Monday, Dec 27, 2021 • 40min
Alexandra Bonetti, The Talent Hack
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While owning and operating studio gym spaces in New York, Alexandra Bonetti knew that it shouldn’t have to be this hard to establish processes for issues all gyms have like recruiting new members, hiring qualified talent, and getting substitutes for classes, to name a few. So she founded The Talent Hack which is a platform geared towards helping experts working in the fitness and wellness industry achieve tangible success. In this episode, she discusses her philosophy that everyone has superpowers and she is passionate about discovering those talents and making them work for the individual and how to be nimble as a new company in a complicated industry.
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Talking about
Speakers
(3)
Alexandra Bonetti
Darrell Etherington
Jordan Crook
Transcript
Verified
Darrell Etherington
00:00
Hello and welcome to
TechCrunch's
Found podcast. I'm Darrell Etherington, one of your hosts, and I'm joined by the coach to my aspiring athlete's would be bodybuilder.Share
Jordan Crook
00:14
That's what you want to be as a bodybuilder?
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Darrell Etherington
00:15
Yeah, you gotta get me into shape with me into bodybuilding shape. I need to like go up there, and you know, get all, I need to get greased up and get, do the fake tan and pull the poses.
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Jordan Crook
00:27
I'm Jordan Crook, and I'm probably i'll equipped to do that. I'm actually on my way to go contracting coil poisoning from
Chipotle
after this, so, but work towards it.Share
Darrell Etherington
00:37
I love chipotle, chipotle is health. This episode brought to you by chipotle.
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Jordan Crook
00:42
Sponsored by Mcdonald's.
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Darrell Etherington
00:43
Is not actually is sponsored by anything, but that's good because we can tell whatever stories we want, which is how we like it.
Share
00:55
This week, we're telling you a great story about Alexandra Bonetti from The Talent Hack. So she's the CEO and founder of Talent Hack, which is a platform that provides business tools for fitness instructors and trainers and coaches and gives them basically everything they need to get their business going as an indie provider of those services. It's a thing that I think Jordan wants because she's, a fitness trainer.
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Jordan Crook
01:21
I'm not a fitness trainer, I'm the opposite of a fitness, I'm a sleep trainer if anything, or a rest trainer. I mean, I thought Alexandra had a bunch of interesting things that she talked about in this conversation, and we didn't get to even like half of them because I've covered talent half before, and she's very interesting, founder, and we only scraped the surface, but it's still jam packed with cool stuff.
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Darrell Etherington
01:43
It was great, and her experience as a gym owner herself previously definitely influenced the perspective on creating this product, she can tell you more about that. So without further ado, let's go ahead and hear from Alexandra.
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02:02
Hey Alexandra, how 's it going?
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Alexandra Bonetti
02:03
Hi Daryl, hi Jordan, thanks for having me.
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Darrell Etherington
02:05
Yeah, thanks for joining us. So we're super excited to hear more about your founder story. But do you want to give us just kind of like a high level overview of what the Talent Hack is and maybe also what spaces by the Talent Hack is?
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Alexandra Bonetti
02:18
Yep, so Talent Hack is a vertical sass, full stack career platform to empower fitness and wellness talent to achieve financial wellness, which means that we build software to power and fitness and wellness creators and their relationship with their clients and SPACES is our software products.
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02:35
So within our suite we have a job board, we have education, we have a community product and SPACES is the software, the transaction platform.
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Darrell Etherington
02:45
Yeah, so I would love to hear about how you got into this business. Like my understanding of it, I think Jordan knows more about, she wrote an article for the website that we work on
TechCrunch
. For me, it looks like a Shopify
, but like for personal trainers is my understanding of it. Is that like a fair metaphor for it? Or analogy.Share
Alexandra Bonetti
03:04
Very fair. Yes, it's a business in a box for fitness and wellness creator, so personal trainers, fitness instructors, meditation teachers, health coaches, nutritionists, everyone who powers our vertical and the majority of our talent want to spend their time programming building community, not necessarily segmenting their client base for optimal marketing tactics.
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03:30
So I think the biggest difference is that I think of other platforms as systems of record, that kind of record, who comes, who goes, they build you the business tools to run your business. We think about a system of action, which is how can we action on behalf of our creators to really supercharge their growth. So we are segmenting the clients in the background. We're marketing as much as we can on behalf of the creators themselves. So that's the biggest difference.
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Darrell Etherington
03:55
Great, so how did you come to this? Is like something you wanted to do where you create yourself or was it just something you recognize as a gap in the industry, or what was kind of the origin story there?
