From Wag! to Fit! – The life of an Entrepreneur Mike Deverna

Join us as we sit down with Mike DeVerna, the innovative mind behind the renowned dog service app, WAG, and the now rapidly ascending Fit Home Gym. Mike's story is a whirlwind of entrepreneurial spirit, starting with a college club and soaring to the heady heights of tech startup success. His candid recount of transforming WAG into a sought-after service and its eventual sale is as instructive as it is inspiring. But it's his personal voyage – a transformative health and fitness odyssey – that truly captivates, leading to his current crusade bridging the convenience of app-based fitness with the tangibility of home gym equipment.

The conversation takes a turn into the fitness realm as we unpack the inception and explosive growth of the Fit Home Gym amid the pandemic's push for at-home workouts. Mike's foresight into the customer's struggle to find quality equipment has morphed into a patent-celebrated, multifunctional marvel. As we dissect the agility needed to pivot from digital to physical, Mike illuminates the philosophical core of entrepreneurship – a quest for impactful creation that transcends mere monetary pursuit. It's a raw look at how health and innovation intertwine, and how Mike's own journey is now helping others embark on their own path to wellness.

As we wrap up, we delve into the marketing triumphs and trials that come with promoting a top-tier product like Fit Home Gym. From the highs of influential partnerships to the lows of customer service skirmishes, Mike shares the full spectrum of emotions that come with entrepreneurship. For those eager to follow the Fit Home Gym evolution or connect with Mike for a dose of fitness ingenuity, we reveal where to find him on social media and hint at what's next for his latest venture. Tune in for an episode that's as much a masterclass in business as it is a beacon for budding entrepreneurs and fitness enthusiasts alike.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Show Up Fitness Podcast, where great personal trainers are made. We are changing the fitness industry one qualified trainer at a time with our in-person and online personal training certification. If you want to become an elite personal trainer, head on over to showupfitnesscom. Also, make sure to check out my book how to Become a Successful Personal Trainer. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. Have a great day and keep showing up. Howdy everybody, and welcome back to the Show Up Fitness Podcast.

Speaker 1: 0:33

Today we have Mr Mike DiVerna, and this big hunk over here was one of our clients to show up, but he has a really neat story from entrepreneur into a dog app WAGS. We've probably heard of that before. Now he has a really, really cool contraption that he's going to talk to you about. And one thing I just learned that we have in common we both started up clubs at our colleges. At Chico State, I was the founder of the Exercise Physiology Club, and that was in 2003 or four. And, mr Mike, why don't you tell me about your entrepreneurial club and then how you got to this contraption? That's kicking ass and getting partnerships with the military.

Speaker 2: 1:13

Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, so back in about 2007 was doing my undergraduate studies at the University of Rhode Island and you know I wanted to do something in the entrepreneurial space. So there was a program for entrepreneurship but I just kind of felt it was a little outdated. You know, I wanted to get kind of real world, you know, modern day experience. And so I went to our professor and I said, you know, hey, we need to start an entrepreneurship club. You know, students need to be like working on ideas, like making websites, making products. And he said, you know, funny enough, another student came in about 30 minutes earlier, said the same exact thing you guys need to meet. And that's how I met John John Vinner. He's, you know we went on to partner together in two companies since then, wag being one of them. He's also living out here in Los Angeles. So that was kind of fate that we met each other and got things going and started working on businesses, basically 15, 20 years ago.

Speaker 1: 2:21

So if you're not familiar with WAG, that is, is it fair to say it was essentially Uber, but for dogs?

Speaker 2: 2:28

Yeah, exactly. So you know, around that time you had the on-demand space was really taking off. You had things like Uber, you know, postmates, you know, but these were were you know earlier days of those companies. So the whole space was really kind of blowing up at the time. And there was nothing like that for dogs. You know, there was Rover, which was more for kind of pet sitting, overnight stays, but not for like daily usage if you need your dog to get walked. So that was really the big innovation was to start with a mobile app that kind of had that Uber-esque experience and do a really good job kind of curating these amazing dog walkers. What we found is there's a lot of people that want to walk dogs as opposed to delivering someone's food. And we had kind of immediate product market fit. We launched in Los Angeles and then quickly expanded to, you know, the four major cities in the U S and I think it's in over over a hundred markets here in the U S.

