Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The bulk of the business is this one-time fee to buy the chart that you’re providing.

Nick Shaw: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What do the 26 coaches do then?

Nick Shaw: They do more detailed one-on-one coaching.

Sramana Mitra: There is a subscription business that is more detailed one-on-one coaching.

Nick Shaw: Yes. There are three tiers. The first tier is about $20 where you can buy our ebooks. You read it and you can do things yourself. A lot of people want things laid out for them. Tier two are the templates. All you have to do is input a couple of things. The templates lay everything out for you. You just follow the directions. If you want do-it-yourself, you can. Those are roughly around $100. They usually last six months on average. The tier above that is you have access to a coach to ask as many questions as you want. They’ll build you a custom diet and a custom program. That’s the highest tier. The price for that for three months is about $600.

Sramana Mitra: Got it. If you break down your revenues, how does it split up into these three tiers?

Nick Shaw: I would say 40% templates, 40% coaching, and 20% ebooks.

Sramana Mitra: You said you have 85,000 people in your Facebook group. How many followers on Instagram?

Nick Shaw: Around 330,000.

Sramana Mitra: Across the three tiers, what is the number of paying customers?

Nick Shaw: It’s a little tricky because it’s not subscription. It’s a one-time thing.

Sramana Mitra: But they have paid.

Nick Shaw: Yes, over a hundred thousand.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you in terms of revenue right now?

Nick Shaw: In 2016, we had an article in Forbes. The lady that did the article specializes in companies that do over a million dollars in sales and have just one employee. We have grown a lot since then. That was in 2016. In terms of the range, we’ve been over a million dollars for the last four plus years.

Sramana Mitra: As far as our series is concerned, we don’t accept any story unless it’s $5 million plus in revenue so I assume you’re $5 million plus in revenue.

Nick Shaw: That is correct, but we have been well over that in 2016.

Sramana Mitra: Anything else you want to add?

Nick Shaw: The real keys are just the uniqueness of being a virtual online company – low overhead, low expenses. Once we created the digital ebooks and the do-it-yourself diet templates, that’s when things took off.

Sramana Mitra: You’ve done a very nice job of handling the scalability. Given the amount of penetration you have with your scalable content type of stuff, you can easily increase your online subscription business by adding more trainers and acquiring more of the subscription customers in the long run.

Nick Shaw: Absolutely. Maybe I have one other thing that I’ll add. Our main Instagram account has about 330,000 followers. We also have a second account that is only before and after pictures of our clients. There are thousands of posts on there. That page alone has almost a hundred thousand followers.

Sramana Mitra: Of those hundred thousand, how many are subscribers of your training program?

Nick Shaw: We’ve sold hundreds of thousands of templates of which, 90,000 come from our second Instagram account. You could make it the case that it’s every single one.

Sramana Mitra: Those people who are featured on that account are not just the people who are doing personal training with you. They’re also people who are using your template.

Nick Shaw: Yes, we only post pictures of our clients.

Sramana Mitra: Very cool. You have a very interesting way of doing this business. Congratulations!

This segment is part 7 in the series : Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization
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