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Alexandra Bonetti
04:05
Both I owned and operated fitness studios in
New York
for close to 10 years and the first probably three years of that, I was teaching most of the classes, the first year I was teaching all the classes, it was just me running the entire shop and as we grew when we had more locations and our staff grew in number, it became harder and harder to hire great instructors, great coaches, great nutritionist to power the business.Share
04:34
And I also realized that there was a big power dynamic imbalance where the studio and the business had all of the financial leverage, not to say that we were raking it in, and it was a super profitable business, but the power was sitting on the business, and it felt like the majority of the heavy lift was coming from the talent.
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04:55
You know, they were programming the classes, play listing, building the relationship, reaching back out to clients to bring them back in, responding to their social media DMs, and that grew over time. You know, when I opened my first studio Instagram didn't exist, and you can imagine how much creators have gained in power, but the financial leverage was still not on their side.
Share
05:15
So it came both from, you know, I wish I had it as a creator and as a small business owner and there's a really clear power that these creators have in their hands, and they're having a really hard time capitalizing it, how can we help them? You know, get paid what they deserve.
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Darrell Etherington
05:31
It didn't really exist, right? Like pre-Instagram or pre other social platforms, like you had trainers and people like their trainers, but it was I guess all word of mouth, right? Like you had no real reach beyond your immediate geography really, did you? Or maybe people did, and I'm not aware of it, but I don't think that category of celebrity existed at the time, right? Or like influencer.
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Alexandra Bonetti
05:53
Yeah, this, this scale is very different, right? 10 years ago you still taught at a gym, you taught at a studio, you had your private training clients and maybe, you know, you taught at a park, but now you have 50 people at a class, a few 100 clients that you can serve. And I think that the pandemic was definitely a catalyst to the talent, realizing that they could scale their business without the middle man.
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06:17
And it was also proof to clients that they could transact directly with their talent and build a relationship directly with them, which, you know, it feels more personal, it's more exciting for you to put money in the pocket of your creator when that's fair, you know, other times you want to go to a business and get your eucalyptus spelling towels and shower in the facility and, and then you pay that business.
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06:39
So I think that there 's a really good case for these options to exist.
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Darrell Etherington
06:43
So how much of this do you think that was precipitated by like the pellets like peloton had their phenomenon where like, you know, people started, oh, I have my favorite trainer on the peloton.
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06:52
And then, and then for me, my experience with it a lot has been through
Apple
Fitness actually because I'm an adamant user of Apple
Fitness and you know, their trainers come on, and I'm like, oh, like there's actually a guy named Darryl on there now, and I'm quite partial to him because we have the same name, but like how much did that help? Was that a big factor in it too? And kind of like turning this into a category of like mega influence?Share
Alexandra Bonetti
07:16
Yeah, I think the, what you're referencing is our kind of passion for personalities. I would attribute it to social media more than, you know, pre-social, you had celebrities, but now you can really follow people, right, different personalities. And so I think that that's been really amplified by social media.
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07:35
The second trends that you're referencing is the unbundling of the gym and that I think has been happening for a while, but that was more precipitated by, by the last few years of people having to figure it out on their own.
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Darrell Etherington
07:49
Right, right. And what do you think the relationship of that is going forward? Like, do you think they continue to coexist productively or is there a lot of friction there? Like, are you seeing a lot of pushbacks from the gyms about like, well we don't really want trainers to set up as independence?
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08:06
The customer relationship must be an issue or a contention even though we're talking about how like they can be very different things, but like, somebody I know really like their trainer, and then they moved away, and then they want to maintain the relationship with the trainers, so they can do like at home remote sessions with that person because they have a lot of high level of trust or whatever right? Like, how much is that an issue of contention?
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Alexandra Bonetti
08:28
If I wanted to generalize for the industry as in having sat in the chair of being a studio owner, you kind of are forced to play into it because your talent holds the relationship to the client right? So if they leave that's not you don't want to be in that position, you really want to be in a position where your talent loves working where you are.
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08:50
And so it takes that dance to make that really productive and positive. If I were to cut it right and take a micro look at it, it's a super fragmented industry, hundreds of thousands of small shops across the U. S. And across the world and different studios have very different approaches, so you have mostly the bigger studios, the big franchises who are really the minority, you know they take up a few percentage points of the market, they want their talent to be their talent, and they can pay accordingly, so they can hire people full time.