Speaker 1: 3:30

I remember one day we were working, you were working out with one of the trainers. It was Hollywood, and I went up to Chelsea. I was like it's a weird thing, like I have a background in track, and I was like I, this guy, I don't know something about him, I'm a little jealous because I think his calves are bigger than mine, but you have some jacked calves. The next thing, you know, we start chatting up and you have this entrepreneurial side and then we just kind of meshed and more times than not I would take you out and try to pick your brain on what you've done with your company and you said I remember vividly that something you're really good at is scaling. And so you took WAG and you would bring it into new markets and you did a really great job of growing it to the point where you could sell and you got out and you're living on an island now right, yeah, obviously a lot of failures along the way, but working at the earliest stage of a company is really the hardest.

Speaker 2: 4:22

You know going from idea to getting your first product out even getting those first, you know 100 users is incredibly hard. But you know, once you can do that, you just got to figure out how to get your first 1000 users. And then, you know, grow from there and you know everybody's kind of constantly thinking about like what's their idea? But really like the biggest challenge these days, how's your idea going to get to market? How are you going to scale this idea? What's your kind of competitive advantage to do so? So that's really kind of where I spent a lot of time working with different startups, eventually said why don't I do this? You know, with ideas of my own, and you know WAG being the last company I worked with, and then Fit the story about Fit was pretty interesting. So after I left WAG, I was working 80-hour weeks, was not really taking care of my health and fitness. I took like three months to just kind of travel the world, hang out, and then I said, okay, what am I doing with my life? I got to work on something I was itching for that next project and I remember coming up into show up, starting to train, starting to take care of my fitness. I felt amazing. I started working with different styles of trainers, from kickboxing to CrossFit, strength training and I never felt better. I got in sort of the best shape of my life. I used to never want to go on a hike and then I was hiking, you know, five times a week, and so I was really inspired and the first idea was to bring this convenience, as well as like variety, into what I knew, which is how to build apps. And you know, the idea there was you can follow anybody's training plan, whether it's a 30-day plan, 12-week plan. But these were people that had different expertise, right, so you had variety. So if you got bored with one style of training, you might want to try something else. That kind of kept you occupied and you follow these programs and plans and you get these results. And you follow these programs and plans and you get these results. And we sort of aggregated all of this into an app with these different influencers who would market it to their audiences. You know, those audiences would come into the Fit app and you just, you know, try a variety of programs, and we had really good success.

Speaker 2: 6:41

And then the pandemic hit and we had even more success, success. And then the pandemic hit and we had even more success. I remember that, you know, we had the servers couldn't even keep up because, you know, there was lockdown and all of a sudden we're like what's going on? And everybody wanted to learn how to handstand or, you know, just do these mostly body weight fitness programs.

Speaker 2: 7:01

Later that year, what we found out was we kind of surveyed our customers and what was missing was and I don't know if you remember this during covid, but you couldn't get anything from for equipment. You know, it was like six months to get, you know, a pair of dumbbells. And people were kind of making these hodgepodge setups right and for our customers it was, it was all the same stuff that they were looking for. It was, um, you was dip bars, pull-up bar. Mostly it was like kind of a flimsy doorway, pull-up bars, push-up handles or parallettes, and then something for light resistance, like bands, light dumbbells, and that was really kind of the crux of like what our customers needed to do, the body weight kind of fitness programs on the app. And so that was the initial inspiration, um, behind the fit home gym.

Speaker 2: 7:53

Uh, I brought, uh tyler doe, who's a co-founder. I brought him in. I worked with him at a previous company, kind of brilliant hardware engineer, uh really into fitness. I said, can you take all these ideas of workout styles and put it into one product, right? So it kind of worked on that for months until we kind of came up with the first prototype of the fit home gym, put it in the app and it exploded. It kind of took off from day one. Now that's actually kind of the primary piece of the business. Just actually received our patent on the product yesterday.

Speaker 1: 8:28

Awesome. Congrats on that. That's huge, and we're going to talk more about the product, but my mind is just going down this dark hole of trainers for the most part. In my opinion, I've been around trainers for decades now and we don't surround ourselves with true entrepreneurs. What we surround ourselves with are what we call level zero, textbook trainers and a ton of ideas, but very, very little action.

