What is FitRadio? Rusty Greene
CLICK FOR AUDIO OF PODCAST
Guest: Rusty Greene
Release Date: 8/21/2023
Welcome to Trulyfit the online fitness marketplace connecting pros and clients through unique fitness business software.
Steve Washuta
Do you struggle to find great workout music for yourself or class that you’re teaching? Have you ever dreamed of continually having updated playlists designed for you? On today’s episode, we discuss an app that does just this and more.
Steve Washuta
Welcome to Trulyfit. Welcome to the Trulyfit podcast where we interview experts in fitness and health to expand our wisdom and wealth. I’m your host, Steve Washuta, co-founder of Trulyfit and author of the book Fitness Business 101.
On today’s episode, I interview Rusty Greene. He is the CEO and founder of fit radio, that’s going to be the lion’s share of our conversation today.
Steve Washuta
What fit radio is how it could help you and your business. If you’re somebody who works at a gym, if you own a gym, if you’re a group, fitness instructor, or a personal trainer, or if you’re somebody who’s just in the general population, and you’re looking to have great workout music designed on your behalf.
Steve Washuta
You can search through genre, you can search to bpm, there’s so many options. In addition to just talking about, let’s say the utility of this, I always like to talk about how people got started, why they they chose this individual app and this project, did they see a hole in the market?
Steve Washuta
What struggles did they have? It is a really great story hearing rusty and all he went through to develop this and sort of push through with entrepreneurs. Like myself, I know how difficult it is to stay the course. I believe in yourself and never quit and rusty has a great story.
Steve Washuta
So this month, as a reminder, for anybody who has listened to the previous episodes, we’re going to do almost all app based stuff. We had the no way app we have coming up we shape and the following week, and today we have fit radio. With no further ado, here’s rusty green.
Steve Washuta
And I thank you so much for joining the Trulyfit podcast. Why don’t you give my listeners and audience a little background on who you are and what it is that you do day to day in the health and fitness industry?
Rusty Greene
Sure, yeah. Thanks for having me. I’m rusty green. I’m the founder and CEO fit radio. We are a music service that specializes in fitness content, our long fitness mixes, running content all the way from class specific content.
Rusty Greene
We power the music for Orangetheory burn boot camp F 45 and 1000s of other sort of boutique fitness chains in North America. We’re also available in Australia and UK and Canada.
Steve Washuta
Wow. So what gave you the impetus behind creating fit radio? Were you in the fitness industry prior to that and saw like a hole in the market? Were you in the music industry and thought it would be advantageous? What like what started this? This brainstorming to creation?
Rusty Greene
Yeah, yeah, no, it’s good story. Um, so yeah, going back to my childhood, I think one of my first jobs was working in fitness, I worked the front desk at Gold’s Gym. I think I’ve told this story before, but you know, I would burn CDs back in the Limewire days for people who were coming in the gym.
Rusty Greene
You know, I’ve worked as a personal trainer, and I was always passionate about fitness, went to school, got a degree in exercise physiology, with a plan to go to physical therapy school, was going to school at Georgia State and Atlanta at the time, and I was working security at a nightclub a large nightclub in Atlanta.
Rusty Greene
And there was a point that I graduated where I kind of had a choice to go to physical therapy school, or they gave me an opportunity to be the general manager of this large nightclub in Atlanta, 23 years old. So obviously went that direction, we were booking DJs.
Rusty Greene
You know, we were booking all kinds of talent from, you know, hip hop to rock, to electronic music, you know, 2000 3000 person events, you know, two to three nights a week. So doing that for years, I mean, I’ve always kind of had an entrepreneurial spirit.
Rusty Greene
But people were asking me like, hey, how do we get the music that you’re playing in the clubs so we can work out to it? And I think, you know, I would find myself at the time, you know, and work out in the mornings, and I’m sitting there trying to make a playlist on iTunes or find something and, you know, I would back in that day, like, I would spend more time making the playlist that I would working out because the music for me, was that important.
