S03E58 CrossFit's Race to 30 Million: Can a Phone App be the Game Changer?

In today's episode, Iet's go out on a limb and strategize how CrossFit can reach 30 million athletes by 2030. In order to do so, we need to look at CrossFit's current standing, the way it interacts with its affiliates, and its marketing strategies.

Above all, let's make the case that a singular app could be the solution to the impediments CrossFit faces and how it could revolutionize the experience for new entrants. If you agree that CrossFit works, then we need to clear the fragmented landscape of current CrossFit and fitness apps and allow CrossFit HQ to message the potential consumer directly, and to help the affiliates and membership communicate more effectively and grow. Big vision, big goals, big successes.

As we wrap up, we invite you the listener, to join this discussion about CrossFit's future. Share your ideas and thoughts and let's collectively brainstorm on how CrossFit can reach its audacious goal. After all, together we can all help to rid the world of chronic disease.

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00:00:05 CrossFit's Future Success and App Importance

00:14:45 Current State of CrossFit App Landscape

00:19:30 CrossFit's Emotional and Inspiring Performances

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S03E58 CrossFit's Race to 30 Million: Can a Phone App be the Game Changer?

[00:00:00] Sam Rhee: I'm going to reach back to an old Tom Cruise movie, a classic. Jerry Maguire. Yes, for the younger generation, this is the movie, "Show me the money," and "You had me at hello," and "Help me help you," quotes which will exist forever. Now, if you remember the beginning of the movie, Tom Cruise is a sports agent who gets fired from his corporate agency for writing a mission statement. Of course, he gets completely shunned after sharing this mission statement with everyone. So this episode will be my mission statement about CrossFit.

I am passionate about CrossFit. I have been an athlete for 10 years, a coach for five.

I co-host a CrossFit podcast with my friend and CrossFit Bison affiliate owner, David Syvertsen called The HerdFit. I live and breathe CrossFit like so many of us CrossFit enthusiasts. My non CrossFit friends make fun of me almost every day.

Now I fully admit that I am completely unqualified to make a mission statement about CrossFit.

My day job is as a plastic surgeon, and I love being a plastic surgeon. I'm not a businessman or knowledgeable about financial matters or tech. And so I am going out on a limb with this episode, so this may be the most ill-informed opinion out there about how to make Crossfit successful, but I do know that CrossFit works.

The best thing for the world right now would be to reach the goal of 30 million CrossFit athletes by the year 2030 as CrossFit CEO Don Faul has said. So regardless of my lack of knowledge and qualifications, I'm going to reach out to anyone who may have the power in the CrossFit community to make a difference. Don Faul, Austin Malleolo, Adrian Bozman, Pat Sherwood, Dave Castro, Nicole Carroll, Becky Harsh, Dave Eubanks, James Hobart, Sean Woodland, Tommy Marquez, Lauren Kalil, Sevan Matossian, Andrew Hiller, the team at Morning Chalk Up, Greg Glassman, and anyone else that I can think of.

I'm a hundred percent convinced that the only way CrossFit will achieve real future success, and not devolve into a fringe movement is with an app, a phone app, and not just the kind of little app that CrossFit has currently, but a spectacular mind blowing app that when you think about it, at least when I think about it, will catapult CrossFit into the forefront of fitness and health globally.

It will address all of the issues CrossFit currently faces, and also provide a path to growth, which will make CrossFit the dominant force in health, wellness, and fitness. Listener. If you agree with my thoughts, please tell someone who can make this happen.

Like Jerry McGuire, I may hear dead silence, laugh and ridicule, or get a metaphorical punch in the face by Kelly Preston, God rest her soul, for what I'm about to say, but I'm ready for it.

First of all, for those listening who don't know what CrossFit is exactly, the easiest thing to do is go to www.crossfit.com/what-is-crossfit, and then come back and listen to the rest of this podcast.

Okay. How are we going to get to the ambitious goal of 30 million CrossFit athletes by the year 2030 as CrossFit CEO Don Faul has said?

I would say most people, including me, would say, while this first year of new leadership has been stabilizing, ambitious and dramatic changes need to happen in order to achieve this goal.

How CrossFit HQ communicates with affiliates, how affiliates communicate with their members, the way we are currently trying to get new members in the door, and how we market CrossFit to the general public, while all these efforts are getting better incrementally, simply making what we have currently marginally better will not be enough for CrossFit to thrive. It will merely survive.

After listening to Don Faul and others at length, it appears that CrossFit HQ has made missteps over the past five years that they are now continuing to recover from.