Speaker 1: 8:55

And then the big monkey on the back is fear of failure. So everything that you've already talked about, you're highlighting all the pros, but you started your app with this one, and now it's really neat to see that your mainstream revenue wasn't the original idea. And I just know for so many people, they have an idea but they're afraid to go through with it one. But if they were to go through with it and something happens, they don't have the ability to pivot. So what do you think it is about entrepreneurs with the action-based principles that they have, but just almost taking everything with a grain of salt and being excited about trying to almost come to that first failure, because then you know that you need to pivot and come up with a solution.

Speaker 2: 9:37

Yeah, no, I think that you know a big trait of being an entrepreneur and you know there's a learning curve to this, because growing up in school you're kind of told what to do and you're waiting for permission to do stuff right. As an entrepreneur, you know, really the exhilarating part of it is you have an idea and you test it and you get feedback and the best entrepreneurs just do that faster and you'll probably have better results from experience. But essentially there's running lots of tests and experiments, building products, getting out to the, the market, seeing if it works, and then gathering that feedback and deciding what to do next. Right, a lot of people just get caught up in that decision paralysis. Even starting something, what's the first idea? Should I even start it? And they never do anything because they're afraid to take that first step.

Speaker 2: 10:27

Even me, I wanted to go in to show up and talk to you about your experience in the fitness space. I was nervous to go out. I wasn't, I was an introvert, you know I was nervous to go out and talk to people. But once you start taking action, making those decisions, launching things and just getting that experience, you get more confident and less fearful to try to test and try new things, and that's really where the magic starts to happen.

Speaker 1: 10:54

Would you say that you're more intrigued by the ins and out of? We don't strive for perfection, but we're always trying to make it better. The optimization of the product is that excites you more, or is it the business side and you're trying to find that next buck? So then you can put that into the practical aspect. Which one do you like more?

Speaker 2: 11:17

Yeah, for me it's not necessarily the money, because I feel like there's easier ways to make money than starting a business. For me it's kind of building things and seeing the result of, especially when those things succeed. You know, seeing, you know happy customers, seeing people say like, hey, this is super innovative, this is solving a problem, and getting that feedback, and then kind of scaling that, like reaching more and more people. You know, and I think if you do that you will make a lot of money. But you're not doing it just to kind of turn out, you know, a few extra bucks.

Speaker 1: 11:52

Yeah, so sorry if I didn't pose that question right. I meant in the fact of, like, trying to get seed money and investor stuff and you know, money. I'm kind of the same way. Someone asked me the other day, like what do you want your next job to be, Chris? And I was like this, I'm not going anywhere, this is what I'm doing. So I'm in a phase right now in my life where, with the business, I'm obsessed with the meeting people and trying to figure out what they want so I can present a solution with our product. And we just did a partnership the other day with a very big gym. We're about 99.99% closing it, but that's going to be another 105 gyms that we're going to partner with and that, like I left that like Ooh, that was fucking cool, Like that was.

Speaker 1: 12:35

I wasn't ready for it. I was just like this having a zoom call and he was, you know, busting my balls. I'm like why should we work with you? And I had to basically spread my wings and say, cause, we're the fucking best. You can get a trainer over here who has their level zero, but they're going to fail. Or you can invest in the new product which is, you know, the Tesla truck. You can't interview people who are, you know, riding around in horses or us for the best and new product, and so that's what really excites me, what really grinds you, fires you up to get out there and build your business.

Speaker 2: 13:08

Yeah, I think, answering your earlier question too, I much more enjoy the process of working on the business, talking to customers. I'm in there in customer support and text messaging. I'm doing that stuff all day long. I'm going in our Instagram account and talking to different influencers who might want to try the product, and that's really like kind of where my passion lies. But you know, at the same time, I'm practical and realize that you know a company like ours is going to need to take on, you know, capital and funding and bring in external partners. So that's an important piece of like keeping the company going and continuing to scale it and grow it to that next level.

Speaker 1: 13:52

How do you overcome the constant negativity of working on the business? Because there's so many fires that you got to put out whether, if it is an unhappy customer, someone wants a refund. I was working with someone the other day and they were upset because they bought too many of the products and they said they didn't know they bought it and I was like it literally says right, fucking here, like you can't, just whoops, I accidentally clicked that it's like you have to go through put your credit card like there's this whole process and people are hard to work with. The more more people I meet, the more I like whiskey.

