The FitTech Club Podcast

"Freezing churn with biohacking" - Daniel Donhauser, Founder & CEO, MAIKAI

• FitTech Club • Season 2 • Episode 8

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🔥 What's in this episode?

Only 15% churn rate compared to the industry average of 25% - this is how Maikai is transforming member retention through innovative biohacking services. In this episode, Daniel Donhauser (Founder of Maikai and former CCO of EGYM) reveals how integrating cryotherapy and other longevity treatments creates higher customer lifetime value while requiring less space and staff than traditional gym offerings. Discover how they're achieving remarkable retention rates through a health-first approach that bridges the gap between fitness and preventative wellness.

🎤 About our guest:

Daniel Donhauser is the Founder of Maikai, a boutique gym chain with seven locations specializing in yoga, boot camps, and biohacking services. He previously served as Chief Commercial Officer at EGYM (now a unicorn company) for four years. Under his leadership, Maikai has expanded into the longevity space, partnering with Biogena to create medical day spas focused on personal health and holistic well-being across 10 locations in Austria and Germany, with plans for further expansion.

🎯 What you'll learn

[03:27] How COVID lockdowns sparked the pivot to biohacking services as a survival strategy

[04:50] Why cryotherapy memberships yield similar revenue to gym memberships while requiring only 10 square meters of space and minimal staff

[06:55] The surprising retention advantage of biohacking treatments - customers have difficulty evaluating effectiveness, leading to lower churn

[09:56] Customer demographics - 80% overlap between traditional gym members and biohacking clients, with core audience being women 45+

[11:26] The Biogena Plaza concept - creating an integrated customer journey combining medical diagnostics, supplements, and biohacking treatments

[13:55] Major challenges in the European biohacking market - gaining doctor endorsements and educating consumers

[19:22] The future of fitness tech - AI-powered exercise guidance and advanced wearables that trigger proactive health interventions

📌 Links & resources

Maikai: https://maikaionline.com/en/wellness/fitness

Connect with Daniel Donhauser: https://at.linkedin.com/in/daniel-donhauser-a581023a

🎧 Enjoyed this episode?

Speaker 1:

Hi, I'm Natalia Karbasova, founder and CEO of the FitTech Club, a global business club for founders and executives in the fitness and consumer health tech industries. In this episode, we explore how biohacking is revolutionizing the traditional gym model, improving retention rates and creating new revenue streams. Daniel Donhauser, founder of MyKai and former CCO of eGym, reveals how his gym chain leveraged cryotherapy and other biohacking treatments to reduce churn and significantly boost customer lifetime value, all while requiring less space and fewer staff than traditional gym offerings. So, without further ado, let's dive right in than traditional gym offerings. So, without further ado, let's dive right in. Amazing. So we're live now and I'm very happy to introduce and to interview Daniel Donhauser today. Daniel is a founder and business angel in the fitness, health and biohacking space. He's been around for over 15 years now, so I'm very curious about this conversation. Daniel, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:

Great to talk to you, so let's dive right into it. Daniel, you've been the chief commercial officer of eGym for four years. Egym is a unicorn these days, so I hope that was worth it for you. So I hope that was worth it for you. You moved on to found your own gym chain, maikai, with seven locations, including yoga and boot camps and biohacking as well, and then you moved on to longevity space. So let's just start with a very simple question.

Speaker 2:

How has the industry shifted in the last 15 years? I mean, this is, of course, a not too easy question because there has been many different shifts, I would say. But as a gym industry, our goal was always, within the last years, to move more towards health right, so it was always the claim we are like health providers and we are not just for the strong guys and not only about muscles. And there was always this bigger picture that we are health providers but nobody actually knew how to make it really operationally work for the customers. And so I would say that, depending on the segment where we are, but for mid-price and premium gyms, I would say, they really moved towards that direction, to become this kind of health provider, and there, of course, longevity and biohacking also play a crucial role, role. So this is one shift, I would say, um, that happened over the past years and is now going even faster.

Speaker 2:

And, on the other hand, side, of course, as an industry, we always had big issues with our churn rates, um, so you, you know the numbers are, depending on the country, let's say germany around about 25, so that the question was how, what should we do as an industry? And one approach would have been to actually improve the product massively that people don't quit anymore, or the other option would be to make the product a lot more, let's say, not so expensive that they stay. In that way, the budget segment grew actually quite a lot and is a really valid concept. And I mean, for example, myself I probably would work out in a budget gym because I need no trainer, so there's nothing bad about that. But these are the two things I would say. The budget gyms grew quite a lot, actually the most, I would say. And in the premium segment, all these services around the core, they evolved, including longevity services around the core, they evolved, including longevity, biohacking, therapy things and so on.

