Nolan Parker - The Product Leader Who Still Coaches CrossFit

Every product team has that moment. Someone pitch a feature and says, This is the one. Sometimes they are right. Sometimes they are very wrong.

I am Marco Benitez. And I am Jonas Dücker, and this is This Feature Will Safe Us, where we dig into the decisions, debates, and occasional disasters behind building great products. Let's get into it. Today we have Nolan Parker, a senior product manager from Push Press with us. We will dive into his background as a coach and athlete, but also being a product manager in the space. Super excited for this one.

Very excited. Let's go! Welcome Nolan Parker. It's great to see you, my friend.

You as well, Marco and Jonas. Pleasure to be here.

Alright. So let's start with a rapid fire. Alright, so my friend, which color do you prefer? Red or blue?

Blue. You can tell from the t-shirt. Um CrossFit or Hyrux. CrossFit all day.

I kind of need meat or salad. We gotta go with meat.

Favorite fitness product that you use every week.

The new one, it's it's been all about the mobility tools. I know you guys were gonna ask me that. So I grabbed out here. This is this is the uh the alpha ball on Amazon, and it's just like so much better than a regular lacrosse ball. Get it right here in the in the hips, in the glutes, in the low back. That's a good one. Nice.

Married or alone. I am married. Married or alone. That doesn't mean that you prefer that one.

Oh, do I prefer? Yeah. We won't we won't say Rosie.

Product management or growth management?

Uh the answer is product management, I think.

Most useful AI feature you have used?

I think um within Claude Cowork, the ability to just have MCP connection to all the other tools I use in one place is like the biggest game changer of life hack for me. Um, just being able to plug in everything and query the database and just pull from Slack, email, linear, all the above.

From a product lens, what metric are people obsessing about way too much?

This might be a hot take, but I would say uh NPS. One thing I see, like NPS obviously gives you a great overall signal if people uh like and enjoy your product, but I think people over-index on it. And one trend that I've actually looked at when I look at NPS data is it's very highly correlated with problems that people might have in the platform. So they tend to answer the NPS. Like if you have, like, say, you know, an outage or something, you get a ton of bad feedback. And something good happens, new feature release, you get a bunch of good feedback. So uh tying it and looking at it with your product cycle in mind, um, I think is really key. So don't look at it just uh as a snapshot up by itself.

Tell me your favorite wearable.

We're on Team Garmin now.

Team Garmin.

Team Garmin.

Interesting. Before you have a goop, right?

I did whoop and polar for a long time, which uh enjoyed all of them, but uh the Garmin has been really good. I've gone into more cycling and yeah, been nice for that.

Adidas or Nike? Nike.

Though I will say I haven't I haven't worn uh I guess I got a pair of Nike Metcons, but not a fan of either, really. Retention or acquisition? I see them as a little bit of one in the same. I guess when I think about acquisition, I I think about getting users to that that first habit moment. And really, like I would say that's your first retention checkpoint. So you have to retain them for the first time, get them coming back. Uh, but then when I think longer term retention, um, I think the answer varies a ton when you're looking at B2B versus B2C. So like B2B, I think actually retention is a little bit easier. People are locked in a little bit more, longer cycles, um, and the cost of changing is a lot a lot more painful.

Best heck from fitness wellness perspective for traveling.

Ooh. First thing in the morning. When you're traveling, you're out of your routines, you're out of your normal uh cycles, and you're probably worse asleep and less to do. So wake up, get the workout done when you're on the road. Otherwise, I'm like an afternoon guy.

Must underrated recovery habit.

Underrated? I'm gonna go with breathing. I think using your breath to switch up your physiology and kick off the uh the sympathetic nervous system is probably the the biggest thing you can do. Doing a quick, you know, body scan, 10 deep breaths just like throughout the day, reset that stress cycle is a big hack.

It's really interesting, right? How does that work? Because it's like uh it it do you never imagine that only learning to how to breathe that helps you to improve everything? It's it's really crazy.

Yeah, it's up there with the uh, I mean, it's not quite meditation, but it puts you back in control again, right? You know, if you're frantic, if you're scattered, um, whether that's from work, from a workout, you know, change it up, change the vibe entirely. And so, like after workout, it's like change the music to something way more mellow, turn the lights down, and then just get reconnected again. So, yeah, huge.