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09:26
The large majority of the industry is made up of small businesses who have call it 10 instructors or you know 20 instructors, you don't give them a full time job, they're working 5 10 15 hours a week at your studio.
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09:42
So you know that they're they have other jobs, they have to in order to pay their bills and there 's a really positive symbiotic relationship when studios are pro that, so the same followers who are following them on social media and taking their zoom classes are showing up to their in person classes and that 's a really big top of funnel discovery moment for clients to also end up in the brick and mortar shops.
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10:07
So if I had to bet on it, I would bet that the majority of the industry really plays into it and it 's getting more out of that symbiotic relationship than not.
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Darrell Etherington
10:17
Well, that's good to think about because it's like no one's thinking like, oh, I own this person or I or the relation their customer relationship is my customer relationship right there thinking like we're working together to achieve this kind of things and like maybe they go, but it kind of comes out in the wash because maybe somebody else comes, and they bring their customer base when they come and maybe there's some whales though, maybe there's some fitness whales out there who are like, is that true?
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10:38
Is it lumpy? And that like there's some people who account for the majority of the spend in the fitness industry or is it kind of like evenly dispersed in terms of like who pays and how much they pay.
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Alexandra Bonetti
10:47
In the industry, yes, there are, you know, the big companies, peloton being a really obvious, you know, 30 billion market cap company. In our platform, its creator economy textbook definition, you know, there's a really nice distribution. The people who are making most of the money don't necessarily have the biggest audiences.
Share
11:08
So we have people on the platform with a few 1000 Instagram followers who are making $30,000 a month in revenue. And we have people with 30,000 followers who are making $10,000 a month in revenue. So it's you realize how important the depth of the relationship to the consumer really is kind of beyond the numbers, which is more of the fluff.
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Darrell Etherington
11:31
And do you offer assistance with that part of it? Do you offer like analytics and kind of like how to do how to build stronger relationships and maybe more profitable over time relationship?
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Alexandra Bonetti
11:40
Yes, so we think about our tech, however much the technology can do for them, we action on that and that's our number one line of defense. But we really believe in the power of the creator and that relationship that they cultivate with their clients, and we think that we're never going to be able to replace with technology nor do we want to, you know, really think about building technology that empowers the human connection, not it doesn't replace it.
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12:05
And so we really encourage that, that really special connection that people have with their coaches across wellness pillars, and we do that through education as much as possible.
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12:16
So we have courses from how to build a community to how to build your personal brand and social media, the things that we know that, you know, even the best ML and AI r is just not going to get right, you know, there's no soul to it, so, so that's, we really try to empower the creator as much as possible through education.
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Darrell Etherington
12:34
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I've never turned to AI or like computer generated, I can't imagine it would be good.
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Jordan Crook
12:42
Or it might be like a really good one day, right? Like it might be like "this is exactly what Jordan has to do with her soft skills".
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Alexandra Bonetti
12:52
And that actually that is how we think about algorithmic, so I won't go into the AI ML specifics, but how we think about algorithmly delivering a better service or technology is we can remove a bunch of the stuff that humans don't need to do or don't want to think about or don't need to figure out themselves so that they can have more time to really connect with each other, right?
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13:15
So I can better guide your wellness journey. I can more easily recommend who you should see and how long that next workout should be and how to push yourself and set goals, all of that via technology.
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13:28
But then your coach shows up and that's where the science and the data really proves that having that person is going to keep you in it for longer, you're gonna enjoy it more and that's ultimately when, when you see results and where the impact comes from.
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Darrell Etherington
13:42
Jordan, me and you're going to build an app that just sends you a push notification like on a schedule determined by algorithm, and it's like dude 20 crunches now.
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Jordan Crook
13:50
I thought you were talking about AI I think we're talking about aI that could replace the education she's talking about like, which would be even better.
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Darrell Etherington
13:59
Yeah, I know, I know, but I want, I want that app to live in the world.
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Jordan Crook
14:03
Run a mile just like randomly in the middle of a Zoom call. It's like run a mile, you fail! To like, nothing encouraging about it, just like.
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Darrell Etherington
14:14
We're laughing about it, but it's almost real, right? Like you're watching now, so it's like stand up, and you're like, come on.
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Jordan Crook
14:20
I know it's like breathe. Like, don't tell me to breathe, like as soon as you tell me to breathe, then I start thinking that I have to tell myself to breathe. If I have to tell myself then for my body is like, "oh you're telling me to breathe, so I don't have to do it for you" and then I feel like I can't breathe. It's really vicious cycle.