Speaker 1:

Right During the pandemic you started the biohacking as part of the traditional gym offering. Can you just lead us through the rationale behind it and how this worked out for you?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, the rationale was quite simple during COVID. Of course, our gyms are based in austria, so we had, uh, three lockdowns actually, and even the first lockdown we thought, okay, now we have actually no revenue, no money, so what can we do? And our hope was that if we provide something more medical, more therapy kind ish, that the government would say, okay, you're allowed to do that. And that was actually the the path into biohacking. So, like a cryotherapy, like oxygen therapy, like heat, like electricity are different things you can do. And that was the reason why we implemented that to have something that we can offer.

Speaker 2:

And after we started, the government said, no, you know, actually we closed down everything. So that didn't work out that well in that direction. But on the other hand side, it helped us to actually look into biohacking and we then found out that this is really beneficial for our core product as well, because it just helps us to improve the customer lifetime value, it helps us to upsell, it helps us for retention, it helps us to have a higher productivity within the team, it helps us to differentiate, and so on and so forth. So this was how it actually happened.

Speaker 1:

Can you throw some numbers to the table? How exactly did you see the improvement happening?

Speaker 2:

I mean, we started actually with basic biohacking, so like a cryo chamber, and so we really found out that per gym we have around about between 600 and 1,000 members. So we have quite small gyms, boutique gyms, and it helped us to just make more money out of those customers on the one hand side. And on the other hand side we also saw that the churn rates. So our churn rates were always pretty good, so we had around about 15 percent always, but it helped us to even reduce it a little further down. Why? Because customers sometimes they they are willing to work out, but sometimes they want to have something that is just convenient, where you don't have to do something like the magic pill without working out, and of course the cryotherapy is something like that. You just go into a big freezer, you have to do nothing on yourself, it's just cold outside, except freezing, except freezing, but that's only three or four minutes, so that's not really difficult, everybody can do it. So this helps us that. Those people who said you know I'm too lazy now, but over summer of course freezing is actually something quite good, and during summer you usually have the highest churn rates in the gym industry, and then it just moved towards cold therapy. So there were a lot of different things and for us actually, we also sold it as a membership. So the cryo membership was exactly the same as the gym membership.

Speaker 2:

I was around about 100 euro per month, but of course you only need like 10 square meters for the gym. You need, depending on your gym size, 500, 1,000, 2,000, 4,000 square meters. You actually need not a really qualified trainer, because I mean you have to differentiate between first booking and follow-up bookings, and follow-up bookings for cold is just open up the door and close it. So this everybody, also an unqualified person, could do that. So you have a lot of less like personnel costs. You have not like the recruiting issue and so on and so forth.

Speaker 2:

And also the expectation of the customer is quite different, because they just expect it to be cold. But it's difficult to evaluate. Is the immune system really improving? Did I really sleep a lot better? But we fitness it's easy that people expect to get a six-pack. That usually doesn't happen that fast, if it happens ever. So we we saw that the churn rates within those biohacking treatments are actually pretty low, because it's not so easy to figure out if it works or not. I mean you have the studies and you have the papers. They say it works. But for people they believe in that and that's the reason why they stick to that.

Speaker 1:

That's exactly my next question. Gyms and let's call this longevity concepts have different kinds of kpis. Right for a gym, it's usually you can measure your muscle volume, you can measure your fat percentage. Right, of course, it's also an indicator for longevity, but probably those people who are coming to your longevity concepts biohacking concepts are driven by different kinds of indicators. So have you found out a way to measure their success so far?

Speaker 2:

It depends on the treatment. So I mean with cold actually I mean for cold, for example you have different use cases. Some people say your skin just looks like if you're 20. And, as you see, this does not work. So even if you go into the cold, you don't look like 20 years old. But it actually works for pain. So we have a lot of customers with atrocious a treatise I don't know the English term for Rheuma, so here they just measure their felt pain and so we ask them so what is your on a scale from zero to 10? How do you experience pain right now and after 10 treatments? How do you experience it after those treatments? So there we see a significant improvement.

Speaker 2:

For most of the pain patients, for better skin or for losing fat, I would say cold does not work that well, um. But there are other treatments. For example, one is um with oxygen, so it's like um, altitude training. You get like five minutes of low oxygen, five minutes of more oxygen and there, for example, example, you can measure different things like a lower resting heart rate or improved HIV rate, heart rate variability or better oxygen in the blood. So there are different things you can measure and this works actually pretty well.

Speaker 2:

But you have to see that there are actually two target groups in the biohacking space. I would say there's the one group who just does it out of a lifestyle-driven, let's say, motive, and they would do it anyway. So this is you go into the cold or you do oxygen or you do heat because you just want to have it on a preventive side. And then there are the other customers who come with really some kind of diabetes or high blood pressure or long COVID or post-COVID or whatever. And then the question is can we help them to reduce their sickness or not? And if so, they will stick to that and if not, they will quit. Obviously, Right.