Awesome, awesome. So we're gonna reconnect now. And then we change gears a little bit. Um, maybe you can give us your spiel of like 30 seconds, real quick, your role at PushPress, what is PushPress doing, and how did you end up there? Especially what we want to focus on in today's session is a bit your background as an athlete and coach at the same time as a product builder. Um, because I think that's super interesting for for many folks out there in that space.

Amazing. Yeah, so I joined uh Push Press uh uh almost two years ago as the product manager for kind of their newly formed growth team. And since then I've also taken on their mobile team, so our our staff app and members app and our train workout building product. So um pushpress is kind of all in one gym management solution, which ties in really well with my background, having been a former gym owner and operator, having been a CrossFit coach and trainer for 14, 15 years now. So it's been a minute. I I still have my hand in the coaching pot. Like I'm coaching, you know, three nights this week, and having that dual perspective of I get to actually go use pushpress in my gym, experience firsthand kind of the pain points that owners and coaches feel day to day, and actually have the ability to do something about it has been uh a huge unlock. So yeah, enjoying the time of pushpress.

You have a very interesting uh background because it's like uh you you are from two worlds, one on the fitness, and the other one on the product with technology. That allows you also to, you know, to understand a little better better the the end user, the consumer, and everything. So tell us a little bit more about your background because this is where you are today, but before what happened, because I think you were working with so many companies building different products. So tell us a little bit more about that.

Yeah, definitely. So um I kind of found my way into tech, not on accident, but it was never the plan. Went to school for dietetics and nutrition and coming out of school and decided to open a gym for myself and kind of spent six, seven years, kind of most of my early 20s, doing training of some sort or nutrition coaching. And I was like, I was really kind of struggling at that point. Like it wasn't going well all the time. And everyone knows kind of the demands of that lifestyle as a coach, as a trainer. You have to be available to your clients when they are, which means super long days working on the periphery of the nine to five, and then trying to do whatever I could during the middle of the day to make ends meet. And so kind of saw tech as a way to like have some sustainability and um be able to support myself while I grew my training business and kind of fell in love with it. So I got my first role in tech as a customer support specialist at TrueCoach, which is a one-on-one personal training uh workout builder product, and kind of fell in love with it and ended up kind of working my way up, getting into more management, and then eventually making the leap over to the building side of product, which at that point, you know, I'd had, you know, thousands and thousands of conversations with coaches and trainers, and I had been on the front lines of support and had been using the tool myself and was like, okay, like I know what to build. I know how these people think, I'm one of them. And having that firsthand perspective, and I've always tried to keep that in mind as I choose my rules and positions that have worked. Um, so kind of coming through, um, you know, did some agency work and then found my way over to Verb and then uh my time with you guys, which was amazing, is we kind of danced on the uh the periphery of health, longevity, medicine uh 2.0, 3.0, and really just finding ways, I think, to connect users and technology. And I love sitting at that intersection of behavior change. I see so much of like the opportunities that are coming today are a lot of data unlocks. And so information is no longer the problem. And now we're able to focus on like, well, like what do we need to do to motivate people? Because the answer is there, but the behavior's not. And so, like, that's been kind of my superpowers like having spent so much time in that coaching seat, I really get to think a lot about what blockers exist for people and like what are they running into, and then trying to find ways to use the technology to help navigate around that or to better steer their journey.

That's great. And I want to actually double down a bit on on what you mentioned with like you being a user or like kind of part of this value chain at the same time a builder. Do you think like having that perspective from from a user coach perspective, like is that helping to better understand really the needs and what you need to build? Or is there some bias as well when you are so involved from on the other side that this actually can be also against like building the right thing from a from a product perspective?