And it will take an ambitious vision and push in order for us to see CrossFit's potential for huge success to become reality. Dave Syvertsen and I interviewed Don Faul on the HerdFit six months ago in February, which was a great interview.

Don Faul's now been CEO for a full year and he recently did another podcast just slightly bigger than HerdFit with Jocko Willink, who you may have heard of, and that was really interesting to hear what he said then, compared to what he said six months ago.

Some of the issues are very similar, such as ensuring that the experience of new athletes starting out and learning about CrossFit is more uniformly positive.

Another issue is working on affiliate quality, which historically has been uneven, given the relative freedom and low investment needed to be able to open a CrossFit gym. Don Faul told us CrossFit HQ does not have much data on which affiliates are doing well, which are losing money, or even how many athletes are doing CrossFit right now, except in the most general of terms.

They know how many people are participating in the CrossFit Open, but that's really about it ,other than what some affiliates have volunteered in terms of information to CrossFit HQ. Don Faul talks somewhat more obliquely about the pressures of dealing with the investment firm that owns CrossFit and how part of his job is to get them to understand that CrossFit is not a typical corporation, and the typical short term strategies towards profitability may not work with CrossFit, which is a very unique entity.

Lastly, Don Faul talked about how historically CrossFit HQ has been siloed into three major groups. CrossFit Affiliate Business, CrossFit Teaching such as the L1 certification and CrossFit Sport.

I think Don Faul said while the HQ staff are generally doing a good job in their roles, they hadn't really synergized, communicated with each other, and were sometimes duplicating efforts and communication with others. So how is a single app going to fix all of these challenges?

Well, let's just start with a newbie experience. Right now if someone brand new is interested in CrossFit, what would you tell them to do?

Tell them to go to the nearest local CrossFit affiliate? Tell them to Google CrossFit? Well, right now in 2023, the best answer I could come up with would be to go to the website, crossfit.com. The intro webpage is not bad about being welcoming to newbies.

I personally think the presentation could be somewhat simplified because it's a pretty busy webpage. There are links to affiliates, education, Games, workouts, movements, media, as well as a Welcome to CrossFit. But it's set up that way because the opening webpage has to be a gateway for all.

Right now, crossfit.com opens in part with background video of Dani Speegle and Rich Froning and other athletes fist pumping and yelling at the CrossFit Games, which may be extremely inspiring to me, but would probably scare the crap out of my Aunt Julie, who might be thinking about doing CrossFit for the first time.

If much of this newbie content was streamlined and presented in an app, If you've ever opened an app for a first time, many of the good ones walk you through the basics before letting you loose into the rest of the app, you could make that initial app experience extremely positive for a new person possibly scared of CrossFit. And Don Faul has said we have to combat the stereotype that CrossFit is scary and that it is dangerous.

Plus, there's nothing simpler than just telling someone to start CrossFit by downloading the app. That's all you would have to do. Worldwide, most people don't have computers, but many people, even in developing nations, have cell phones. That's why Facebook has 2.9 billion users. The vast majority, especially in places such as Indonesia, Brazil, and India, for example, they access Facebook with their phones.

With a phone app, you've just lowered the bar worldwide to entering the CrossFit space. You can customize a language on the app, and unlike a webpage, you can better guide the newbies through the experience. Have the app take them through a five step checklist for a newbie. Explain what CrossFit is. Show some videos of someone doing some home workouts. Explain the basics of some movements with a broomstick, and then you can reward the app user with a gold star for completing the checklist. That's why apps like Duolingo gamify everything. You can't do that with a webpage.

Heck, you can use Pukie the Clown as your little app mascot if you want to, to please the OG CrossFit truthers. Actually, a better strategy would be to be able to unlock Pukie and use him as your avatar if and when you log a Fran time in your app of under two minutes.

For those people in the world without CrossFit affiliates, you can take those newbies through another path in the app with workouts customized for home use. Now you have access to potentially millions of people in the world when they want to do CrossFit but don't have the local resources to do so, relying on the app for their home fitness using the CrossFit methodology. These are aspirational athletes who may someday join or even start their own affiliate in their area, resources and economic development permitting.

For those newbies near an affiliate, after the user wins by completing the initial newbie steps, the app can direct them to a CrossFit HQ approved affiliate. The user can message the affiliate directly through the app. No extra steps.

HQ could even sponsor an offer and cover the affiliates cost for the first week of classes or some other financial incentive to help get that newbie in the door. Affiliates will now thank HQ for already having done some of the onboarding for these newbies, and affiliates will also tremendously benefit with member growth, now that the barrier for entry has lowered and new members can be directed straight to their locations.