Speaker 2: 14:36

It's, yeah, it's, it's. It's hard, and I think that I'm used to it. Um, but it's also. You know you don't really overcome the difficult parts of the business. I think it's like that game, you know, whack-a-mole where, like you, you knock out one problem during a day and like four other ones pop up. But you have to knock it down and then and then, but then you might get a win, like yesterday we got our patent you know for for the home gym. I'm sure we had a bunch of problems yesterday. You know stuff happened, there was emergencies, things like that but you know that was a pretty awesome day.

Speaker 2: 15:01

So we just try to celebrate like the fun, cool moments and milestones, cause you're going to get caught in negativity because there's so many challenges every day, so you just got to knock each one out and do one at a time and then I think, just knowing that that's normal, things will always just pop up. It doesn't really end. That's a way to kind of deal with it better, and then surround yourself with other people that can handle a lot of those things. Like you know, I have a really good customer support team who's really fast. They get back to people right away. They're able to solve their problems, and that helps me out. You know a ton, so I don't have to take on every single task in the company.

Speaker 1: 15:42

With the patent that you just got approved yesterday. Is this the one behind you, or is this the new one that's going to be coming out for more commercial use?

Speaker 2: 15:49

Yes, no. So this is for the Fit Home Gym, the calisthenics device that has been really taking off over the last three years. It's our utility patent. We do have a provisional patent on a piece of technology in the Newton, which is our digital strength training device. That will be launching in a couple of months here.

Speaker 1: 16:11

Can you break down in layman's terms the difference between a trademark and a patent?

Speaker 2: 16:16

for those that don't know, Sure, I mean, I'm not like an intellectual property expert, but for us there was a process for getting a provisional patent on the product. So, you know, the patents have to do more with that physical you know, physical product and our first step was to get the provisional patent, which happens, you know, a little faster, but that doesn't mean you're actually going to get awarded the, the final patent. Then we got a design patent, you know, which is sort of like the look and feel of the product. That we got, I think, about a year and a half ago, two years ago. And the hardest to get is the utility patent, which is just sort of an ongoing process of going back and forth and getting kind of technical. And so we, you know we worked with a great team that just kind of continued to work with the office there and, you know, send over our designs and revisions and eventually we were able to get the actual utility patent as well.

Speaker 1: 17:23

And then what you got behind you is your name FIT, and that's the trademark part. So you know, people ask me, you know the USPTO I don't know if that's where you went to do all that, but the United States, I think it's Patent Trademark Association and you have to go through higher lawyers and then do all that stuff. It's not cheap either, is it?

Speaker 2: 17:40

Yeah, no, and our actual corporate name is Macrofit Inc. So Macrofit is our corporate name. And then you know we go by fit with the exclamation, sort of similar to to wag. We had, you know, the exclamation mark on the on the wag logo. So, yeah, we worked with a designer to make a really unique logo and name mark that, you know, we felt was going to be behind all the different products that we end up launching. So you know, each of these products will sort of be kind of powered by Fit.

Speaker 1: 18:16

And so for the listener who needs to get this product painted in their mind, how can you better explain what this product is and if someone were to get it? Because we have a lot of trainers who have garage gyms and we have a lot of trainers. I was just talking to a kid on the podcast here shortly. I didn't realize there's 10,000 anytime fitnesses in the world and so let's pretend like you want to open up an anytime fitness and you see this product and you're like I want it. How can you paint it so people can visualize it?

Speaker 2: 18:46

Sure, yeah, it's one of those things typically where I'm like, oh, you just kind of have to see it, but it's a modular fitness station with it's a full standing pull up bar and dip station. It's a full standing pull up bar and dip station, so these bars kind of snap into each other and below that is this wooden steel base which the dip bars as well as the push up handles. They just kind of plop into the holes there and there's fasteners to kind of tighten it there. But there's no tools to set up. So you literally can set it up in like 45 seconds. These things can kind of pull out, put it in a storage bag, slide out into the bed and the base has handles on it so you can carry that around. You can play with a variety of setups, so you might have bands attached to the ends of the base and be doing bicep curls, or you might take that down and just want to work on dips that day and just have the dip station set up.

Speaker 2: 19:47

So people love the convenience of it. It looks nice enough to put in your living room as opposed to like a big industrial squat rack or something like that. It's a very small footprint, so I think it's surprising, like, how much of a workout you can get in such a small space. And, of course, like you know, pull up bar. Having a freestanding pull up bar is a huge advantage, because those doorway pull up bars are super flimsy and you know, it's just not, you're not getting that that same result. So you can hang, you know, rings on this or people put, like you know, trx stuff on there. So really, I think the versatility of the product is what makes it so unique, as well as just how convenient, compact it is and you know the unique design of it.