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Alexandra Bonetti
14:38
I feel like I'm having a focus group right now.
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Jordan Crook
14:41
That's what this turns into, everything.
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Alexandra Bonetti
14:42
Yes, I'm writing things down.
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Jordan Crook
14:45
I have a question for you. I assume that the entry point for Talent Hack was like, okay, there's a bunch of existing fitness creators out there, wellness creators out there. Like, let's bring them on, but then we're also seeing like on the side this whole great resignation thing and, and like a super big jump and boost in people's interest in things like fitness and wellness, right?
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15:06
Like with the pandemic layered and everyone was like, am I going to die? And they're like, I better get healthy. I'm curious if like what it's looking like on your side in terms of like new creators and his talent had a good place for them? Or do they need to be established and kind of have an existing following and have like, what's your take on that?
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Alexandra Bonetti
15:25
Just recently, you know, in the past six months, more than we have since we started. We've seen a lot of new people joining the workforce. It can be as a hobby, right? As a part-time. You want to teach one class. We see a lot of moms trying to teach a few classes after drop off to make some extra cash, as well as people leaving their jobs and doing this full time and a few things.
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15:48
I'll say one is, yes, Talent Hack is a place where you can get started, you might not start selling content straight away, or you might start with our education. But what's really interesting about this industry's education is that every Pilates and Yoga studio you've ever walked into has an education arm, right, they certify people in their method.
Share
16:09
There are call it 10 really large companies that kind of own education in the space, certifications that were established 30 years ago, and so the education that people are consuming right now is relevant, right? I mean anatomy programming, things that you need to know how to do as a trainer, but you're kind of missing the other half that's evolved in the past 30 years.
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16:30
People are, how do you build community? How do you build digital brands? And how do you sell on social media? If you have clients, they're not just asking about fitness anymore. They're coming to you about sleep, about nutrition, about mental health. And that doesn't mean that you need to be a nutritionist, but you need to know some basic science and data. And so we think a lot about how do we empower, and how do we educate this next wave of creators, be it part-time to full time?
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16:59
What does the modern creator need to know that's not necessarily being taught right now. So, all of that to say, Talent Hack is a really good place to start. And I would argue is the best place to start because you really are getting a more holistic education into the practice and whatever we can't teach we send you to the right place. So we're sending, you know, we're sending you to the right certifications, and we have really close relationships with all of them. Yeah.
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Darrell Etherington
18:21
I can remember like the first time I got a gym membership, which I remember using it once and then not ever again. Like I used it for one day, and then I paid for the entire year and I did not use it one other day, and it was pretty funny, but.
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Alexandra Bonetti
18:36
You are all of us Darrell.
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Jordan Crook
18:37
You got a gym membership?
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Darrell Etherington
18:38
This was like, this is a long time ago, this, I don't even want to say how many years because I'll be dating myself. But like, but my point is I remember going to that and there was like a trainer that they assigned me for like the intro session or whatever, and it never even would have occurred to me to be like, "oh, like what should I be eating or like anything else" again dating myself.
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18:57
But like at that time I was like, "oh you're the muscles guy, I go to you, and you teach me how to get the muscles" and then.
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Alexandra Bonetti
19:02
And that's all I need, right? And I feel like 10 years ago we weren't thinking about all the different layers that wellness has and it's so complicated to navigate even with, you know, the best app, and you can be wearing all of your wearables, and you have all of the data translating that into action is extremely overwhelming.
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Darrell Etherington
19:20
Yeah, and yet people assume that if you're the fitness person, like now it's changed entirely. And then the assumption is you'll be able to tell me all about all I'll go to you and be like, okay, so like, well how should I change my diet? And how should I change my activity? How should I change my sleep pattern, and you'll have all the answers to it, right? Which is, that's a lot of stuff to keep track of. It's crazy that we do expect that now.
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Alexandra Bonetti
19:44
And that's where I think technology can be really powerful for creators, right? It's like, sure, we do payment processing and that's all great. But how can we deliver answers to creators? All, you know, all the answers that they need in real time?
Share
19:57
So that they don't need to become scientists and doctors in a bunch of different ways, and they can really just focus on being your coach, which ultimately, once you boil it down, you know, and you peel the onion, that's what everyone loves about their instructor, they're driven to their personality and whatever archetype they have.
Share
20:17
For Jordan clearly she wants a drill sergeant in her app.
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Jordan Crook
20:22
I want to be drill sergeant to be clear.