Yeah, no, definitely. I think um I definitely have some strong biases and some strong opinions. One way that I combat that is one just through awareness. It's actually easier because I know that I have the bias. I think we all do, but because it's such a direct one-to-one, like, oh, I have this and I want it in the product, it's easier for me to say no to the things that I'm like, that's that's a null-in-specific because I tend to, you know, maybe be a little bit more nerdy. I want to geek out on data more, I want to like do things, but I'm like, does the user need to hear this? And I kind of teach my myself the same lesson when I'm coaching, right? If like if you're a really good coach, you don't tell the client that you're working with all the technical cues, you don't tell them all the things that go into programming, you don't explain how a muscle works and how a hypertrophy is is developed. So you have to give them cues that relate to them. And I kind of try to do the same thing when I come back to the product side and the building side. I'm really thinking about, well, like, what do most owners need to do? Like, how much time do they have? Like, what is the job they're trying to get done? And my favorite thing to say back to myself is like, don't make me think. And I'm like, for most of our users, they're busy, they're time strapped, they're trying to do a million different things, wear a million hats. And so I'm like, what is the don't make me think version of this feature or way to solve their problem? So, in kind of doing that, I'm like, okay, like this is how I'm gonna kind of remove myself from the situation and what I want, just really think about like where are they at when they're kind of making the decision or using this tool or feature.

That's interesting. And it sounds really holistic, right? Because it's like you are connecting the dots between your experience plus you are using the shoes of your the other coaches and fitness clubs and everything, just talking about the fitness clubs, of course, but it's like a it's really interesting that for perspective. But that's when things are going really well. What happens when your product decision where your athlete's instincts were wrong? I mean, what happened with you know, you you think that hey, this feature really is going to be really, really, really good. And then when you show to everyone the answer or the the results were wrong, do you have any of those experiences?

Yeah, definitely. Luckily, I made one of these mistakes pretty early on and I was able to do that.

Hopefully you're on here with us.

I was gonna say, I wonder what's in rook.

I remember that.

No, no. Um, so for me, I I think it's that that bias of you know, my my desire for more information, more exposure. Actually, when we were at TrueCoach, we did a pretty major rebuild of our client-facing app, which is where users perform the workouts. So the the most touched surface of the platform. And we basically like redid the way that workouts are displayed and we put all the information and basically like it led to these really long kind of scrolling uh views that a lot of people just didn't care for. And we had to kind of go back to the drawing board and clean things up a little bit. But it does not feel good when you, you know, launch a new version of the app. And then uh, even though it's a small maybe subset of the audience, like if it's even 1% of people, that's still hundreds of emails, uh app reviews, people yelling at you. So a couple lessons in there. One was just like, yeah, like get more user testing in, get that feedback early on. Don't just do what you think is best because you're informed and you know sometimes, like when you're a fish, it's hard to tell and explain to a fish, you know, what's the water. The water's all around you. So you don't you don't see it, you don't think about it, and you get a little too familiar and comfortable in it. And so it's like, no, you gotta kind of kind of give it to someone who's not in the water with you in kind of in that day-to-day. Yeah, good good lesson there.

Can you imagine? But what I also imagine is challenging if you connect that actually to the company perspective, right? Because one thing is being in the product seat and having to build the product and you want to build the features and you having that first-hand experience as as a user, as a coach, you're like, okay, we need this and that, etc. But like from a company business perspective, not all the great features are necessarily features that actually clients would be willing to pay for, or that actually drive, like, you know, the impact from a business perspective. Kind of differentiating here as well from like product roadmap, product vision, cool features that you can see as athlete and builder, but then you have the flip side of it, actually, it has to drive business impact. Have you seen kind of these types of decisions where you felt like, okay, we're building something that is really cool and I see there's a lot of value in it, but at the same time, even it is very valuable, it might not really drive business impact. And whatever you can share, obviously, like feel free to go into some examples as well if you have.

Yeah, yeah, there's a couple different ways we could take this. One thing that comes to mind is there are a lot of things that people ask for in products. And we see this in like legacy kind of SaaS products and things that have evolved over time. And so gym management software is a great one, a great example. I've seen this at PushPress, I've seen this at Tribe back when I was at Explore, where users ask for something. It's a good idea. It works for you know 10, 20, 30, 40% of your user base. And you say, great, we'll build the feature, add it into the product. And then somebody else comes along, and another 10% says, We need a slightly different version of this thing. And so you start to end up with these very bloated products that now get harder to navigate, harder for users to know, you know, who it's for. And then maybe you start to expand your TAM and you go out and you add, you know, a slightly new type of user, and they need all these same things, but uh now a slightly different version. So you end up with these like big bloated Frankenstein projects that are just all these pieces stuck together, and then um you have a bigger code base to maintain, and you just kind of get yourself in the spot of like, well, like who are we building for? And how do we kind of adapt and like give them what they need and highlight the parts of the product that they need? And this is one of the reasons where a lot of the changes with AI I think are getting really exciting, is you don't need to spend so much time doing the customizations within all these different features, and you can kind of start to let AI assistants and agents and some of these things do that customization and personalization for you. So now you don't have to keep building bigger. I actually like am really excited about a future where we're actually starting to get smaller and a little bit more zoomed in in that regard. So yeah, that's that's kind of like one direction I would take that.