Rusty Greene
And I’m like, This is so inefficient, like, why can’t we just take these these DJ sets and put them up so people can access them? So, you know, we went to some attorneys in Atlanta, and they were like, You can’t do this. Like, you know, Spotify wasn’t live in the US at the time, it was very early in the music streaming days.
Rusty Greene
So, you know, there was a lot of attorneys that like, Hey, you, you might be able to do it this way. And the labels will never license it. It was just very new. So we just kind of did it anyway, to see what would happen. So we started super Bootstrap. We were like making these playlists in the basement of the club. And we were putting them up on this like website that we threw up in a couple of weeks.
Rusty Greene
And this was right around the time, too, that the App Store came out, right. So the App Store comes out and like we’re like, hey, let’s turn this thing into an app. So we built it into an app. And the app didn’t work half the time like finding app developers back In that day when the app store like is new to launch, like, there were people that say they could do it. But there’s a lot of folks that just didn’t have the expertise.
Rusty Greene
They said they did. So we had an app. People, I think the reviews were like, hey, when this thing works, it’s awesome. You know, progressively, the app got better over the years. And, you know, we had a lot of organic traffic. I mean, I think there was a time where you’re getting probably like 15 to 1700 downloads or installs a day.
Rusty Greene
And got big. And, you know, I think, in 2018 19, we got really big, big enough to where we got sued by all of the major music labels, you know, who were concerned about our functionality and felt like we were outside the DMCA, which is a, you know, a US copyright statute kind of governs the way that music services work.
Rusty Greene
That was probably the scariest moment of my life, man. I mean, you know, you’re, you know, early 30s, I’m staring at, you know, and I haven’t made a ton of money at this time, right? Like, it’s not like, we launched this thing, like the dudes at Limewire. And they were making millions, and they were disrupting music. You know, I honestly, there’s a lot of times that we thought we’re gonna lose everything.
Rusty Greene
My wife was pregnant at the time, it was kind of a freakout moment. But I think, you know, in meeting all the labels, what they realized is we were trying to do the right thing, that there just wasn’t a way to carve out fit radio. And thank God, you know, we had a ton of settlement payments, we had a lot of stuff that, you know, that we had to do, we had to change, we found a way to make it work.
Rusty Greene
We went through, you know, a tough period of of few years, where we had to kind of like revamp the service and make it work within the confines of our label agreements. And, you know, looking back, I’m like, I don’t even really know how it worked. But we made it through the other side. And we’re here.
Steve Washuta
It’s a really cool story. And I love how you had both backgrounds, right? So you were involved in fitness, you were a personal trainer, at some point, you worked in gyms. So you had that background.
Steve Washuta
But then you also were in the nightclubs here in the music, people coming up to you asking about the music, and you sort of fused both of those things together to make fit radio. Now tell me a little bit about the experience. So today, I go on, I download the app, I sign up, what is the next step? How exactly does the user experience work?
Rusty Greene
Yeah, you can sign up as an individual or as a gym. So we have two levels of service. So the gym content is a little bit more robust and a little bit different than individual content. But as part of the onboarding process, you’ll you know, tell us your genre preferences, tell us what style of workouts that you like to do, and what style of music that you like, right.
Rusty Greene
And then from there, we deliver sort of a semi customized experience, you’ll have access to the app. You know, you can search playlists, by genre by BPM, if you want to run a 10 minute mile, you know, you can find, you know, hundreds of playlists and 150 beats per minute to keep you on pace during that run.
Rusty Greene
You know, we’ve got everything from yoga to boxing style music. A little bit everything. So, you know, I think in that sense, we don’t really compete with Spotify, and that we have this sort of very specific focus and fitness music. So most of our individual folks are our fitness enthusiast who are working out multiple days per week and just looking for that fresh playlist experience.
Steve Washuta
So give me an experience of how a gym would use it. And maybe I’ll just give you what I think in my head, and you can tell me where I’m wrong. So I’m a, maybe a big, I’m a big gym at a country club or something. And I have music that’s playing overhead, and I can pick some playlist out specifically.