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Alexandra Bonetti
20:25
Jordan wants to be a creator and the drill sergeant.
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Jordan Crook
20:30
Do it!
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Alexandra Bonetti
20:30
But really you are, you're attracted, and you're going back, and you know, you get, you get kind of enamored with that person's personality and that happens to you and with your peloton, you know, if you hang out with a bunch of peloton people, they all they want to talk about is what trainer do you take and why? Right?
Share
20:46
So, so it always goes back to personality, so how can we really elevate that point about them and just help them out and everything else so that they're really administering great impact to their client.
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Jordan Crook
20:57
Yeah, we had a peloton trainer that came to one of the sessions that disrupt and was in the chat and the chat went, I've never seen anything like it in my life. I mean our chat is like fine like people comment and like say things and ask questions and share their startups. But like I think it was Ally Love or someone, they were like you, I love you. It was like having like a rock star and disrupt chat. It was wild.
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Alexandra Bonetti
21:21
I love it.
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Darrell Etherington
21:23
I have a question here, this is actually from Maggie Stamets socially producer. The name of the company is pretty broad, like it's just Talent Hack, right? And it seems like you can apply that to a lot of other categories, is the thinking that like eventually you will apply this to other categories as well beyond fitness? Or what's kind of the or just or if it's not, just kind of give us a little background into the behind the scenes of the branding there.
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Alexandra Bonetti
21:48
So, talent is an industry word. I think when people from outside of the industry see it, they think more HR within our industry because we have so many names for people trainer, teacher, instructor, coach, guru, health coach, nutritionist. The blanket term that we use is talent, and I think it comes from photo shoots, you know from call sheets from talent call sheets.
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Darrell Etherington
22:14
Maggie and you should call us the talent.
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Jordan Crook
22:17
Everyone calls me that.
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Darrell Etherington
22:18
Actually they don't they don't do it because they know we're not talented.
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Alexandra Bonetti
22:21
You guys get it.
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Jordan Crook
22:22
Yeah, yeah, we're like talent as a, as a noun not as like an adjective anyway.
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Alexandra Bonetti
22:29
So that's an industry word and attack it just, it's always felt harder than it should be in this industry for me since the beginning, I just always felt like I was reinventing the wheel and I think it's because we're so fragmented, you know, they're just there aren't a lot of economies of thought and collective wisdom in our industry because there's not a huge corporation, we don't have a PNG leading R and D.
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22:53
And so I've always felt like how can I give talent good hacks, you know, not necessarily shortcuts, but smart cuts just help them do things better and faster. So that's where the name comes from. And in terms of being vertical eyes into this industry, I hope so, I mean that's the vision and I think that you unlock a lot of power in your data in one industry.
Share
23:14
So everything that we've talked about that we could create for the consumer, for the talent comes from deeply, deeply understanding the industry, right? As soon as you open yourself up to others, and it's a lot harder to produce real impact on both sides of the creator side, on the client side. So, so yeah, the goal is definitely to stay in fitness and wellness is a category, and it's a big, it's a really big industry.
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Darrell Etherington
23:36
Like you said though, this is this brings back the shovel for example to me because it's like you just take the things like journals, laughing because I didn't even say that I worked there okay now I did, now you made me say it, but there's these things that are available to large companies in the industry and that are not available to everybody else and everybody else has to kind of like relearn them or reinvent them over and over and over again because there's no.
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Alexandra Bonetti
23:59
Or not even you know, just try to figure it out and never figure it out.
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Darrell Etherington
24:03
Yeah, exactly, yeah just fail like by doing the same thing and 100 others have done before them and failed that right, so.
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Alexandra Bonetti
24:10
I mean I'll give you a really easy example of when I was running studios which was subbing, we had you know 100 different instructors and some people are sick all the time and some sometimes they were sick that morning, sometimes they were sick the day before you know they took vacations like these are humans, and we had to figure out who to put in their spot.
Share
24:31
And it took me three years to come up with like a solid system, you know like a really good system and I remember when we did, and it was, it was working really well, we hired a trainer from
Equinox
and the Equinox
system at the time. This must have been seven years ago was a reply all email for subbing, and they have thousands of instructors.Share
24:52
Every single studio owner to this day has a really hard time with things that you should not be trying to figure out a sub your classes, you should be trying to figure out how to get new clients, how to build better programming, right?
Share
25:03
Like what's, what are the best playlists that are going to get people excited in the common area, just things that are unique to you, not just how to add and subtract. It just felt like everything that we were figuring, and it was thousands of studios figuring out the same thing at the same time.