No, no, that's great. The big question for me then always is how do you avoid this from happening? Right? Like, because it's so easy to fall into that trap. It's so easy, like yet another big client knocks on the door and says, Oh, you know what, tweak this a little bit more like this for me, and even if it's just for me, not for everyone, and you start building like these, you know, v2, v3, and like there's a customized version for someone, is that a product decision not to do this, or is that a company decision not to do this?

Yeah, no problem.

And how do you avoid this from happening?

So I I forget the uh the exact terms that they use, but uh we're we've been kind of going through a pricing and packaging workshop and thinking about really like what are the features? One way I like to think about it is like what features do we have that are like needed for market parity? What do we need to have that's above market parity to like gain more market share? And then what do we need to be world class at based on you know whatever your industry and specialty is? And then there's probably a lot of stuff that isn't one of those three, and those are all the filler features, right? Like it's just it's just extra stuff that's in there. And I think you can make a case for the removal of that. So every time a new feature decision comes up, be like, okay, where do we kind of place this and stack this and rank this in our our feature stack? And if it's just filler, if it's not hitting a large enough part of uh TAM, and this is where I think product analytics, you know, need to come into play. You don't always have this when you're maybe an earlier startup, but as you get more advanced, making this kind of a first class principle as you build of I'm really monitoring and engaging, engagement with each of the features and understanding like who uses this. Does our ICP use this feature and how many of them and how often? And that way you can start to put some numbers to that qualitative story of like, oh, we have this thing, everyone loves it. And it's like, well, do they, how do they use it? And then what impact does that ultimately make? That's another thing that kind of this shift in, and like I mentioned earlier, like this consolidation has me thinking a lot about is the job to be done. And then how do we, you know, start to use AI and to like unlock these jobs to be done and go from just being like, hey, here's a place where you can do a click to make it happen, to how do we start to automate this for you? Think ahead and be a little bit proactive. And so that way, again, we're not trying to build more service area for you to do things. We're actually just focusing on getting that job done for you.

And uh Nolan, did you have like an experience on the opposite? I mean, in terms of um that feature that was underestimated, but then you realize that receive a lot of engagement. So it was like because nowadays you have AI tools and you can do prototypes very easy and you can do so many things, but in the past, and in the past I'm telling you about five years from now, or maybe two years from now, uh, where you don't have on those days AI tools and make prototypes or do these features very quickly. But before you were like, you I have like an idea because I receive XYC from the clients, and then you create something underestimated, and then receive a lot of engagement. Do you have one story?

Yeah, I think um a great example of that is um we did like a rebuild of our dashboard, like the kind of main homepage that users would operate from. And this hadn't really gotten a facelift really since I don't know, it'd been years and years. I learned a couple things in in kind of launching dashboard 2.0. One is like some people, they just like things the way they are and they don't want them to change, but they don't know why. They're just familiar and comfortable with it. And so, you know, we can we go through and we do testing and designs and we um do usability testing, and we're like, this this new one's better, it's faster, it's more performant, gives access to more of the information that I know people are looking at on a daily basis based on where they spend their time in the product. And, you know, like when you that's why I said like these product analytics tools, like once you get to a place that you can stand that up, seeing like the heat map of where are people clicking, where are they spending time, how long are they staying on the page, uh, watching user replays. And so what I saw was we go from dashboard 1.0 to 2.0, but I kept 1.0 open because I said, I want to see how many people like, I don't want to piss them off. I want to see how like people adopt this new one. And so we see the initial, you know, and the the you know, the crossing the chasm example of like uh user adoption. You see your early adopters, and then you kind of see the the middle group, and you have the long tail. It was like to a T. It was like early adopters in there, love it, great, perform it. And then I do some nudging and push other people and they like it. And we get to like 60%, and then there's just like the laggards, and they just don't want to come along for the ride. And so I'm like, okay, we're just gonna have to put a date on the calendar and eventually rip the old one off. And then they come over and nobody really complains. They all use it, they love it. It's just they didn't want to try the new thing. So I think that was a really good lesson in that I was a little too actually uh reliant on what users were telling me when I knew I had something better for them.

