one, may or may not appeal to the audience, but this one is Steve Schwartzman, What It Takes, Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence. And this guy is the founder of Blackstone, which is one of the most successful private equity firms in the world. But really, it's a uh a factory of entrepreneurialism and just fascinating reading in that book at the moment. It was my birthday the other day. My wife, my next book that's that's lined up is uh Rebel Ideas by Matthew Sayad, the power of diverse thinking. She knows that I uh I'm a big fan of understanding ideation and innovation. And so this is a good fit. I I look forward to reading it. I think that innovation has to come down to a group of people who are primed, ready to be creative with their thinking, uh, and not critical, but just creative to begin with, then moving to critical and then using testing to uh to determine what was a good idea and what was not a bad idea. I think that growth hacking, as it's called, that growth hacking, which is another book by Sean Ellis, if I recall correctly, that's a great book that's relevant to this. Growth hacking is is what the the guys in Silicon Valley do when they develop new features, new products to to find truth. And that's what you're trying to do, find truth with a product. Um, I think that's one of the um most underrated activities that any entrepreneur can can take uh take part in. So yeah, maybe look that one up. Growth hacking, Sean Ellis, you'll you'll find it on YouTube for a bit of a teaser and you know, real value to any entrepreneur.

Awesome. I've been furiously taking notes here. That's great. Emmett, thank you so much for coming on. This has been really informative, really cool. I love what you guys are up to. I think you're positioned really well to help the industry move forward. So that's really exciting. If people want to get a hold of you or if they want to follow what you're up to, is there any places that you send people?

Yeah, look, our website is myzone.org. Our social handles is my zone moves, and then my email address is it's just my initials. It's aw for emmettwilliams at myzone.org. Right on.

Yeah, man. This has been great. I I really appreciate your time and it's valuable and and uh I want to respect your time as well to get together by the top of the hour. But yeah, once again, it's gonna be a good thing.