Steve Washuta
And then I also have individual classes, I might have spin classes in there, I might have kickboxing classes and things of that nature. And then I can still use your app inside of the classes or I can I can be playing it in multiple locations. You could have one, I guess you would say license ship of your app and use it throughout your whole gym.
Rusty Greene
Yeah, so yeah, I mean, we absolutely do that. And I’ll plug one of our partners, LA Fitness. Their parent company, fitness International, has a new sort of concept called Club studio. And in club studio, it’s a big box gym, but they have like five boutique experiences inside of that gym.
Rusty Greene
So they’ve got like a hit class, they’ve got a spin class, they’ve got boxing. We have stations that can power and be specific to each one of those. For instance, like a kickboxing class, most kickboxing instructors use like 140 beats per minute, so we have a kickboxing station.
Rusty Greene
But CLIP STUDIO also uses us in the background. And of course that background music isn’t as intense it’s not like you walk in a club studio and you listen to to 140 BPM mix or anything like that. So yeah, we have specific background music. And then we have music that’s catered towards each sort of fitness modality.
Steve Washuta
Are you using some sort of like, AI algorithm to choose this music based on genre and popularity? Are you curating this? With a with a person with more personalized touches a combination
Rusty Greene
Yeah, you know, I will say we fall more on the personalized touch. Right? We do a lot of research with our partners, we rely heavily a lot on instructors that we work with. So we work with hundreds of instructors across the country who kind of helped feed our music department and what what’s working in the DJs work with those instructors to create playlists.
Rusty Greene
We do have some learning algorithms inside, I wouldn’t necessarily, I feel like there’s a pretty distinct difference between learning and AI. If you’re not familiar with this, you know that the music industry and AI, they’ve kind of taken a very firm stance on AI as of recently, they’re like, you can’t, you can’t take our content and crawl it with AI, right, because they’re concerned about the deep fakes that are getting created and some of the stuff that’s happening.
Rusty Greene
There’s a lot I think that’s going to come out that allows us to utilize the power of AI with music. But I think the music industry internally is really trying to grasp and understanding like I think Google is working on a partnership with Universal Music, where they can sort of take AI and create renditions of songs, but it’s still very new and the labels trying to figure out like how artists get compensated, what that looks like.
Rusty Greene
So we’ll certainly be a part of that conversation once these like criteria or whatever the labels will allow comes out. And we have engineers that you know, work with AI and experiment with AI. But we’re sort of limited in how we can allow AI to crawl music content at this moment.
Steve Washuta
I remember teaching a TRX suspension training class. And I tried to always curate my own list, but sometimes I just didn’t have the time to. And somebody had messaged me and say, Hey, this radio station on Pandora is really good. It’s called White panda. So I put it on, and the class starts. And like the first song is just like explicit lyrics. And I’m telling you, this was like a 65, and overpopulation and it was bad. Is there a way to turn off explicit lyrics?
Rusty Greene
Oh, yeah. So yeah, we have, that’s a big part of our value proposition. We also power like 2000, elementary schools and middle schools with PE music around the country. So we edit out all the profanity, like if there if there’s a track that you know, doesn’t have a clean version, you know, we’ll edit that out.
Rusty Greene
That’s a huge part of our value add, especially to the gym partners that want that clean music experience. It’s just, and it’s not just, it’s not just explicit, like words, it’s also suggested content, there’s a lot of stuff out, especially in the hip hop genre, that may not have a curse word in it, but it’s certainly suggested that it can be a little bit awkward as an experience to listen to in a group setting.
Rusty Greene
Yeah, that’s great. You do that? I don’t really know. Anyone else. one else who does that maybe like you said, they take the explicit words out. But as far as the content, the suggestive content, I think that’s, that takes another level of somebody going in and really taking their time to do that.
Steve Washuta
It doesn’t seem like anyone else really does that. Can you talk to me from the artists perspective, if I am an artist, and I make music, and I think it’d be great for people who work out in fitness? Can I reach out to fit radio and say, Hey, can you put my stuff on Fit radio? How does that partnership kind of work?