Speaker 1:

Speaking of customers, where do you see the overlap between traditional gym customers that we're all used to, right, and this new kind of customers that are looking more for longevity side of solutions? So where's the overlap? Is there like a percentage that you can see? Do they have different kinds of features that you want to highlight here?

Speaker 2:

have different kinds of features that you want to highlight here. I mean, of course this depends on the gym concept, but our gym concept is like we focus on beginners, older people and more female customers. This doesn't mean that they have to be older than beginners, but probably a typical customer of my guys like female and plus 45. So this is our typical customer that's not old and of course they also have some kind of optical or aesthetic reasons why they come, but they come more out of a health perspective. For that reason the overlap is pretty big because it's health-orientated.

Speaker 2:

Of course, if you go into other gym concepts where mainly young people work out who just want to look good, then then of course the overlap is not so big. But in our concept I would say 80% of the customers could actually do both products or services. Of course not 80% are doing that because it's quite expensive. But from a potential I would say 80% could be targeted in both directions. And then it depends on how good you sell and how good your marketing is and how you can monetize and that or not right, I'd like to dive deeper into the concept of biohacking labs and specifically your partnership with with biogena.

Speaker 1:

You started the biogena plaza in vienna and I guess you guys are also now in munich, correct?

Speaker 2:

exactly, yeah, yes, yes which is kind of a medical day spa, focus on personal health.

Speaker 1:

I guess you guys are also now in Munich, correct? Exactly, yeah, yes, yes, which is kind of a medical day spa focused on personal health, in-depth prevention, holistic well-being. Can you guide us through the rationale for this project, what happened and where you stand now with this?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so first of all, biogena itself is a separate legal company who sells supplements like vitamin D, vitamin C, every vitamin you can think of.

Speaker 2:

And we actually did some kind of a joint venture in the biohacking field, as you mentioned.

Speaker 2:

We started to get at the Biogena Plaza in Vienna, next to the opera, and the idea actually was to build a medical day spa. So you have like doctors who do IV, you have like a shop where you can buy your supplements and you have a big biohacking area where you can do different treatments red light, cold oxygen, electricity, pmf, maths and so on and so forth and the idea was just to provide one place where the customer journey is more or less perfect. So you either go to the doctor, you do your blood work, you figure out okay, there are this and that issues. Based on the issues, the doctor will then say okay, we really need to go the medical way and it's a different path, or we can go the, let's say, more natural way. We do supplements, we do treatments, we do lifestyle interventions and then we can offer all these kind of interventions in one place. That was the idea behind that to have just a big use or profit for the customer who is there.

Speaker 1:

And where do you stand now with this project?

Speaker 2:

So we started in Vienna and right now we have different labs. So there are two labs in Vienna and a third is in the final making. We have two in Salzburg, we have one in Klagenfurt, one in Graz, one in Linz, one in Munich and one in Berlin. So if I'm counting right, I think it's like 10 labs right now and there will be one probably soon in Dusseldorf. So there's still a big expansion plan going on and the idea is just to build those places where people have this all-in-one concept. And of course, bigger cities are easier than small cities. But that's the plan for the next year.

Speaker 1:

What are the major challenges that you faced, or that anyone can face, when starting a biohacking slash longevity business?

Speaker 2:

I mean, I would say in Europe we are not that far than the people in the US, so here it's still a niche that is growing pretty heavy, but it's not mass market right.

Speaker 2:

So the biggest challenge is to build a biohacking product that becomes mass market adaptable, and for that, of course, you need quite a lot of education and enabling and and also you need to get the doctors on your side because, like in Austria and also in Germany, people trust the people in white for a good reason, and if you don't have them on your side, you have a lot of hurdles to overcome.

Speaker 2:

That people believe in those treatments and it's not some kind of hocus pocus or horrocks, and that is, I would say, the biggest challenge to get this kind of knowledge into the mass market but also into the doctor. So, for example, oxygen therapy or this altitude training there was 2019 Medicine Nobel Prize for the science behind that, but a lot of doctors are not familiar, do not know about that, and this I mean. Usually you say, like a big innovation takes like 15 years to become mainstream in the medical area. So 219 plus 15 years, it will take sometimes until every doctor has heard of that, and this is a big, big challenge for us if we don't get the support there.