Share
25:19
And that's what a fragmented industry is, you know, and that's the power of aggregating, which is hard because it's fragmented, but if you can do it, and you can build that top line view then that's really, really powerful, and that's why I really believe in being vertical to this industry.
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Jordan Crook
25:35
We talked about using the word hack, like smart cuts, whatever, but like also integrates like a bunch of different systems, right? And technologies in order to allow a creator to not have to mess with all the different things at once, right?
Share
25:50
And so how did you figure out as a founder? Like at what point you launch a product versus like keep your head down and keep building because you know, you want those feedback loops, but it feels like Talent Hack was like a pretty completed product at launch.
Share
26:03
So I'm just curious like do you do one thing and then kind of launch with an M. V. P. Or how did you think about building versus launching and being public and kind of your iteration feedback process?
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Alexandra Bonetti
26:14
That's a hard question because it's not a specific, it's not a playbook, you know, it's not like these are the four things that we need. We first launched with actually pre-launch, it was huddles in my living room. I was inviting talent over, and I would ask just what's it like being a professional in this industry, and it felt within minutes ago the room would get really emotional.
Share
26:38
You know, people would start crying and very passionate people about this career. It was hard, it was just really hard. So that was our focus groups turned into, the first product that we launched was a job board, and that came from my necessity as I grew my brand to hire people.
Share
26:55
It was really hard to find people, you were posting on
Craigslist
on Indeed
getting hundreds of applications and one qualified lead that you couldn't hire. And so that was super frustrating for me and I knew it was frustrating for the talent as well, and that was a really good way for us to start a top of funnel growth engine.Share
27:17
At the time, you know, we knew that we wanted to build vertical stacks, full stacks for talent, but it was hard to decide where to start to your point Jordan. So we started with that product that grew very quickly and that's really what allowed us kind of volume to start listening to people. And we monetized that product, March 10th, 2020, so two days before the world shut down.
Share
27:43
And so within 48 hours, that product was completely irrelevant because everyone had shut down, no one was hiring, no one was looking for a job, but then we had a big community to listen to, and the first thing that we put together was education, how to launch your classes on social media, you know how to go out on your own.
Share
28:00
And those courses informed our v zero of our product, which started with a system of record. You know, it was kind of the basic Who comes? Who want? You can buy a 10 pack, you can buy a class, and we'll keep track of that while we build more of the, of the marketing tech and these algorithms to drive adoption and help people with their clients cycle.
Share
28:22
And I think at that point where we saw tech was they were building video, and we just spoke to a ton of people and really tried to nail down, do you really need better video to enjoy class? Like the sign-up experience? Or is it the creator experience? You know, is it, who is in front of you and how easy is it to book?
Share
28:44
And so a lot of the industry went to build video, and we did a quick zoom integration, great video, everyone has it on their phone and on their computer and really started to focus on helping talent actually make more money and not just have a nicer video experience, which by the way, I probably wouldn't have been nicer because Zoom has a lot more resources than we would have been able to pour into video.
Share
29:08
So we focused on value to the talent and I think that that focus on what's going to drive success to them. I think focus in our industry is sometimes confused with do one thing and for us that hasn't been the case, it's been building multiple things, but with the same goal in mind which is really adding value, success, you know, tangible success to the creator, what are things that we can build that are ultimately going to make them more successful?
Share
29:35
And so that's been our compass as we've built deep software with a ton of features. I think our, if you ask anyone on our team right now, it still doesn't feel complete, we still have an unlimited roadmap ahead of us, but it feels like we really have been able to prioritize things really well.
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Darrell Etherington
29:51
Yeah, that's a good lesson too because it's like probably a lot of companies were thinking like, "oh if we build like a really sophisticated video stack, like that'll be defensible, and it will be something that we can call our own and point to".
Share
30:03
}But yeah, you identified, well, no, like customer focus is not the thing, right technical tool focus, but like focus on like what does the customer need? And then you have the urgency created by the pandemic of like, well what they need to, they need in this specific instance? Which ends up being like just kind of like an amplification of what they need over. All right.
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30:24
I think it worked out really well, and I think you picked the right focus and direction, but it's probably because you come to it from the background of having worked in that industry as opposed to like maybe a lot of other people came from the technology side and had, you know an interest or like an enthusiasm for the fitness side, but that wasn't their specialty or their work history.