Which kind of brings us to a different point of like what what sometimes makes it hard to build great products is maybe not even just building the product, but adoption of the product, right? Like it's the same, even like I mean, AI is being hyped, cloud is being hyped, and people who work with these tools, they feel like we're falling behind, we need to move fast. And then you look at the world and you see like how much adoption is actually happening of these types of solutions so far, and you're like, oh, it's actually a tiny percentage of the population using these tools so far. So, like when you translate that a bit to to the example that you just gave, thinking about building great products, but building great products that are easy to adapt. What's been your experience there? Maybe you have an example from from push press or like previous experiences where you felt like the product was great, but there was no easy way to adapt the product, or there's a good way to adapt the product and and you know, like and how did you kind of tease that up uh to get this out to market to driving the penetration you expected?

I th I think there's there's kind of a couple different stages in the journey. I think one is the initial like awareness. When when you're trying to launch something new, how do you get people bought in? Because there's there's more noise now than there's ever been. You know, I I feel like I end most days like just absolutely drained from the barrage of input that I receive, right? Both some of my own doing, but a lot of just the world trying to get my attention. So I think being louder is no longer the way to get seen and recognized and get users to start doing something. I think you need to meet them where they're at. You need to kind of put yourself in their shoes and anticipate like, where's the best way to surface my solution in that it's going to feel like it's already a part of their world. And again, going back to that, like, don't make me think like uh it's it's easy for me, it's natural and it's it's solving kind. Of a problem that I already have, and I know that it's there for me to help solve that problem. So getting it in front of them in a little bit more covert way. Example of that that I'll probably give is building this feature called member Intel right now. And this is like my absolute baby. It's like a feature that I am so passionate about. And it's basically like an Intel report for coaches before they coach class. And it's solving a problem that's very like real for me, which is I spend my day at the computer, you know, doing my job here at PushPress, and then I zip over to Coda CrossFit and I go coach classes. And I'm like, give me the 30-second intel on like what I need to know, who's going to be in my class tonight, whose birthday is it, whose you know, membership anniversary, any injuries I need to know about, any new people that are going to be there. And that way when I show up, I'm like ready to go. I put my coach hat on and I'm like looking around for all these people that have been flagged in my intel. And so one thing that I realized with this feature is gym owners and and their staff have a lot of different ways of working. And so it's like, like, where are they solving this problem today? And like for me, when I when I realized, I was like, we're doing everything in iMessage. And I'm like, I end up messaging my gym owner and being like, oh, we had, you know, so and so. Sarah was new, she dropped into class last night, here's how she did. And I'm like, PushPress doesn't know about any of this. We need to get all this information into the system. And so what I'm realizing is we need to find ways to extract data. And again, in the age of AI, this is becoming more and more necessary. And we actually have the tooling now and the power to do it. But if I can gather a broad context, but then only surface the insights that are important, I'm able to give coaches something super valuable, right? I'm telling them how to spend their time and create touch points with members that are going to ultimately create a huge impact in their coaching experience and give everyone a great class. So that's one where I'm really trying to figure out how to close that information gap of like, you do all these things out in the world, you use all these other tools in addition to the one that we have. How do I help bring that context in and make it really easy? So I'm like, I'm thinking about everything now in terms of notes. I'm like, how do I log this as a note? How do I get this intel into the system and out of either the coach's head or out of the iMessage chat or the Slack thread and pull it into a place where it can be used by other people at the right time?