Speaker 1:

You've mentioned quite some treatments that you are offering, but I didn't hear anything about GLP-1, the weight loss. What's your take on this in terms of the European market penetration?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, of course, the idea to lose fat with that simple hack is always great. I mean, from a personal view, I think it's not clear yet whether it is a sustainable way to do it or not. I mean, studies show different things. Of course, the success in the beginning is quite good, but what does GLP-1 do? It only reduces your feeling for hunger, so you just eat less, but this also leads usually in a reduced muscle mass. Reduced muscle mass, for sure, is not healthy. So the weight on the one hand side is one KPI, but there are other KPIs for overall health.

Speaker 2:

And if you're super obese, of course this makes sense to do that to reduce fat. But for, let's say, a normal person who has maybe five, 10 kilo too much on the scale, I'm not sure if that is the right way to do that. So I would personally stick with like normal lifestyle interventions, proper nutrition and like strength training. In terms of penetration, we don't see that much in Austria and Germany right now. I mean, you still need doctors for that and they have not adopted it that big already that it became like, yeah, market, but it will happen. I mean if there's an easy way and if it will get cheaper. I mean, right now it's super expensive, and as soon as the first insurance companies in Austria and Germany will cover that, of course, then the penetration rate will go up and it will make sense for some people. But I guess for most people it's better to stick to just a healthy lifestyle.

Speaker 1:

In the US the situation is quite different, because the treatment, on the one hand, is more expensive than Europe currently, but, on the other hand, there are already fitness and fitness technology companies like Echelon, fit or also Lifetime, one of the biggest gym chains in the United States, that are absolutely moving into this market as part of their product spectrum. So is GLP-1 a good business for Europe right now, would you personally?

Speaker 2:

sell it. Let me put it this way. I mean you have to differentiate between earning money, and I think for earning money it is a good opportunity If you do it. I mean in Austria it's not so easy from a legal setup. I mean you need doctors for that. You just can't do it as a gym saying. I mean you even can't do IVs like basic things. So there's the to put a needle into somebody. In Austria only a doctor or a nurse are allowed to do so. So you either have to employ them and that is pretty difficult from an auto regulation side or you work together with them. So it's not so easy.

Speaker 2:

For that reason I think it's quite difficult to implement it into a gym concept. But if it's possible you definitely can earn a lot of money with that. It's the same analogy as with the cryo chamber. If there's a way where you can get to the results that is just faster and easier, people will go that way right. So I mean if you would offer me a pill let's say 10K that would say I will stay exactly the way I am forever now I would buy that. And even if I don't have the money, I would take a loan or credit to do that, and GLB-1 is more or less something like that. It's the quick fix, so you will earn money with that. For us as a gym it's difficult to do that and from a, let's say, not only money-driven point of view, I think for most people it's still unclear whether it's really beneficial or not.

Speaker 2:

I mean, there is no long-term study on that right now, so we will have to learn that.

Speaker 1:

Right For the last couple of minutes, daniel, let's zoom out a bit. And one of the last questions I want to ask you what kind of market segment do you see as the biggest future market for yourself in the next five to 10 years?

Speaker 2:

yourself in the next five to ten years. I mean, yeah, I'm sure that biohacking and health will keep with the high growth rates. What we right now see and it's also in the US it's already big. There is like reformer pilates is, like in the gym field in Europe now growing quite heavily. So we just launched our first Reforma concept in Salzburg and we see like super heavy demand there. We're super high as a business case. It's just insane. It's actually the best business case in fitness I've seen for quite a long time.

Speaker 2:

I mean, people pay 30, 35 euros just for 50 minutes. It's not really super complex from a trainer perspective. Of course some people will tell you it's like super complex, but I mean I'm not a trainer, but I think it's not so difficult to do that. You need not so much space for that, you need no showers for that. So the cost side is quite good and the demand is super high and the price is super high. Yeah, so I think this is one of the let's say, the next three years at least. I think Pilates will grow quite heavily. So we will go into that direction.

Speaker 1:

Which one technology will change the fitness and health markets forever?

Speaker 2:

That's a good question. And health markets forever oh that's a good question. I mean I think each of them did a pretty. I mean I'm not saying that because of my history, but I think each of them did really like really, really good development with this open platform and now with the AI approach towards like all the exercises, all the equipment, all the machines. So I think this will be a game changer for the industry.

Speaker 2:

Even in a world where you have not so many trainers anymore because of different reasons, we have a lot of cost pressure. So this, I think, will be a game changer. But if you look into the end customer, I think it will be probably one of the big players. I think it will be probably one of the big players, like if the Apple Watch or Uber or Uber moves into more health KPIs, that allows people to better and easier understand where they are. This will bring them more towards like doing an action, doing an intervention. So if there will be I don't know blood sugar measurements or even more predictive things, this will tell people, hey, do something.

Speaker 1:

So I would say wearables on the end customer side and this connected open artificial intelligence approach on the business side. Those two things might be the biggest changes in the near future.

Speaker 2:

Daniel, thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you, it was great seeing you again.