Rusty Greene
You know, we don’t have anything set up, like, you know, like Spotify does, where you, if you’re an artist, you can get your content ingested inside of that platform. We ingest content from the major labels. And as part of that, you know, as part of the royalty payments that we make, we ingest a lot of metadata, like I SRC numbers that are associated, like publishing data that are attached to the track so that we can pay report to those artists properly.
Rusty Greene
It’s something we’ve had a ton of artists reach out to, and we’re exploring, but you know, we’re still kind of a smaller team, we’re certainly not the size of Spotify. So for us, you know, at this at this point in time, like we need that content to come from the major labels.
Steve Washuta
Sure, that makes sense. So you don’t have to name any names. But as far as whoever your competitors are out there, what do you do differently? What do you do better?
Rusty Greene
Yeah, I mean, you know, there, there are a couple of services out there that are unlicensed, that, you know, I mean, you know, that are like apps that were thrown up in foreign countries that, you know, I think the labels do their best to police that stuff.
Rusty Greene
I mean, there’s, there’s certainly Apple tries to police the copycat space, but there’s, there’s some copycats, I think the biggest difference between us and those folks is just the amount of content that we have, right, and the fact that we are licensed. So, you know, when a brand like Orangetheory wants to put something out, they need to understand that their partner is licensed, that they’re going to be in business and that it’s a reputable company.
Rusty Greene
I think, you know, when you look at us versus the traditional services, like Spotify, you know, Spotify itself is not licensed for commercial use, right? So like our services available to be used in fitness for commercial purposes. So that’s, you know, that’s something that’s very important to ensure that you’re using something that’s licensed properly for your use case. You know, we also have you know, another arm of our business that provides public performance licensing on behalf of our gyms.
Rusty Greene
So public performance meeting ASCAP, BMI, CSAC, and GMR. Those are licenses that gyms are required to have, especially if they have fitness classes. So we have a whole division of our company that helps our gym partners process those license, ensure compliance and make that process easy because a lot of gym partners don’t understand their obligations there. And, you know, we we like to make that fair.
Rusty Greene
So we’re we like to ensure that our gym partners are paying the fair rate and what they should be paying, because in many cases, they’re overpaying in some in some, in some instances. So yeah, so we, we offer sort of a fully robust experience specifically for fitness. And then obviously, the amount of content that we’re cranking out, we’ve done a lot of research in this space, with our partners and 95% of people surveyed said that the music is just as important as the instruction.
Rusty Greene
So if you were to say, let’s say you were looking at a Pandora playlist, right, the white pan a playlist that you mentioned, that playlist is essentially going to stay the same, they’re like, they might inject a song. But if you listen to that playlist 10 times, you’re gonna hear about 70 to 80% of the same content with us, if you take that same TRX.
Rusty Greene
And let’s say you wanted to teach it at 130 BPM, or you just want an open format, top 40 minutes, you have hundreds, if not 1000s of hours to choose from. And then in the in the app, you’re able to see like what’s trending what’s working in other studios. So we put that in front of you in a way, as an instructor, you know, it’s going to be clean, you know, it’s going to make sense for your class.
Rusty Greene
And most of our stuff is open format. So it’s pretty friendly across like a wide member demo. And we just make that decision easy. And it stay. You know, we keep the playlists fresh for every single class because we we talked about this all the time. And I think that trainers are great at making playlists. But the reality is, if you’re a gym, you cannot rely on your instructors to make 700 playlists a year, unless you dedicate five to 10 hours a week for just music.
Rusty Greene
And that’s not what happens. What often happens is an instructor, they’re like, Oh, I really liked this playlist, or I’m gonna make this playlist for this class. And I think it’s awesome. And it probably is great. But the problem is, you can’t play that multiple times, right? Like, you need to keep that playlist fresh.
Rusty Greene
And you don’t have a lot of insight into the member demographics and what member music preferences are, you’ll probably have a couple people that go wow, I really loved your playlist today. But the reality of what we’ve seen is the people that don’t like the playlist usually just don’t say much, they just don’t come back, right? Or they’ll shorten their membership. So we, what we do is we look at data from all over the world, right?
