Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to customer acquisition. You said you have 85,000 people in your Facebook group. How did you get to these kinds of numbers?

Nick Shaw: Our number one strategy is social media. That was pretty evident early on. Being in the health and fitness industry, it’s very visual-oriented. People want specific results. They want to look a certain way. If you can get people results, people post and talk about how well the program works. We repost and spotlight on certain clients. People see that and it just takes off. It just snowballs and has an exponential growth.

We have almost 330,000 followers on our main Instagram account. Instagram is the perfect medium for what we do because it’s visual-oriented. Nowadays, we use a lot of ads on social media. Early on, it was all organic. Now, we do a lot of advertising to get our name and program out there. It worked really well. We have been doing that for the last year to year and a half. The bulk of it is really organic growth on social media. We also work with a lot of influencers in the health and fitness space.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like your number one channel is Instagram.

Nick Shaw: Absolutey.

Sramana Mitra: Could you provide insights into what really works well for you on Instagram? I understand that a lot of your clientele like to post their photos. Image is a big part of this. Are there other nuances to building an Instagram following that is particularly interesting?

Nick Shaw: A big part of it is working with influencers in the space. That’s something that we do a lot of. We probably have 50 plus influencers that we work with.

Sramana Mitra: What does working with influencers mean?

Nick Shaw: They use our program. We reach out to them and sometimes they reach out to us. As we’ve gotten bigger and bigger, people just naturally reach out to us. Sometimes we’ll say, “We’ll be glad to set you up on our platform and just talk about how you like it. Show your results.” Influencers range from 5,000 all the way up to a million followers. They talk about you on social media and you gain a bunch of followers through their platforms. It has consistently been growing.

Sramana Mitra: Are these relationships paying relationships?

Nick Shaw: We have some paid and a lot that are unpaid. Some of our biggest athletes are paid ones. One is Rich Froning. In the sport of CrossFit, he’s the Michael Jordan. He’s won the CrossFit games four times. He’s one of our main athletes. We’ve been working with him f0r almost a year.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization
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