Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to customer acquisition. You said you have 85,000 people in your Facebook group. How did you get to these kinds of numbers?

Nick Shaw: Our number one strategy is social media. That was pretty evident early on. Being in the health and fitness industry, it’s very visual-oriented. People want specific results. They want to look a certain way. If you can get people results, people post and talk about how well the program works. We repost and spotlight on certain clients. People see that and it just takes off. It just snowballs and has an exponential growth.

We have almost 330,000 followers on our main Instagram account. Instagram is the perfect medium for what we do because >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you’ve created more of a content business.

Nick Shaw: Yes. I would say we’re in the education business. We give people the education on what they need to eat, when, and how much.

Sramana Mitra: An online learning kind of program. What’s the form factor of how you distribute this?

Nick Shaw: Early on, it was all Excel files. We recently changed it to PDF format. It was originally all on email. We’ve since changed. Now it’s all downloadable right on our website. A person orders, and within a few minutes, they’re able to get their files. It’s right in their account.  >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you learn about how many clients could each coach service?

Nick Shaw: A lot of it depends on the coach. All of our coaches were either in school or professors. Currently, we have over 25 coaches – 20 of them have Ph.D.’s, seven are registered dieticians and one is a family physician. This isn’t necessarily their full-time job. How many clients they can take on varies a little bit. Some may want to keep it relatively small. A good rough number to cap it at is probably a hundred at any given time. That would be an outlier. The average is 40 to 50.

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that is strategic in how you have scaled this business besides figuring out a reliable way to pair the customers with coaches who can then customize their training routine for this $100 to $150 per month price point?

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Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to that moment in 2012 when you started RP. What did you start with? Was there an app or was it straight away online consultation?

Nick Shaw: It was just me and my buddy. We were already working with clients online and in-person. It was this idea of, “Let’s join forces.” There was no funding. It was just him and me founding it. We didn’t really have these great visions that would take off and grow into something a lot bigger. It has become that now. It was just one of those things where he and I loved health and fitness.

We would work with our close friends and family. We would do a good job with them. We would just work off referrals. That’s how it all got started. >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.

Nick has built a very interesting e-learning company and addressed scalability with nifty strategic choices. Read on. You’ll learn a lot.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Nick Shaw: I was born and raised in the state of Michigan. I grew up with the goal of wanting to go to the University of Michigan. It’s a top-level school. I was lucky enough to get accepted there. I started in the Sports Management program. I originally wanted to be an athletic director. >>>

Bootstrapping with Paycheck to $15 Million from Tennessee: Gene Caballero, CEO of GreenPal (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How big a company do you think you can build? Obviously, you probably have a sense of the total market that you can access. What is the size of that market?

Gene Caballero: The landscaping industry is about a $9 billion a year industry. Our TAM is almost limitless. In 2019, we want to be in all the major top 100 markets. Then in 2020, we’re going to double back and hit some of those sub-markets in those areas. By then, our revenues should be in the neighborhood of $80 million a year.

Sramana Mitra: Right now, you’re doing it with just the two of you. Do you use a lot of outsourced resources? >>>

Bootstrapping with Paycheck to $15 Million from Tennessee: Gene Caballero, CEO of GreenPal (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk a little bit more about the Facebook outreach? What did you learn? What have you learned about doing the Facebook outreach? Whom do you target?

Gene Caballero: We target landscaping professionals on a geocoding basis. We are able to get those down to about $3 or $4 a click. That has been our goal. Now we’re getting about 10 vendors a day as opposed to 10 vendors a week, and we’re able to hyper-target specific areas. Facebook outreach has been a gamechanger for us.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like landscape professionals are identifying themselves on Facebook for you to be able to target 

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Bootstrapping with Paycheck to $15 Million from Tennessee: Gene Caballero, CEO of GreenPal (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to reach the $1 million annual revenue level?

Gene Caballero: We did that in 2015.

Sramana Mitra: This is revenue – not gross merchandise value, right?

Gene Caballero: Yes. >>>