Rusty Greene
Because what works at F 45, or Orangetheory in Atlanta is very different than what works at Orangetheory. In Pacific Northwest, right, just different music tastes. So I think that we look at what performs well, we rely on instructor feedback. We worked with our music partners at the major labels. It’s sort of this multifaceted approach to ensure that you have fresh content that’s going to make sense for your class.
Steve Washuta
You mentioned that you partner with certain gyms and other like larger fitness organizations like orange theory, do you currently or have you ever thought of partnering with certifications like people who teach like National Academy sports medicine has a group fitness certification? Right, so all of their instructors are now going on? Looking for music? It would seem to be like a natural partnership there.
Rusty Greene
Yeah, you know, we recently had a couple of calls with with is, was it ISS a? Is it Yes. Or? Yeah, that’s one of the international sports sciences Association. Yeah. So they, and just training their instructors on music and programming. So yeah, early discussions there.
Rusty Greene
I do think it’s extremely valuable, you know, to teach fitness instructors, you know, what music options are out there, the data that we see, and we you know, we share a lot of that data with our partners about what works and what doesn’t work and what we see across, you know, at least our gym partners. And I think we’re certainly open to continuing partnerships like that in the future.
Steve Washuta
Yeah, somebody who’s worked in gyms for a long time, over 30,000 hours, certainly at this point. It’s it’s a Hangout that a lot of instructors have, especially older instructors.
You’re talking about really good fitness instructors who have been in the industry for a long time and might be in their 50s, who don’t have the technological grasp who can’t do what you and I can do and not saying we are doing this.
Steve Washuta
but if anyone was downloading illegal torrents, let’s say for music, a 50 year old can’t do that. They don’t have the grass to do that. So they they’re really stuck. I think it’s not only going to be good for the younger population coming up to have that radio but really giving it to the older instructors who who otherwise don’t know how to work that the technology aspect.
Rusty Greene
Yeah, for sure. And we’re constantly trying to simplify our user experience to make that easy. See? I mean, I think that I think I look recently we power several 100 YMCAs that are using us, I think and, and water aerobics, we have old, like, sort of older genres of music, we, you know, you can go back to 50s and 60s and 70s, inside of fit radio.
Rusty Greene
So I will say we don’t put out as much programming in those genres because that music is not coming out anymore. But we do have a vast amount of content that makes sense for for that demographic.
Steve Washuta
So talk to me a little bit more. I know, in the front end, when you were explaining the app, you told me some of the problems you had. But so technically speaking, or like, from a marketing standpoint, what are some of the other snack foods that you ran into? Or snags and the processes me somebody who’s developing an app? It’s, that’s really interesting to me.
Rusty Greene
Yeah, you know, I think I made I think I made a mistake as an entrepreneur early in my career, I’m just not listening enough, right. And I think that, you know, I had this vision of, you know, we can, you know, we’re never going to be Spotify, right, based on our functionality, but we could have 10s of millions of consumers that use our app, right.
Rusty Greene
The entire time, I had 1000s, of gyms that were using us, and the service was priced at five to seven bucks a month at the time. The gyms had all of these issues, and they were willing to pay more money, but we weren’t really trying to solve their problems in the early days. And it was kind of right in front of my face. Right. So it was, it was, you know, in 2018, kind of taking a step back and going, Wait, who’s using this? And like, How can I just solve their problems?
Rusty Greene
And I think that if I could tell my younger self, something, I think it would be that right, like, you know, when my my fault has always been in, I’m sort of a serial entrepreneur is not, I have to constantly remind myself to focus on what I’m doing and not start other businesses, but you’re either in the nice to have business or in that you’re in the must have, right. And I think when I looked at our business, in the consumer space, we were a nice to have, right? If you if you had the extra income, and you were a fitness enthusiast, hey, this app is great.
