Episode 58: Entering the Fitness Industry with Lauren Foundos, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Fortë

In this week’s episode of Subscriptions: Scaled, we pick the brains of Lauren Foundos, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of fitness brand FORTË. 

We learn everything from the company's technologies to Lauren’s experience moving from trading to the fitness industry. 

Keep reading to learn more about the episode.

FORTË

FORTË is a white-label solution providing access to boutique studio classes coached by leading fitness experts globally. 

Lauren explains that the team has built an end-to-end solution for gym chains like the UFC. They’ve created the solution from the hardware and streaming to producing live content on the platform.

The team at FORTË has spent a couple of years developing this automated hardware and software to enable live streaming for customers. Then, they provide gyms with a branded platform and app that integrates into their ecosystem.

This platform is live with leaderboards, social chats, and more. It’s integrated with the gym’s CRM and booking management system for easy accessibility. Gyms can give their members access to the platform to stream classes.

While many big gyms want to use their own product, FORTË aims to power the big brands. Because of this, the team has moved its focus solely to a B2B model.

Lauren Foundos

The episode begins with Lauren explaining how she moved into fitness from her background in trading. Then we learn what led Lauren to start FORTË. 

Lauren explains that she’s been into fitness her whole life. She was even an athlete growing up, and fitness has always been something she’s very passionate about.

She explains that she’s played sports her whole life, and working out fuels the core of her existence.

However, when starting FORTË, technology and marketing were entirely new realms for Lauren. 

Lauren loved her career and never thought she’d leave her previous job. But she began to go to the gym more and developed a vision for what she thought the industry's evolution would look like.

Because of this vision, Lauren knew she needed to figure out a way to make it happen. She didn’t want to miss out on making her ideas come to life.

Lauren also talks about her experience establishing a subscription service for the first time. We then learn how the FORTË subscription works and what types of classes you can expect to follow.

Using personal experience to grow FORTË

Lauren shares that she’s used plenty of personal experience to grow her company, which she feels is her secret weapon. 

During the pandemic, Lauren tried to figure out how to take her favorite class. That helped her think about how gyms could utilize technology.

Lauren shares that she’d stay awake at night at the start of the pandemic and think about how she could make her company work and whether her product would be useful going forward.

She’d question how to give people the same flexibility that she’d want and how to provide gyms the ability to receive more engagement from people. As Lauren’s a gym user herself, she believes this helped her develop her ideas more easily.

Lauren explains that a year after the pandemic started, data showed that many people were following her same behaviors and thoughts when it came to workouts and using the gym. This shared experience helped her trust her gut.

A big part of Lauren’s decision-making relies on what she’s doing along with what other people are doing. Lauren explains she likes to listen to people and understand their behaviors to see their points of view. 

Technology

A large part of the episode surrounds the technologies Lauren uses in FORTË and the challenges she’s had. We also learn how Lauren decided which technologies to use for her company.

Lauren explains that her team has dealt with many challenges with technology in creating FORTË. 

One of the biggest challenges was when the company began scaling and getting bigger customers. While getting a really big customer was exciting, it was also highly challenging because the team hadn’t tested their technology at that scale.

FORTË hadn’t experienced that many simultaneous live users, and it became a problem. Lauren’s advice is not to build automated testing for millions of customers you don’t have, but also to be prepared for what’s to come. Lauren explains there should be a balance. 

When it came to choosing technologies, initially, it came down to money. Lauren explained that the team looked at many infrastructure platforms like Wowza and UStream. However, they would have had to pay a significant amount to simply test live streaming.

Lauren explains that Microsoft has an excellent startup program that allowed the team to get off the ground with their credit system. So initially, pricing was fundamental to making certain business decisions.

When selecting technologies, Lauren shares that it comes down to money and who makes a good offer a lot of the time. Of course, the reliability and quality of the tools matter too.

Lauren goes on to discuss her customer base and also talks about using personal experience to grow the company.

Covid-19 and FORTË

We also discover how the pandemic affected FORTË and how the company grew. 

Just before the pandemic, Lauren and her team planned to shift their focus on making FORTË a white-label product.

Incredibly, FORTË went from a couple of people running a startup to well over 60 people during the pandemic.

Lauren shares that at first, like many, she was stressed due to the pandemic. Many gyms were closed, which of course, affected FORTË. 

However, many gym-goers were using digital even before the pandemic. While the gyms didn’t want this to happen, there was no stopping the trend from growing throughout the pandemic.

Lauren believes that, in many ways, this trend forced gyms to shift the way they worked and move more towards digital. She believes that, ultimately, this was good for the industry.

Advice for entrepreneurs 

Toward the end of the episode, Lauren gives her best advice to entrepreneurs and people thinking of building their own subscription service.

Lauren explains that pricing was one of the mistakes they made at FORTË. She shares that the team made the mistake of having a high price point compared to competitors. Dealing with this problem was an interesting experience and a learning lesson for the company.

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