Mike (00:02):
All the cool people are talking about NFTs, non-fungible tokens. So what are NFTs and can gym owners benefit from them? Chris Cooper explains on this edition of Two-Brain Radio.
Chris (00:12):
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Chris (00:32):
Hey everybody, it’s Coop here and today I’m talking about NFTs, non-fungible tokens. For gyms. If you’ve been following NFTs, you might think that they’re just like people buying JPEGs like they’re buying baseball cards. They buy them, they trade them and they appreciate in value only if other people use them. But NFTs are not just about buying the rights to JPEGs or GIFs. The real opportunity is to make money through your own proven work. And if you’ve been producing content or programming or any kind of media at all, there’s a real opportunity here for you.
Chris (01:10):
The world of fitness training and coaching is changing really rapidly. And I think that the evolution of web 3.0 is gonna create a lot more opportunities for gym owners who are on top of it. So I wanted to share a little bit about NFTs. And before I do that, I’m gonna talk about web 3.0. Web 3.0 is what’s basically on the horizon for the internet in the next couple of years. Think about it like this: Web 1.0 was like one-directional info. Every website kind of looked like a brochure. You didn’t participate in anything you just consumed. Right? Lots of people back then said, I don’t even need the internet. Cause I’ve got these really good brochures or I’ve got the yellow pages or whatever. Web 2.0 was two directional. Everybody could upload content and everybody could have conversations, but the guys, and they’re all guys, who built the platforms, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram for content and for conversations, they make all the money, right?
Chris (02:12):
Like their product is actually us. They’re selling advertisers access to us. Web 3.0, everybody is their own platform. They own their own content. They can license their own content and they can even create their own money for transactions. Web 3.0 is basically built on the blockchain, which lends another layer of security and also anonymity. So right now, for example, if I wanted to license my ramp-up program, I would need lawyers and contracts and a ton of oversight. But if it was an NFT built on blockchain, we could say, everybody, go ahead and use it, copy it, build on it, add or subtract. And every time they sold their version, I would collect automatically, like a royalty payment. All the stuff that takes a ton of legalese and licensing and contracts and oversight right now, that’s not gonna be required anymore. The blockchain also creates a ton of anonymity, which breaks the current advertising algorithm.
Chris (03:14):
You can’t pay Zuckerberg for access to the audience anymore on web 3.0. So instead you truly own your audience and your content. For our kids, this means they could like build a castle in Minecraft and then add it to a race car game like Forza. And if somebody sees it in their game or on YouTube or Twitch on their streaming channel or in his metaverse room on Facebook or whatever, they can license that from him. And he’ll create like, he’ll get like a royalty forever and they’ll have it in their game or whatever. So content creators and audience builders are going to win. So I’ll use a couple of examples of how this could impact you in your gym business. All right. So I’ll start with just selling programming and keep in mind that none of us have any idea of just how far this could go.
Chris (04:05):
So the first ideas that I share with you, five years from now are gonna look kind of quaint, like what? That was his best idea? But the reality is nobody has a really good indication of like what these new opportunities are. And I was listening to Nivel last week and he said that right now, there are 8 billion people on earth who are trying to have a career or a job, but with web 3.0, there will be 8 billion different careers or jobs. Everybody will make money a slightly different way. And no two careers will be exact carbon copies of each other, like they were in the old industrial. So let’s get back to gym owners and NFTs. Let’s start with programming. So when box programming came on the scene, boxprogramming.com, there was no real infrastructure out there. Jason Brown was one of the first and he had to create the product, but also build the audience.
Chris (04:57):
He was an inventor. So we promoted boxprogramming.com Two-Brain because I thought it was an amazing way for people to save money who owned gyms. And he connected to our audience that way. But then more options came online, right? Chris Spealler had something and you saw a bunch of other people jump in too. The problem was that most of the others didn’t have an audience. Although, you know, Speal did. The guys with good programming who couldn’t access an audience didn’t make any money. So the people with the audience kind of became the gatekeepers, but then some platforms saw a different opportunity to connect a large number of programmers with the audience that they had. Right? So there was this list of, or a little bit of democrization happening like Sugarwod and Wodify created programming marketplaces and trainerize started doing this for personal trainers a little bit and exercise.com was working on it a bit.
Chris (05:54):
And what happens when you have a wide open marketplace like that? Well, two things, you get commoditization pricing, right? The price drops dramatically approaching zero, and you get differentiated value. So most of the programming that were on these platforms dropped in price from 200 bucks a month to about 20. And of course not, everybody went this route. Some of the gatekeepers, the people who controlled the audience, picked one type of programming, and they recommended that over everyone else. CrossFit picked HAM plan and renamed it, CrossFit Affiliate Programming. I picked Brooks Difiore’s programming because it had the best adherence and retention rates in the world. And I renamed that Two-Brain Programming. These aren’t bad moves. My job is to pick the best using data and say, use this. CrossFit HQ’s job is to increase values to its shareholders. And the best way to do that is to add value to its customers, the affiliates. But all of this is just to say that creators had to work with gatekeepers like me or CrossFit HQ to sell their creations. More on that in just a minute.
Chris (06:57):
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Chris (07:39):
What NFTs will do is allow you to license your programming to other gyms and trainers without the middle man. So if you can build a program and build an audience, then you don’t need somebody else to build a platform for you.
Chris (07:53):
You can just sell it to them. You can allow them to tweak the programming or the nutrition plan that you sell and you can still collect a royalty on it, even if they change it and resell it. If they’re using the base, you’ll still collect a royalty. You can be the licensor of your own content without lawyers and intellectual property contracts and platforms like SugarWod. If you connect to somebody with a large community, you can leverage their trust to sell your creation. And if you’re part of that community yourself, then you can build on that platform, which is a win for the community, for you, and for its leaders, because their platform just became more valuable. So trainerizw is doing this a little bit by allowing trainers to build specialty programs and then sell it to other trainers on the trainerize platform and Chalk-It Pro seems to be doing it really well.