Rusty Greene
But in the fitness space, we were a must have, right, we were solving some major problems. We were enhancing member experience all over the country. And I was over here focused on marketing to consumers where we were a nice to have. So I think that was like, that was like, I think the big turning point for us is when we said hey, we’re gonna focus on in studio music, we’re gonna do it better than anybody else. And if you want to take this home or workout to it great.
Steve Washuta
Yeah, that’s a fantastic point. I think the economics term is like you don’t create a market, you find out what the market needs, and you adjust accordingly. And a lot of people don’t do that. Because they follow their vision and their dream instead of taking a step back and saying, Okay, now that I’ve followed my dream, let’s say halfway, now I need to step back, look at what’s going on and see what is going to be the easier path to success also.
Steve Washuta
And it seems like, that’s exactly what you did. I want to go back to something you were talking about with tempo. 80% of my listeners understand that they understand because they’re in the fitness space, but 20% of people listen to this podcast or just general population. Can you explain a little bit more about tempos? And BPM is concerning music.
Rusty Greene
Yeah, so like we talked about, we talked beats per minute, right? So like, that’s how many beats are gonna measure a music, whether it’s four bars or eight bars? So, you know, like, you know, when we look at most instructors, and most fitness classes, which kind of have a beef with us, 130, right. And I don’t know who created this whole 130 thing.
Rusty Greene
And we have a ton of 130 content. But we also have spoken to a lot of brands about trying to branch out and move higher and BPMs. Specifically, like Orangetheory and F 45. And we can talk about that more. But yeah, I mean beats per minute. I mean, just like your heart, if your heart beats 75 beats per minute, it’s how many beats per minute, you would expect the music on the either, you know, on the beat in the measure. Yeah, just basically how many measured beats that you’re going to have in a given minute.
Steve Washuta
And you believe that maybe it’s too low and the songs and the music you’re using now also, can you maybe elaborate on? Am I taking a song and changing how fast that song is going that pace? Or am I finding songs that already have that bpm?
Rusty Greene
Yeah, so you know, there are a couple of I think there’s maybe a couple of I don’t know that names, a couple of knockoff apps where you can adjust the music tempo like that. We don’t do we don’t allow the user to do that. But what we do allow you to do is you could play an entire hour of 130 BPM, I mean, we have hundreds if not 1000s of hours of content, all the way from 115 all the way up to 180 beats per minute.
Rusty Greene
We are allowed under our label licenses to adjust the BPM of tracks between five and seven beats per minute. We’re one of the only services is licensed to do that. But I think the key is, you know, you can’t really go outside of seven to 10 beats per minute, right? Like I, I remember, there was like a sideload app that they were using an orange theory to do this a while back, and you had instructors that were cranking up BPM is like 15 to 20 beats per minute.
Rusty Greene
And it’s just, I mean, it made the music, it took away the integrity of the music. And I think one of our goals is to really be true to the artists and what they’ve created and make sure that we’re not creating a way or facilitating a way for people to manipulate that piece of art.
Steve Washuta
If I was a individual group, fitness instructor, maybe I worked at three or four gyms doing different classes around my local area, I would tell me if I’m wrong, I would purchase the sort of the individualized version of this right and be able to hook it up rather than the gym. Because I’m not a gym or no, do you get a gym? lationship even if you’re an individual group fitness instructor.
Rusty Greene
Yeah, so one of the things that we had to do as part of our label licenses restriction, the service on usage base, right, because when, you know, I had that moment of like, wow, we have 1000s of gyms, we had a lot of gyms that were using us 24 hours a day, right. And if you do the math, just on the base per play rate, these gyms, we were losing a ton of money on those gyms.
Rusty Greene
So what we did is we kind of went back to the early days of of Pandora, I don’t know if you remember these days, but like when they initially launched, you had like 40 hours a month for free. So you know, what we do our base user subscriptions are individuals get up to 35 hours a month, right. And for 99% of individuals that work out that gives them an hour a day, it’s plenty of enough time.
