In this podcast, we connected with Anthony Vennare, Co-founder of Fitt Insider. Below are some highlights of the conversation.
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How a military background and a tough personal loss shaped Anthony's career trajectory
Kyriakos: Anthony, good to see you again. It's been a while. I wanted to do this conversation with you. You have built one of the best media companies in our space, which is now a fund as well. Super excited to do this.
The first time I saw you guys, you wrote something about Terra in the very early days of Terra and our traffic blew up. So I started wondering, what is Fitt Insider? So that's the first time I heard about you. But I was doing some research about you and I saw that you were in the military in the past. Can you walk me through what you did in the military?
Anthony: Yes - crazy times. I enlisted in the Marines while I was still in high school in the Marine Corps - I joined what's called "the late entry program." My goal was to finish high school and then go to the Marines, and I left straight after graduation. I just turned 18 and my goal was to spend 20 years in the Marine Corps and I wanted to go infantry, try to do as much stuff as I could.
But then while I was away at boot camp, my dad was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer... So I found out he was sick and was going to die at some point and it completely changed my trajectory of life. And that's basically how we got here today.
Literally, my plan was 20 years in the Marines and then I intended to join the FBI afterward.
So they kept it a secret until graduation day and then on graduation day, I found out. And that really changed my trajectory in life. I still went on with school and I still went on to do a certain amount of my time. But as he got sicker, I got to come home and spend time with him as he was going to pass. I ended up not fulfilling my dream of going into infantry and eventually Special Forces, but I still got to go through a lot of cool pieces of training and do a lot of fun stuff there.
Kyriakos: That's very unfortunate man... I've seen some of the stories earlier about this. Did this push you into trying to become a healthier person yourself or did you have something different?
Anthony: Yeah, it was the first part. Well, I was always into fitness. I did my senior project in high school on fitness as being like a trainer, shadowing people. I was a high school athlete. My brother and I, it was all we wanted to do always from when we were 15 or 16. We started with bodybuilding and kind of got on there from football.
But it was the first time that I looked at fitness as health. Because seeing my dad, a big strong Italian father who was great and fine when I left, and then when I graduated boot camp - he just had brain surgery, was 50 pounds lighter, and was just so different... You realize that if you don't have health, nothing else matters. And that was the first kind of thought process around me, thinking about things that need to change around health. And then it was after I got to the Marines, I needed to provide for the family and make money. My dad was the main breadwinner in the family and it was all about coming home, making money, kind of being with the family, and contributing.
The only thing I ever thought about and knew I enjoyed - was fitness.
The road to building Fitt Insider - a global fitness empire
Kyriakos: I believe it all started with making a gym right?
Anthony: Yeah. We started training people in parks, doing events, training people in their homes, everything you could to make a buck - because I was an uneducated Marine at the time. That was in my early twenty's.
Unfortunately, we live in America where if you get sick there are medical bills. So I was basically doing whatever I could and I loved it from the start. I got every personal training certification, every workshop, and everything I could do, and then started training people in every place that I could and building up awareness and a brand.
Then my brother and I, well, we opened our first gym and it was crazy. It was 12,000 sq ft. It was an indoor skate park where we met a guy. I was looking for space, didn't even know anything, didn't know what a lease was, didn't know how to do it, didn't know about insurance, didn't know anything. But it was really about, how can I build this business. And I met this guy, he's like, oh, I have this small space. It was in an indoor ice skating rink. Above it was a skate park. And he had like a 500 sq ft room for us.
He was like, you can rent this room. I was like, great. And then he said, well, I also have the upstairs. And we went upstairs and it was a full-blown skate park that was absolutely massive. It was like an airport hangar. I essentially said something along the lines of, oh, I'll take this. And that was the start of it.
The future of gyms is all about connecting people through communities
Kyriakos: Before we get into the specifics of Fitt Insider, what do you think, based on your experience, is the future of the gym - what things need to change in people's experiences within the gym?
Anthony: Yeah, I have a few thoughts about the gyms, and this is coming from seeing what's working now and what's scaling now, but what also has worked in the past.
I think for most people, it's about building functional movement. It's not CrossFit, it's not lifting heavy weights. Although, I love CrossFit. We used to own CrossFit. It's something I've done for a long time. I don't think it's CrossFit, lifting heavy weights, or Olympic weightlifting. I don't think it's boutique fitness specifically. I think it's a mixture of all of that.
How can you build an accessible, exciting program and do it with a community?
It's about bringing people together to work out. And that's what's missing. The reason that people are back in the gyms, the reason that people are doing what they're doing, is because it's fun to be around other people. It's proven that working out with partners and friends and being there helps you work out harder. Stick to your routine, go, and be at the gym more. So I think it's about providing that community space and then pretty basic workouts. I think it's kettlebells, body weight movement, I think it's sandbags medicine balls. I think it's running around and doing stuff.
But it doesn't have to be as extreme as some of the options out there. And that's it.
Kyriakos: So you're focusing 100% on the community - that's very interesting. Fitt Insider, how did you guys start? I believe the first thing I saw personally was the newsletters. Was it the newsletters?
Anthony: It was while we were running a different company. Fitt Insider was essentially a side project. Joe and I, we've always loved creating content and we've always loved the space. And having been trainers and coaches and being on the ground running gyms and doing everything else and kind of working our way up - we thought our perspective was unique.
For us, the newsletter was published once a month, and the first issue was on, I don't even know, vegan food or something, the random thought process.