Chris (08:42):
And they’ll be scaling that up in the next year, I guess. So basically let’s say that you’ve got this amazing pull-up progression program or an amazing on-ramp and it’s working really, really well. Well, you can put it on their platform and you can sell it to other gyms around the world and it’s all automated, but of course, because they are the gatekeepers to that audience, they’re going to keep a share of that. And also nobody’s gonna police usage. So somebody could copy your program, pay for it once and resell it. But web 3.0, built on the blockchain, will have automatic tracking built in. And so that won’t be possible. So this doesn’t mean that you’re gonna be selling programming for $300 per month again, I think those days are done, but what you might do is sell a bit of programming for $5 per month per gym, over and over and over again.
Chris (09:29):
So maybe you create the next like Murph or Fran, and you register the NFT and people license the ability to use that workout. Or maybe you set up the next charity WOD and you license that for $3 per user. And that’s how you fundraise, right? You can do that worldwide. Maybe you publish a clear exercise progression or your on-ramp program, or your supplement sales pitch, and people license that, and you earn a commission on it every time they use it. So here’s an example. Somebody in the Two-Brain group said, I just signed up a baseball team. Does anybody have sample workouts? And within six minutes, she had a full program from somebody else. So there are models of this in coaching and NFTs will unlock this world for a lot of people. This happens all the time in Two-Brain groups, someboday says, oh, I need this resource.
Chris (10:18):
You know, I need an on-ramp program. I need an Instagram ad. Somebody else has it. It happens right now because I’ve been trying to really encourage this with business by democratizing tactics in Two-Brain. So if somebody has a brand new staff playbook template, somebody has a canva template for, you know, their nutrition kickstart program. They’ll offer it to everybody else in the Two-Brain group. People will take them up on it. When I spot it, I’ll offer to pay them for it so that we can retain the rights and give it to Two-Brain clients forever and reward them a little bit. And this is just, it’s a way to democratize this process, but NFTs will speed this up. So that doesn’t mean that we take a vote on our curriculum. What it means is that if you have a proven creation, like an ad or some Instagram post or a nutrition guide or whatever, then I will buy it from you and I’ll give it to everyone at Two-Brain.
Chris (11:08):
And we do this five or six times every month. Someone in our group will share their kids program. And if it’s great and it’s helpful, then I’ll pay them for the rights. And I’ll put it in the Two-Brain modules forever. If someone was really great, they could make money from being in Two-Brain, simply by creating a ton of value for everybody else in Two-Brain. And if you want some examples, this is how Gym Lead Machine got started. This is how Two-Brain Coaching got started. This is how Two-Brain Programming got started. But of course, when you’re trying to do this, there are going to be some problems. So first is I’m the gatekeeper. So I have to like, notice your thing. And I’m pretty skeptical. Like I want actual proof instead of just picking your programming because I like you. So there is a burden of evidence.
Chris (11:49):
You have to prove that this thing actually worked. And third, unfortunately, if I think that your thing is bullshit, then I won’t buy it and you’ll get mad and leave and try to rip hole on your way out. That’s also happened. But NFTs get people around this problem of gatekeepers. And at first, I hate to say this, but when you’re publishing an NFT for other people to license, you’re not gonna have to meet that burden of proof. People will buy your VA service or your kids programming template or your marketing plan simply because it’s available. And they like you. Now over time, the market will wise up and demand proof just like I do, but that’s just the nature of a free market economy. I said that in the future, there will be 8 billion careers. Your kid’s career path won’t look like yours or like mine.
Chris (12:33):
One of the ways that they can make money is to create media or content that people find valuable. The other way is to be really good at creating an audience or connecting with people who have an audience or a community and people who are great at both will probably win really big. NFTs are really the mechanism to do that. The reason that self-published artists and musicians and writers are really excited about web 3.0 is that we remove the gatekeepers and the middlemen. And if they can build an audience for their work, they’re probably set for life and they don’t need lawyers or IP people or contracts. And they don’t have to be like policing the legalese for the rest of their life. I think that this is potentially a massive opportunity for gym owners to build content that they own forever, instead of putting it on Mark Zuckerberg’s platform.
Chris (13:23):
And he owns it. To license that to other people, but most importantly, to work collaboratively with others. Wow. What does that mean for collaboration? It means that you don’t have to be insular anymore. You don’t have to have this mindset of me against them. It means that you can work with the local yoga instructor, the local swim coach, the local running coach. And you can put parts of your programs together like Legos and everybody gets paid and you don’t really have to worry about who’s collecting the money and who gets what percentage. NFTs will take care of all of that for you. The simplest way to think about NFT is as like a Lego brick that you own. And you’re putting in somebody else’s castle. And when somebody buys that castle or rents a night in your castle, every brick in that castle is going to earn a little bit of the total share. That’s what web 3.0 is bringing, but it’s really the opportunity that exists on the blockchain beyond anonymity, beyond security that I think is gonna play a real role in the fitness industry in the next five years,
Mike (14:31):
Two-Brain Radio comes out twice a week and features all the info you need to run a success full fitness business. Subscribe so you don’t miss a show. Now here’s Coop one more time.
Chris (14:39):
Thanks for listening to Two-Brain Radio. If you aren’t in the Gym Owners United group on Facebook, this is my personal invitation to join. It’s the only public Facebook group that I participate in. And I’m there all the time with tips, tactics, and free resources. I’d love to network with you and help you grow your business. Join Gym Owners United on Facebook.