Rusty Greene
And then we have a coach to your subscription, that’s 20 bucks a month and gets you up to 75 hours. So a lot of the folks that do what you were just mentioning that teach at multiple places, some can fall into individual I technically can’t, like sell them that but we have a coach tear that’s a professional version of the app comes with all the pro cons it gets you up to 75 hours, it usually gives enough time for those folks that teach multiple classes per week.
Steve Washuta
Did you have some sort of fundraising round when you guys were at a certain level to partner with other people to sort of back you and your in your ventures? Did you take that on yourself? That’s too personal. You don’t have to answer?
Rusty Greene
No, man. Yeah, I’m happy to, you know, I’ll tell you I did pretty well at a young age with nightlife and promoting events, right made a really good amount of money for a young kid in his mid 20s. I put everything I had into this right, which was the scary moment, I do have one partner.
Rusty Greene
And I’ll tell you, we tried to we tried to raise money, like multiple times, right? Like we, we went out to the capital markets, and we’re like, Hey, this is what we’re doing. And no one wanted to touch music at the time, right? The licenses were too new. And I will talk to VCs and they’re like, Hey, go out and get 100,000 subscribers and then come back to me. And I’m like, Well, if I get 100,000 subscribers, I don’t really need to talk to you. Right? Like, that’s the whole point.
Rusty Greene
And you know, we got there, right? So we get to that point, and then we get sued by the labels. Then we, we actually really needed money to pay settlement payments, right. I like I took out, you know, I took out home equity loans against my house, like I put everything back on the line to get those settlement payments paid. It took years, right, where, you know, we were, you know, trying to be frugal and fit radio, working with a small team, transitioning the business model paid off settlement payments.
Rusty Greene
But we finally came out the other side, man, I mean, it’s, and now like, you get to this point, we’re licensed by the labels, we have a unique business model, and I get emails all the time. And I don’t take the calls anymore, right? Because it’s just one of those things. Like when I really needed it, you weren’t there.
Rusty Greene
And like, you know, I mean, it’s not that, like, we’re rolling in cash, but I’m certainly not going to go out to a VC and get beat up on my business model at this point, right. Like when we’ve already done all of the hard work at this point. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen like the, the typical, like there’s a info graph that I can send you after the after the call, but it’s like the typical startup, right?
Rusty Greene
There’s the initial enthusiasm that peaks and it’s through the roof and you think this thing is gonna work. And then there’s this trough of sorrow, right. And for most companies that last years and a lot of people pivot, most people quit, and then you finally find product market fit and you come out the other side, and we’re just right there.
Rusty Greene
Now, I think, you know, we’re starting to the labels trust us now, like the folks at BMI CSAC and ASCAP, they, they look highly upon us because we’ve kind of helped a lot of gyms get compliant on the licensing side. So we’re doing the right things for music. You know, we’re also solving a problem in that space. And we’re certainly excited about about the future. But you know, really no plans. I think that you know, our team.
Rusty Greene
For the most part, everybody that’s here has been here since day one. And they’ve kind of seen it. And there’s a, there’s a buzz around here right now, it’s exciting. You know, and I think that we’ve been doing this a long time, but like, we’ve only been, we’ve only had this business model for a couple of years. So just really excited about, you know, what we can do over the next few years.
Rusty Greene
That’s an awesome story. And I love how it turned out positive. And like you said, you kind of have to stick it out. So many people who are entrepreneurs, don’t stay, they give up. And you’ll never be successful. If you give up at some point, though, maybe it is the better decision to quit.
Steve Washuta
But in most instances, it’s like you said, it’s just finding the right market and finding the time and I also love how you said, you know, I needed VC help at a certain time, they weren’t willing to give it to me, now. They’re reaching out to me, through you, if and when I needed it again, I’ll reach out to you, and it’s gonna be on my terms, because I already have a successful product now. And that’s how the game should be played.
Rusty Greene
Yeah, it’s weird. It’s like, they’re like, Okay, we want you to get the 5 million arr. And then like, then we’ll be prepared to write a big check. And it’s like, once you get to that point, you don’t like, I mean, you don’t really need the check anymore. So, I mean, it’s tough. You know, I mean, uh, you know, there’s a lot of companies that, that do great that go out and raise a lot of capital.