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Alexandra Bonetti
30:42
Yeah, I think having been in the industry for a while and owning small studios and training and dealing with six thousand clients, you know, in a week where half of them thought that the room was too hot, the other half thought it was too cold or that the playlist sucked or that it was the best playlist ever, the volume was too higher, the volume was too low. It kind of teaches you what's the insight, you know, what's the truth in the chatter, and it's a complex industry, there's, there are a lot of little wrinkles that I think are easily missed If you haven't just lived and breathed it for a while.
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Darrell Etherington
31:16
I'm curious about your experience as a leader, you know, an entrepreneur's when you're looking at the studio business versus now and being in, in this business with Talent Hack in the tech business, like what kind of carried over, and what was like a challenge for you to learn when you kind of switch modes there?
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Alexandra Bonetti
31:34
Completely different businesses, you know, building software to running brick and mortar operations, so I think that my day to day completely changed. The 10 years that I spent in brick and mortar, I think, gave me all of the insight that I needed to answer Jordan's last question of how to know what to build and what's important when you have talent and clients pulling you in different directions.
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32:01
So I think that gave me the confidence than the industry knowledge to listen to my gut and make decisions as a leader.
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32:08
But day to day I think I'm learning as I go, you know, I bootstrapped my fitness studios, I raised VC money for Talent Hack different skill set totally new, I knew no one in the tech industry when I started this. So I think what translates is just the knowledge base and your management, right? I mean, I think I made all the management mistakes in my fitness studio, and now I feel like a much stronger leader this time around. But the day to day the KPI is even I had to learn it in this job.
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Jordan Crook
32:40
Wait, so I do have, I do have a closing question on my mind, which is if your team were all to write down a word to describe you on a piece of paper, what three words do you think would appear the most?
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Alexandra Bonetti
32:53
I have one, which I know because I just did this exercise with them because I didn't know, and I'm working with the leadership coach and that was one of his first questions was you know, what are you good at? And I was like, I can tell you all the things that I'm not good at.
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33:08
I have no idea what I am good at and obviously a huge red flag, you should know what you're good at. That's really important as a CEO, but as a person in general, and it's, leadership, it's inspiring them. I think I really believe in what we're building and people follow me to a fault. So I have to make sure I administer that with, with a good head on my shoulders.
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33:36
And I think that what I am a mom of two of the three-year-old and four-year-old and I had Joaquin who's almost five really as I was starting to think about this business. And early on I decided as a mom, I'm not here to kind of teach him all the things and, and you know, put all the knowledge in their brains, I'm here to become an expert on, on who they are as children so that I can help guide their decisions as they grow up and that's how I think about everyone who works for me.
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34:05
I love really getting to know each person, I believe in them. I have, I think everyone has immense potential and everyone has a superpower, and it's my job to figure that out, you know, for everyone on my team and once I am able to uncover that superpower, once I become an expert in who they are then I can really coach them to reach their potential and that's something that I really enjoy about my job, not just for my leadership team but for entire execution team.
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34:34
I love understanding them at their core, like what are they really good at, what are they scared of, you know, where can I push them and that's what my team, I think enjoys the most about me.
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Darrell Etherington
34:44
Cool, that sounds great, I'd like that Jordan, you just take notes but.
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Jordan Crook
34:51
Yeah, well I need your word Darell.
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Darrell Etherington
34:55
Oh man.
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Jordan Crook
34:57
My word will end up being actually red flag like that, not just red flag.
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Darrell Etherington
35:04
Good place to end well, thanks very much Alexandra, it's been terrific talking to you, Talent Hack is amazing, you know, it's really changing the industry in a way that I think is long overdue, so yeah, thanks again.
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Alexandra Bonetti
35:16
I really appreciate it, thank you so much for having me.
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Darrell Etherington
35:21
Jordan, what did you think of our chat with Alexandra? Are you ready to get your rest, coaching business up and running.
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Jordan Crook
35:31
Rest coach? Oh God, yeah, I'm totally ready, I feel prepared, I feel like I have the software needed to be successful. I mean some of the things that we didn't talk about with Alexandra, I don't have the exact thing in front of me, but there's something about Talent Hack being the biggest, like early stage round that was given to or invested in female Latinx founder, which we didn't talk about much, but she has definitely made a pretty big splash upon entry into the tech world, all things considered.
Share
36:02
And I also liked her talking about the difference between running studios, which obviously gives her this, like, I think most investors look at it as a superpower when you, like, come from the industry, you're going to go disrupt it, like outweighs a lot of other things I think that they would look at if you were just like, "oh, I'm gonna just, I see this thing in the market, and I'm just gonna go do it without a lot of real world experience".