Speaker 1: 20:38

And you're talking about ideas, and then you have another idea that comes in and, just like you said earlier, one of the problems with these giant squat racks, like we have at the gym in Santa Monica all this weight that goes on the bottom. You got the 45s, you have the 35s, the 10s, the big ones, the small ones, and it's just a clusterfuck. And so you then went into start developing another product. And and so you then went into start developing another product and I can see that behind you and I'm really excited to try this out, because I've never seen something like it out there. It's essentially a power rack without all the weights and the free form, almost like marrying a barbell which it still has and a Smith machine, but then you have that stability aspect. So let's talk about the next product.

Speaker 2: 21:21

Yeah, so the next product is called the Newton. So the Newton, essentially, is kind of combining free weights, you know, think of like a, you know, a bench press, a squat rack and a Smith machine, you know, as well as a cable machine, kind of all into one and instead of actual free weights you're using digital weight. So the digital weight you control from the screen. The screen, you know, lets you put input the weight, the amount you want to do. You can do standard types of resistance or you can do stuff like you know oscillating weight, you can do. You know oscillating weight, you can do. You know eccentric type movements, but let's say you're just using the standard weight.

Speaker 2: 22:08

There's these tracks that move with you along the ground. So that's really one of the most innovative pieces of it is that it's not anchored to one specific place, like if you're trying to bench press, you know, with a cable machine there's kind of one anchor point and it doesn't feel natural, whereas with these, this passive track system, the tracks move along with you. So you could be doing a lunge, you do a bench press curls, you name it, you can. Obviously you can do. You know vertical, you can flip it horizontal or vertical so it folds up um, so you can do everything from you know lat pull downs to um, to rows, anything you could think of in all these different directions, and so we decided to call it the new instance really mimics gravity. It feels like you're lifting um free weight, naturally, as opposed to you know, when you typically would try to do something like that on a cable machine.

Speaker 1: 23:03

I mean, I'm really excited to get to your spot and give it a shot, because it's definitely something that is needed more of. And then you take the even the reference I was using earlier, like the horse and carriage to the. You know one of the first cars and you compare that car to today. It's like significantly different. But we've been stuck in this old school. You know weighted iron plates and everything. It's like it's the future. That's how can we, you know, marry the two where you're able to have a little bit of both. So I'm really excited about that. Now could you end off for the trainers and people that are listening on some best practices or just words of wisdom for an entrepreneur or someone who's maybe interested in doing it? But they have that. You know they're stuck by analysis, by process or whatever it may be.

Speaker 2: 23:53

Yeah, obviously you know, taking that first step, I think, is the hardest part, right? So try not to like get everything perfect. You know, obviously when you're first starting you don't know certain stuff, but don't let that scare you to learn those things, right? I would say also too, like, don't rely on other people, don't rely on you know quote, unquote experts. Right, because there's an expert in every field. But if you're always relying on them, you're never going to be able to get anything done yourself.

Speaker 2: 24:24

So you know, really you have to learn how to do a lot of things yourself, at least to a point where you can get things off the ground, and then from there you'll start to understand. You know, make judgment calls of when to leverage working with other people that can kind of do the things that you're not as good at. But you really do have to kind of figure out how to launch a lot of stuff on your own with minimal resources too. So you know, that's the biggest challenge of being an entrepreneur. But the more you practice, the more you do it, the better you get.

Speaker 1: 25:01

There isn't a textbook that tells you ABCD that you can just follow right.

Speaker 2: 25:06

No, not at all. It's all from experience.

Speaker 1: 25:09

That's right. Well, I appreciate your time. That has been awesome. Where can people find you?

Speaker 2: 25:12

Yeah, so you know, if you check out the product at the fit home gym, you know our Instagram can be found there at the fit home gym. Our YouTube channel has a bunch of calisthenics and body weight exercises as well, and if you're looking to email me, just send me a message. It's Mike at join fit appcom.

Speaker 1: 25:31

Make sure to mention show up fitness so he can buy me some whiskey later on.

Speaker 2: 25:35

That's right.

Speaker 1: 25:37

Thanks, my man. This is great. Looking forward to seeing.