Kyriakos: How did you know what to write in that first one?
Anthony: No idea. Just what we thought the content was. The process was - we saw something happen in the industry, and we wanted to put that out there. And I sent it to five friends. I remember it was from my personal email. I sent it to five friends. It wasn't like, in MailChimp, it wasn't organized. And then we did it again and it was like 20 people because they forwarded around to their friends. And then we set it up in MailChimp and kept it going.
Even to this day - it hasn't evolved a ton, but it really came down to that Joe is phenomenal at spotting trends and information and saying, we should cover this, we should look at this, and then distilling that down to here's something relevant going on. And then more importantly, here's our perspective on it. Here's what it means.
If you work in the industry, it's not just news. There are a million places you can read the news and they pop up every day. Now someplace most likely copying our content, republishing it, sharing the information that we do, and trying to be the next thing that can race to the bottom of regurgitating fitness and wellness news, which is great, but it's about deep dives and analysis and what does this mean.
A lot of our success came down to consistency - being a reliable platform
And it was honestly consistency. Up until last month, we've never spent a dollar on marketing. We've never promoted it in any way other than just posting it online.
It grew tens of thousands of people over time every month. It would just keep growing. And we were always trying to say, when we were founders, when we were building, what did we want to hear, what information was helpful to us? And that's why we launched the podcast because it's always helpful to hear other founders explain how they did it or why they did it.
It's why we launched the job board and why our jobs board is free. Because it's always important to hire. And if you're a founder, making sure you bring the right people and the right hires and the right content, it's why I post Friday with job roundups for free. It was always about - how do we build the most impactful content for these founders, for these investors, and for this community. And it's why most of our stuff, all of our stuff out there right now at least, is free.
Podcasts are about bringing value to our guests - telling their stories and building a close relationship with our listeners
Kyriakos: What are some nuances that you realized from the podcasts? What I mean by that, I noticed when we were doing podcasts at Terra, a lot of people that wanted to work at Terra were looking at a lot of the podcasts - I was never expecting that this would be the case.
On the scale that you guys are today, what do you see?
Anthony: Yeah, it's what we hear from founders that are on the podcast, where investors, teams, people that want to work there, partners reach out to them and say, I just heard you on the podcast.
Because Joe is so phenomenal at interviewing and getting the information down, it's essentially helping them pitch themselves. So for us, it was always about providing a ton of value for our guests, helping them tell their story, helping them get that word out there to the right people, and then obviously providing that value to the community.
What you're seeing with podcasts is that they're spending half an hour or so hearing somebody talk about their thing, hearing Joe be there and talk about it. You build a relationship with you and again, it's consistency. We've not had a podcast drop on a Tuesday, so even during the holidays, even during the stuff - it's always coming, people come to kind of rely on that and spend that time.
Essentially you build a super deep connection between the newsletter and the podcast - especially the way we produce the newsletter. Bringing in-depth content, kind of that research side, you build a very deep relationship with people, especially since the newsletter actually comes from my personal email address.
My email is anthony.co. So when you get it, it's like mine and then Joe is the podcast. And as it's grown and as we built this community, people are like, we come to you for this. We trust you, we know you. Even though we haven't met, we feel like we know you guys.
The future of wearables and mass adoption of advanced wearables technology
Kyriakos: In a recent podcast, I was speaking with the CEO of Outside, Robin, and his opinion on the future of the wearables space is that we're going to have all our clothing, such as our shirts, measuring biometrics such as our heart rate, our pants are going to measure something else, our shoes are going to measure our force exerted, and everything is going to have something to do with wearables and measuring data.
What's your view on the world of wearables? And what do you think is going to happen here?
Anthony: So all that technology he's talking about is already built or being built. It's there, it's being done. We're based in Pittsburgh - there's a Carnegie Mellons here, and there are big universities.
In fact, we were just at an event and someone even had the insoles of shoes they can track. There have been companies that have done it. I forget their names, but we've talked to a few of them. It's there, it exists.
But unless it connects people - no, people aren't going to pay for that unless it adds value. Me tracking and knowing that thing, unless it can connect to my health or my doctor or my system or my thing and improve my life, why would I want to know that data?
I wear an Apple Watch and that's it. And it's fun because I make sure I'm not late to a meeting and I try to close my rings and I try to get my steps in. That's all I care about. But it's fun. It's something that I do, but it doesn't add immense value to my life. So why would I do that if it didn't have that value? I get where he's coming from, and I think eventually it makes sense to do that.
But we already have more data than we know what to do with, and we can't use it right now, and it's not really getting us anywhere. So unless a company can come and connect that to something and show the value and then also, more importantly, maybe the rich, maybe the high performers.
However, currently, I have a disdain for a lot of products and companies out there that are building things that the average person can barely afford to live in the United States. I'm assuming everywhere, too. But the data I always look at is in the US - the average person. A lot of people talk about people not being healthy because they choose not to be healthy because they choose to be lazy. No, it's because there were two jobs. It's because they don't make enough money. They make a certain hourly rate and they have to work, and they have kids and they have a family, and they don't have time to spend $100 a month on the gym and WHOOP subscription. And another thing, that's the problem.
So no, they're not going to wear wearable clothing because they're barely getting by, and healthcare isn't free, so it doesn't connect anywhere and they're not paying for that doctor - they're skipping the doctor's visit. So unless we as a society change, I don't see a vast majority of people wearing these things.