That's really cool because it's like uh something that you really need. And it's like uh at the end of the day, you have the knowledge to manage your people and the classes and everything. But it's more like trying to engage with the end user, trying to engage with them in order to, you know. Only for the birthday. Happy birthday. It's it's just like or what happened yesterday, you were not over there. Uh, is there something I can help you? It's like try to engage with them. It's because at the end of the day, we are talking about the human component and also that we are part of one team and your workout and cholera, it's like that. It's you are building a team inside your facility. So it's it's it's really interesting. Uh that leads me also to another question for you, which is like what happened with the communication in terms of your uh because you are the the product owner, but you you have a lot of noise, as you said before. You have AI, you have data here, data there, you have your maybe the CEO he wants a specific things, then you have clients, and then you have to be around.

Oh CEOs, yeah.

Yeah, I know. They're they are the worst, and because they have they're really crazy ideas, so that's a problem. But uh then you have your tech team, and they say all the time, I don't have time for that, the roadmap it's too big. So, how do you manage everything? And then you realize, like, hey guys, this is exactly what we need because I need it. I because on your case, you are the coach, uh you are the owner who is using the the technology. But if you are not, how can you manage all these situations? Because I'm pretty sure that on your previous experience, you were not like the end user talking with that product. So, how do you manage all these types of communications?

Yeah, I think um it's it's a lot. I think that what you're describing is essentially like having product sense or product taste. Like, how do I choose the right things to do? And so for me, that means you do have to ingest. You have to you have to take in information from so many sources to start to develop your own opinion, and then you start to see patterns and trends emerge over time. And I think this can happen, like you can do this well, whether you are in the industry or like in something that is specific to your role and you have that subject matter expertise. I think all that does is help you actually accelerate maybe some of that data capture, though. I think if you're coming in from the outside, even if you if you don't have that background, if you spend time with users, and I would encourage people who don't have the background to spend even more time with users, like because the things that you can look at in a product and measure and see, that's only telling you the story of what's happening. It's not telling you the story of everything else that's happening outside of that product and how people are trying to solve problems. And so for me, context is king. So, like what I try to do is take in information from a ton of sources and like we have, you know, a feature request log that's getting, you know, 10, 20 things added to it every day. And, you know, the CEO has a million ideas and he's dropping into gyms and he's saying, this is a pain point, we got to fix this. And for me, it's, you know, thank God for AI helping, it's making it easier to organize this information. But for me, it's like there's the product sense first, you have to have that qualitative, all that different input in that kind of context. And now I go look for the data. Like data has to help, and you can use a prioritization framework. Like I know people use rice and that sort of thing. For me, it's really just trying to flush out how much of our user base does this cater to and what problem does it solve for them, and then to what degree. So, thinking about something like the member Intel feature that I was just describing, one of the biggest challenges I realized is like, oh, our notes feature is underadopted. It's one of like the key inputs to this feature, but I realized not enough people are using that that could actually make the Intel more valuable. And so I had to have the idea about what problem we're gonna solve. And I had to have the context to kind of put it together and get it out in the world. And now I'm like, oh, but here's like, here's where in this funnel of adoption it's getting blocked or limited. Let me unblock that. And I think when you when you go to build something new or iterate on something that's already existing, you need to be asking those stories and getting to the root cause and always go back to like the problem that you're solving rather than kind of falling in love with the solution that you already have.

Just wants me to go back to rapid fire questions almost. Um a few questions, maybe. Open backlog, building in public, is that something you would prefer over closed doors, then? Is that kind of what I'm taking from from your argument?

I'd be a fan of building in public, but I think actually if you're if your company wants to try a lot of things, it depends on uh how exposed you want to be and how committed to that you want to be. I think if you can build in public without the expectation that everything is gonna stick around forever, I'd love to do that. But honestly, I find it's a little bit better to keep it a little closer to the chest. So what we end up doing is having kind of a smaller beta squad of about, you know, 100 gyms right now. It's called the inner circle. I have direct access to them. And I'm usually getting ahead of things and trying to just launch features within that group first. One from just a like a bug flush out, but I've started to realize that having features in beta a little bit longer with that that cohort and letting things kind of bake and gel a little bit actually changes the way that I want to ultimately bring it to market with a full launch. So I I think that's like been a really helpful way to do it, is like not fully in public, but close enough to uh a wide array of your audience, you know, 100 people, you can really get an idea of how people feel about something without announcing it. Because as soon as you announce, you know, people are they're stuck to timelines, they're stuck to deadlines, and yeah, you might change your direction or you know, the company's needs might might alter, or another problem could pop up that's better to solve right now. So yeah, in the backlog for now.