CrossFit HQ now has a huge carrot to incentivize affiliates to upgrade their quality. Better coaches, better business plans, all the things Don Faul has talked about to encourage affiliates to become better, but without being forced to mandate changes, and to still allow affiliates independence to run their business as they see fit.

And guess what? CrossFit HQ now has global data on the number of people interested, where they're located, how many of them are starting at which affiliates. And this is the information needed to figure out how best to direct resources: marketing, teaching, course localization, just as examples. This information at a minimum is critical for planning growth.

How does the affiliate and regular gym member benefit from this CrossFit app? Imagine that the members of the affiliates sign up for classes and pay for membership through the app. Actually, not so hard when there are already a ton of gyms out there that use similar systems, right? Programming is also listed through this app, so as an athlete, you see what your affiliate's daily or weekly programming is.

The app also allows athletes to record their WOD scores and track their progress. There is a virtual whiteboard as well. Scaling options for each WOD is listed. As an athlete, you can message other athletes in your gym. Affiliates can message their members.

You can have different forums for different interests. Are you interested in a particular topic? I know there's a significant minority of people who refuse to use Facebook or Instagram, so why use a Facebook group when you already have the CrossFit app for communicating with like-minded individuals?

Want to drop in at another location on vacation? I know from experience it can actually be difficult to get ahold of someone at an affiliate. Now you can locate and message the affiliate through the app. Pay through the app. See the daily WOD. Log your result. Everything that you would normally do at your home gym, you could do with the app at another location.

So right now you must be telling yourself, there are apps out there that do exactly this, right? SugarWOD, Beyond the Whiteboard. This is nothing new. But the official CrossFit app with the power of HQ behind it, could have some additional advantages. What if CrossFit Pro athletes like the Laura Horvaths, the Jeffrey Adlers, were also posting some of their workouts on the app?

Maybe occasionally these workouts are CAP, CrossFit Affiliate Programming WODs, or maybe some of the pro athletes have actually designed CAP WODs where they demo and do the WOD. I personally would like to know how I would do against Roman Khrennikov or Pat Vellner, even if I have to scale the heck out of the workout. I'd love to see something that they would design. I would love to see what their favorite WODs are.

Gym members could message and follow their favorite athletes on the app. Maybe some of the pro athletes would be interested in demoing some of the movements for the newbies or discussing some aspect of the L1 certification.

And now you've suddenly started merging these silos. CrossFit Sport is helping Affiliate Programming and Teaching and vice versa.

If you want others to play in the sandbox, allow Mayhem, PRVN or HWPO to offer a programming track in the app for additional fee. Or not, whatever CrossFit HQ chooses to do.

Now, affiliates have a ton of data, which HQ also has access to. How many times are members coming in? Which classes are popular? What is the churn rate? The new members coming in versus the old members leaving. Again, many affiliates are using systems that already track much of this, but now CrossFit HQ can help affiliates with aggregate data. Hey, affiliate, did you know that the average box monthly rate in your area is $50 more than what you charge? And by the way, one of the most popular times in your area is 4:00 PM but your first afternoon class happens to be 5:00 PM.

You could think even bigger. What if affiliates participating in the app could purchase discounted equipment through the app with CrossFit HQ? That would be a huge benefit for affiliates.

What if CrossFit HQ partnered with Whoop or Apple Watch? So members could overlay their fitness data on top of their WODs? I have a Whoop.

And while I can see my heart rate graph for a WOD, I would love to see it correlate precisely to where I blew up. Was it the dumbbell snatches or wall balls? And we even haven't talked about other possibilities such as a nutrition module, merchandising module, or even ad revenue potentially from the app.

All of the things that VC firms salivate over. I don't think there's one investor who wouldn't want CrossFit HQ to have this type of information, not only for marketing, potential ad revenue, but also to visualize a path to maximum growth and profitability. The information in this app will allow you to roadmap where you want to go as CrossFit HQ in the future as a business.

And as someone who believes in the CrossFit methodology, I believe I would trust my data and my information with CrossFit HQ more, or at least as much as the 50 or 60 companies right now who already have all my personal data with the apps that I use every day, especially if this path allows CrossFit truly to become the worldwide cure for chronic disease as Greg Glassman says.

We have to meet the consumer where they are, and I believe without some similar path to access to the consumer, CrossFit HQ will not achieve their true potential.

