The Future of Digital Fitness Content - Mike Hansen

Mike Hansen got into this industry in the 90s and discovered that his passion was fitness. He changed his mindset to an entrepreneur mindset and wanted to make fitness more fun for people. He wanted to tie gaming with fitness, and through that saw that there was a big gap within the fitness industry digitally. 

How do you define a smart gym? What would things look like back in 2010-2011 compared to now? 

• Hansen says that he believed you could connect better with people, and knew who he was. 
• Ultimately it was aimed at understanding the consumers and sending them the right message. 
• Ultimately it was a timing factor when it came to fitness apps, as back in the early days people saw them as information apps, and not aimed at assisting the user. 

In the world of Smart Champs, who do you think is doing really well? 

• Hansen says he has not seen one fully executed, he sees a lot of vendors that potentially solve part of that niche. 
• He believes it is yet to be fully brought together. 
• There are a lot of opportunities when it comes to being able to make gym-related concepts Smart, but it is just not there yet in the industry. 

Explain how the Hub would work, explain the concept. 

• There is a multitude of places where someone could work out, the application will potentially control where you exercise. 
• The Hub will provide assistance and Hansen will provide the value within the application. 

Looking at what we have seen over the past 90 days, how much did you expect to see, and how much has been a surprise for you? 

• Hansen's business has had to adapt in order to adopt the shifts that are driven by the consumer. 
• There was an indication that there would be a shift to a smarter change to society all around. 74% of clubs now have a digital or some sort of streaming to offer, whereas before it was as low as 5%. 
• Hansen found the pace of the VR and its move into the market to be the biggest surprise for him. 

So you are a managing partner in Endorvins, what is Endorvins all about? What brought this about? 

• Endorvins is a full-service fitness streaming agency - it is the first fully dedicated and integrated agency that is determined to take businesses online within fitness and streaming. 
• This was brought on when Hansen was working on a project last year and he identified a big gap within service. 

What do the actual processes look like for making a company digital? 

• Determine your content strategy in order to determine the tools you require. 
• Once it has gotten to that point, an individual will be taken to their procurement process. 
• After which the individual can be introduced to the market. 
• Once all of that is established, Endorvins will handle everything from content uploading to doing title management and publishing. 
• Endorvins also extends into licensing and is truly end to end. 

Do you think as you move forward, who do you think your main clients will be coming from? 

• Hansen says their target market is to connect fitness creators to consumers, their primary markets for opportunity is in fitness boutiques. 
• Endorvins cross over any market that serves content. 
• Hansen believes that there will be a change in the market to offering a more digitized manner of content and distribution. 

Can you expand on what your thoughts are on the decentralization of fitness and what that is looking like from a historical perspective?

• As a gym owner, the walls need to be broken down and change from being a location provider to a service model. 
• In order to support your member as a service company, you have to be able to have the ability to communicate with your customer - this may mean streaming, and you will need to embrace technology in order to achieve this. 

What do you think the gym model is going to look like a year from now, from health clubs down to boutiques, who do you think is going to thrive? 

• Hansen believes that those who will thrive are those who are going to embrace a hybrid model, and believes it will be able to serve a customer as a consumer service will today. 
• Your business model will need to be changed to a 24-hour service, and convenience is important and you need to embrace that. 

What are some things that did not go right? What was a challenge for you as you were navigating these waters?

• Hansen says that placing cameras in fitness rooms was bad timing in 2014/2015. 
• He believes that the only way to get better in the timing factor is to root himself into the job side of the equation - he now does consumer interviews. 

What was the intention of placing cameras in the fitness room? 

• Hansen had the idea that he wanted to create a broadcasting network specifically designed for gyms to reach their markers. 
• He wanted to build a content catalog and give that content catalog to broadcasters to be placed on TV. 

How are you seeing the gaming industry and the fitness industry merging? Where are they overlapping now? 

• Hansens says that they looked at the VR and the AR, and has toyed with the idea that whether or not people will exercise if it is a video game. 
• Gaming can be an entertainment factor and can be a distraction to the exercise. 
• On the other side, gaming is more for a younger generation, so you would have to embrace social media more targeted towards the younger generation. 

You mentioned your vision for a record label model. Can you expand on that? 

• Hansen believes that the digital market opportunity is not structured right, and this means that most people create content, and have more conversation around brand and distribution. 
• They want to structure relationships between music and the instructor. 
• Hansen believes that they can bring a fitness label into the fitness industry, and that is the vision for their future. 

You mentioned that there was some machine learning that you’re working on, some AI, can you expand on that? 

• Hansen says that they identified a big data gap related to streaming, so they went ahead and focused on pulling all that data into one single platform. 
• The platform will allow users to read dashboards specifically for fitness streaming, which is easy to use. 
• Endorvins will be the only company that will offer a specifically fitness-focused streaming data layer. 

Let’s say I’m Bobby, a mid-level accountant at a firm, now working remotely from home looking for ways to now engage in my health and fitness and improve my health and fitness. How does this technology or concept help me improve myself? 

• This is more on the b2b side of the equation. Hansen changed the example to a real-time example of clubs that know what percentage of their members are using their streaming solution. 
• This will allow you to establish which of your users are within the proximity to come to your facility, if they are close enough, give it to them for free. 
• Market segmentation will improve your business and retention and will improve your capture rates. 
• You need to have a profile for your clients because people's lives change daily. 

What is it you need right now? What are some of the challenges that you are facing? What is it that the industry can help you with? 

• Hansen says he needs more hours in his day, but from an industry perspective, he needs people to embrace this online digital transformation. 
• Do not neglect the fact that if it did not work for you, that it does not work. 
• You need to be open to change. 

Resources:

Email: mikeh@endorvins.net 

Phone number: 833 227 4469