Share
36:21
But doing that versus running a tech company and like kind of what gets to copy and paste and what needs to be tailored and changed, and I thought that was an interesting bit of the conversation.
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Darrell Etherington
36:30
Yeah, for sure. Like especially because like most of the investors side people often they'll have like a lot of experience in one specific vertical, but like not the rest of it. So if you can say like, "look, I did this thing and not, not only did I just dip my toe into it, but I like did it for many years and was successful at it", it's like going to really help you get ahead, and I think it, it definitely help Alexandra figure out this market inside and out and exactly what people need, right?
Share
36:56
I also thought it was interesting talking to her about the, because she's kind of seen both sides of the fence, like the tensions between trainers and then gyms that employ them and who owns the customer relationship and that kind of thing, which especially because she's offering a platform that like is a double-sided marketplace, and also you are involved in that too, right?
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Jordan Crook
37:17
Well, and like, it's an interesting time too, right? Because if you think about eight years ago we had the big disruption with like class pass and mind body, which is now like this mega firm, I think mind body acquired class pass, and then you have like the second iteration of like fitness disruption, which was like the peloton and like them all, you know the tonal and all the stuff that kind of followed, there's like a million of them now. There 's one for rowing and there's one for boxing and all this stuff.
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37:43
And now I think we're seeing this like convergence with
TikTok
and influencers and content creators twitch and all that stuff and how that feeds into fitness and wellness in the wake of the pandemic, and it's all being home and like demand being up.Share
37:58
And it's been really for something that I haven't actually spent time thinking about now that I'm talking about it out loud, like the evolution of that industry has been pretty interesting to watch, and I think she's hitting on the right keys at the right time, you know, so it's definitely wanted to look out for.
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Darrell Etherington
38:13
And also not getting distracted by stuff that she was talking specifically about like how a lot of her competitors went into developing their own proprietary video technologies, and she is like saw like, no, that's a distraction, and it's a huge resource sink. And then when you come out with it, it's like, what do you have? You have like a commodity product that's available already on the market.
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Jordan Crook
38:31
And you're going to do it worse, right? Whatever you're doing as a founder, it should be something that someone else doesn't provide or much better than someone else provides. You really should, you know, otherwise buy it loop it in and call it a day.
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Darrell Etherington
38:43
Exactly, that's cool, and it's a good one for the new year because we'll be like getting our resolutions on like everyone always, right?
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Jordan Crook
38:51
Do you have resolutions, you do that?
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Darrell Etherington
38:54
I mean, I don't usually except for my perpetual resolutions of like stop being such a ship bag, but you know, I never really realized those, so.
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Jordan Crook
39:03
I don't really do resolutions, either, I figure if I change at all happen organically, I'm not going to tell myself to.
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Darrell Etherington
39:09
It will be for the worst.
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Jordan Crook
39:10
Yeah, and it'll be, and I'll just get worse, Jesus. Yeah, that's probably true. But good luck to everyone out there with resolutions. Hope you're crushing it.
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Darrell Etherington
39:19
And if you wanted to let us know, let us know drop us a review like this, you know, max stars, I'm back in my face of forgetting how many stars there are. So, but the most that you can do and then just put in like, here's my resolution, and then we'll maybe we'll read.
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Jordan Crook
39:35
Maybe a resolution is to start up a company, maybe you'll be on the podcast this year. Who knows?
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Darrell Etherington
39:39
That could be a resolution attainable, I'll tell you that.
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Jordan Crook
39:43
It is, that's a smart goal.
Share
39:47
Found is hosted by myself.
TechCrunch
News editor Darrell Etherington and TechCrunch
Managing editor Jordan Crook. We are produced by Yashad Kulkarni, and edited by Grace Mendenhall, and Maggie Stamets is our Associate Producer, TechCrunch's
audio Products are managed by Henry Pickavet.Share
Alexandra Bonetti
40:01
Our guest this week was Alexandra Bonetti co-founder and CEO at Talent Hack, you can find us on
Apple
podcasts, Spotify
or wherever you get your podcasts and on Twitter at twitter. com/bam. You can also email us at, Found at TechCrunch
. com and call and leave us a voicemail at 5109361618. Also, we'd love if you could spare a few minutes to fill out our listener's survey at bit. ly/foundlisteners survey. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week.Share
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Darrell Etherington
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