So what does the current app landscape look like right now? How about CrossFit's own app? Currently, the CrossFit Games app is primarily useful for CrossFit competition, starting with the CrossFit Open and then into quarterfinals, semifinals, and then finals. You can submit scores on the app and you can also currently use it to find your ranks on the worldwide leaderboard or filter to see where you place within your continent, country, or affiliate. You can set up custom leaderboards, but other than the Open and those that go beyond the opening to the later stages, most athletes I know don't look at that app otherwise.

And what about the other CrossFit apps out there? Currently, according to verywellfit.com, these are the best CrossFit apps of 2023. The best overall app is SugarWOD. The best budget app is SmartWOD. The best app for mobility is GoWOD. The best app for beginners, Trifecta. The best app for variety, WODRoulette. The best app for community, Beyond the Whiteboard. The best app for tracking, WOD Insight. Prices for all of these apps range from two to $12 a month on average.

If you search the iPhone app store for CrossFit, after the CrossFit Games app, which has 3,700 ratings submitted, the others listed after that include SmartWOD, HeroWOD, SugarWOD which actually has the most submitted ratings at 77,000, and is owned by Daxko LLC, then GoWOD, HWPO, the WOD Generator, Mayhem, Kilo Strength HIIT, and Trifecta.

So what do all these apps tell you about the state of CrossFit in the app space in 2023? Fragmentation, confusion, competition. What should be the easiest thing in the world? Starting CrossFit, communicating with other athletes, keeping track of your workouts, communicating with your affiliate, is actually one of the biggest obstacles.

So what do we do at our gym at CrossFit Bison? We use Zen Planner for scheduling and payments. We post the daily whiteboard as a picture in our gym's Facebook group, and we communicate with members through text, email, and Facebook. Athletes are on their own to record their progress. Some use Google Docs, some use paper notebooks. If you want to look at past performances, you have to remember the day and search the Facebook group for that whiteboard pic. Or if it's a named WOD, sometimes you can search for that name such as Fran or Murph.

So looking at the current landscape, CrossFit HQ has a window right now for establishing an app which embodies the CrossFit ethos properly. Rather than having other apps and developers shape and modify what they think the CrossFit methodology should be, CrossFit HQ should have the best app, not only to control the CrossFit message, but also ensure that CrossFit is implemented in the correct way by affiliates, athletes, and anyone else interested in CrossFit.

On our HerdFit podcast in February, we talked to Don Faul about having an app. And we brought up many of these same issues. He didn't disagree with us, but neither did he say that they were exploring app development. After the podcast interview, I informally asked him again about an app, and he asked me directly how I thought this app development could be accomplished.

I suggested maybe they buy out an existing app much like Facebook did with Instagram. But the read between the answer lines, which I got, I think highlights one of the big issues, hobbling CrossFit right now, which is lack of money.

Don Faul said that CrossFit is a relatively small operation compared to many other companies, and right now he said they're punching well above their weight. Couple this with the recent layoffs and the rumors, which could be totally untrue, that CrossFit lost a ton of money on Semifinals, resulting in Justin Bergh leaving. And it's just my personal guess, but I think they don't think they have the capital, personnel or wherewithal to implement an app, which I'm describing.

So if the answer why CrossFit isn't doing an app is because of the reasons I've described, because it would be overly complex, it would cost too much money, or there aren't enough resources within the company right now, then I would say okay.

But if we can agree that such an app would be a tremendous asset for CrossFit, what part of it could we do right now? Could CrossFit HQ start a skunkworks project where you get a bunch of diehard individuals to get them going? Like a Man on the Moon project? Maybe partner with a player like Whoop, Apple or Google Health?

Like I said, this window of opportunity is small and closing. At CrossFit's peak in 2018, there were many fewer challenges than what CrossFit faces now. We need to leapfrog ahead. Big vision, big goals, big successes.

My weekly thankful is the CrossFit Games, which were last week. I attended two years ago in person in Madison, and I watched a ton of it, as always this year. And it is really one of the best, if not the best athletic event in the world. The storylines, the emotion, the effort, it all comes out in a week of amazing performances and sometimes heartbreak.

I had tears just like many others, watching Roman Khrennikov on test 11 with his injured foot, and when he talked about wanting his son to know he was fighting to the end. I saw Emma Cary's tears after failing so close on the legless rope climbs, and I saw the joy and elation of the athletes after event wins and then making it to the podium.

I can't think of another sport where the training is more difficult or grueling for a professional athlete than CrossFit, and I'm inspired and I love watching their accomplishments, their ups and downs, just like so many other CrossFit athletes. Thank you.

If you have any thoughts or comments, please DM me @BotoxAndBurpeesPodcast on Instagram or on YouTube at youtube.com/@BotoxAndBurpees. Thank you very much.