You mentioned about felling love over the problem rather than the product or the feature. Have you ever felt in love with one feature that didn't work?

Ooh. I'm trying to think. I I wouldn't I wouldn't say I'm too in love with it, but uh I've definitely had some that I'm like, I think this will be useful. And um it was hard, it was not that it was like went poorly, but it just didn't didn't take off the way I expected. And I I think it's just those things that like people don't really remark on or they don't really like adopt a ton. I think one was like I did uh like pricing recommendations for for gyms. And so my thought was, you know, gyms want to be competitively priced, and if they're not uh charging enough for their memberships relative to their area, they're leaving money on the table, right? So trying to like think like how do how do we make gyms more money? And so I did a project where I kind of sourced a ton of data, looked at all our gyms, looked at average pricing in different areas, and then also looked at by industry, you know, because we want to separate out, you know, CrossFit from jujitsu and that sort of thing. And so basically now every every pricing or every time you go to develop a plan, we have a template that says this is what we think you should charge for this based on your area. Like owners are pretty locked in, they kind of know what they want to charge, and it's it's hard to do that at scale in a way that's actually effective, I think, because you don't know what their service is and how much they pay their coaches, and like without more context there, the feature just didn't quite hit. So that that'd probably be one. Not a flop, but also just not like didn't quite do what I was hoping it could. It was underpowered.

Got it. It's like like having this Airbnb, right? It's like a you more or less know how much you pay for the rooms and everything. It's a lot of power for the end user. I I I see that, but for the coaches or maybe the the owners of those facilities, they were like, mm-hmm, it's not accurate. I I can see that.

Like actually on that note, like there's probably a lot you can do by the scale with a company like push press you're getting right now. You have so much data you're sitting on top, right? Like the average class attendance, what's being charged by class on average, membership pricing, typical kind of scheduling and and so on. I could foresee even features that go in that direction where you where the other coaches or other gyms or crossfeet boxes can kind of benchmark themselves against the the norm or against what you've seen across the board. So which is interesting because again that ties back to more of a business perspective, which I know is sometimes challenging if it is, right? Because a lot of the gym owners are are doing this out of passion and see more the coaching aspect of it rather than the business side of it, which is also a challenge then to obviously build the right features that I I actually appreciate it because not always the the business driving ones are necessarily the most appreciated ones.

Totally. And and we're we're seeing this now. We have kind of a new like AI assistant that lets gym owners be able to query against their own data and you know have have the smart logic on top of it. But we we kind of in the background, we've we've always talked about having you know a gym leaderboard. And we we do have these like built out internally where we can, you know, look at the list of from revenue, you know, one to five thousand, like how are gyms stacking up? And gym owners are also competitive, so I think there's something there to the gamification of hey, like here's where you're at in the list relative to your peers. I've been actually like dreaming about a little uh like Duolingo style feature where you know how each week, I I think you guys are Duolingo users or have it at times. I don't know. Jonas speaks every language already. Um almost. But like each week you get put into like there's 10 or 20 people in your group and you just compete against that cohort and see if you advance or you get dropped. And I'm like, I think gym owners would would really have fun with that. And also it's like it motivates you, it makes you actually start to do more for your gym. So I'm like, we're gamifying it and you're playing a fun game, but it's like actually, if you are getting another lead this month, if you're closing another deal, if you're you know keeping one member who you might have lost, like all these things are contributing. Gym owners are really they're they're living in the margins, so it's like any like one member plus or minus each month, like that trajectory over time makes a huge difference in the business. I can totally see that.

I have uh more questions about uh communication. I I want to connect a couple of thoughts because uh it's like uh today nowadays you're a senior product, you have been working with so many products before. From all your experience in the organization, who creates the biggest friction? And of course you have clients is really good friction, and you understand that once the product is released or you have a beta testing or whatever, but what happens internally when you have that idea and everyone it's like I don't know, you know, or the what or the CEO it's uh I don't know, or you're whatever. So do you have like uh experience before or something that happened that created a lot of friction and you were like, Oh my goodness, this is I need to push this one.