Rusty Greene
You know, like, we take our staff out, we buy our staff lunch every day, right? Like, we don’t have to answer to VCs about stuff like that. So, you know, we’re, we’re bootstrapped, we’ll always be bootstrapped. And, you know, I feel like, you know, if you put a bunch of people who love what they do in the room, like, you’re ultimately going to do the right thing, if you just keep going.
Steve Washuta
And as you, I’m sure already know, the more sort of cooks in the kitchen, as they say, the more problems you know, like so somebody owns whatever 10% equity in the company, then they think they can start making decisions.
Steve Washuta
And they’re like, hey, Rusty, you know, I really think your your interface doesn’t look right, we need to change black screen to a white screen these like little aesthetic things. And you’re like, screw you like, like, this isn’t I’ve developed, I’ve developed this, I put my life’s work into this, like your Give me your money, because you trust my decision making? I don’t need your help.
Rusty Greene
Yeah, that’s honestly a great point. Like I had a meeting with some bankers recently. And like, the first thing they said, they were like, hey, yeah, what we want to do is we want to take this model and, and we want to put you into restaurants and retail. And I’m like, Man, that’s a really crowded space, right? Like, that’s a completely different space.
Rusty Greene
It is just not what we do. And you know, we have a unique opportunity and fitness, just because the way that we’re licensed to really grow and solve a lot of problems for that market. And we’re just kind of touching, we’re just touching the surface of that market.
Rusty Greene
So to your point, like that was like a prime example of like, alright, let’s come in and change everybody’s focus, because there’s more restaurants than gyms, and that market looks sexier on paper. And it’s like, that’s not you know, that’s not the business that we’re running right now.
Steve Washuta
Yeah, funny. If anything, you would hope that they would say, Hey, listen, to get more data on what music people like, let’s expand like, like, internationally, let’s see what is maybe trending in wherever like, or even trending in California that’s going to move because, you know, the court sort of the coasts, in my opinion, tell me if I’m wrong, that have the trends in music and kind of moves inward, right?
Steve Washuta
You usually don’t get trends in music and like, in like Oklahoma, and then it moves out. It’s like, it’s happening in New York and LA, and then it moves back in. It’s like, why don’t these people see like, we want more data? Let’s move internationally, let’s not change the whole business model.
Rusty Greene
Exactly. Yeah. Like Australia, we do really well, pretty comparable, Canada really well. But, you know, I think I’ve spent a lot of my time and it’s a big part of our focus is, is territory expansion, right? Like, we have a lot of territory requests and labels to look to expand. And there’s a lot of work and understanding what fitness is like in France and Eastern Europe, right.
Rusty Greene
It’s very different, like the just don’t have the number of studios in France and Germany and Spain, like those folks are doing a lot of stuff outside. It’s a lot more sort of lifestyle, like they’re gonna ride their bike to work every day, or walk to work or run every day, or they’re gonna play soccer for an hour and a half after work. So really just trying to like understand those markets and what markets create opportunities for us.
Steve Washuta
Rusty, this has been fantastic information, give my audience and listeners a little bit more insight as to where they can find fit radio, or maybe if they have a question for you specifically about entrepreneur stuff where they can find you.
Rusty Greene
Yeah, I mean, you know, you can check our website out God Spirit radio.com. We’re also in all the App Store’s on Fit radio. We’re also on the Sonos platform. If you listen on Sonos, you have a Sonos system. I’m on Instagram at rusty underscore green. Happy to give out my email id Rusty is rusty@radio.com If anybody has any questions, I’m happy to chat anytime.
Steve Washuta
My guest today has been rusty Greene, CEO of fit radio. I’ll put all the links in the description. Rusty, thank you for joining the Trulyfit podcast. Thank you see.
Steve Washuta: Thanks for joining us on the Trulyfit podcast. Please subscribe, rate, and review on your listening platform. Feel free to email us as we’d love to hear from you.
Thanks again!
CLICK FOR AUDIO OF PODCAST