How I lost 97 pounds in 6 months — The perfect diet for startups
Yes, you read it right I lost 97 pounds in less than six months through Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
The perfect diet for startup founders took place during the Renzo Gracie Mastering BJJ course release.
Briefly, the story started when we created Gallerr as a free platform, after that, we overcame our sales concerns and placed Gallerr Academy on the market, then we worked hard to make it a success thereby removing 97 pounds of uncertainty from my shoulders.
It was like how I felt after getting the first positive results from Gallerr Academy.
What did you expect?
Before telling you about this weight loss saga, I will share more about the martial arts scene that we are currently living in.
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu gives a tremendous life-quality opportunity for those who live for the sport, looking to enhance themselves. People from all jobs levels are being courageous enough to step out to become full time teachers or to even open schools abroad.
If I were to get $1 for every time that I hear about someone who wants to quit his regular job to live a full-time Brazilian Jiu-jItsu lifestyle I would be a unicorn farmer — startup joke.
Every time that I see any opportunity related to that I share it with my friends, encouraging them to take risks anyway to have a better life quality and spread their knowledge to more people.
I have already made this change;
Although somewhat, slightly different, I quit my job to live my passion for entrepreneurship, and after a decade I merged this with my fascination for BJJ.
I’ve always dreamed of creating an online product for Jiu-Jitsu, therefore at the beginning of the project, I was so excited about making it real that I had no idea how it would perform as a business and bring results.
When we analyzed the competition market, we knew that we could create a “tech” product at a higher level when compared to what we often saw from others players. After a few weeks and many sleepless nights immersed in discussions and “incredible” (sarcastic) ideas, we made our entrance into the BJJ market. Gallerr was created as a free platform to organize and distribute content about the sport.
It has surpassed our expectations, plus we reached an impressive number of 100k registered users who accessed, interacted and shared our content produced in-house or curated from other sites.
Nevertheless, it was not enough to keep our journey going; we still had one problem: paying the bills with a free product in a small market. Entrepreneurship is not for beginners, and we knew about that when we decided to take a step forward producing distinctive content for our audience under the Gallerr Academy name.
This first product was titled as ‘Renzo Gracie Mastering Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu,’ an entire course with more than 200 videos featuring one of the most prestigious men in martial arts around the world and also an outstanding person.
The partnership with Renzo Gracie has been much more successful than we had planned. We have been using our expertise in digital marketing, technology, copywriting, and development to bring more potential customers across since our release date six months ago. As a result of this investment, we reached 10k paid customers worldwide (distributed in 92 countries) which was considerably higher than we thought for our first production.
For us, the most impressive result was not the sales number but the feedback from the customers. In the welcome email, we gave the opportunity for the customers to share with us their reasons for buying the course. It’s been amazing to see how our value proposition fits the user’s needs, we’ve received all types of feedback, such as people who admire Renzo and are taking the chance to learn from or talking about this never seen before high-quality production in the BJJ market. Consequently, we are delighted by how much our product has made a difference for the community.
On the other hand, we faced a barrier with a small part of the audience that thought our online product was replacing practice in the actual gym or was even graduating students. It’s thoroughly wrong because our proposition is not to take the place of the academy but to provide additional support to enhance training and facilitate further learning from a BJJ legend, which was almost impossible a few years ago.
It is a intriguing topic to deliberate about, and I will cite a great story related to this.
When I was researching about how evolved the e-learning market is for sports, I found an actual story of Julius Yego, a Javelin athlete who learned the techniques by himself using Youtube at a cyber cafe. By using the videos from other athletes competing and training he planned his routines, and in 2015 he became the first Javelin World Champion from Kenya, and in 2016 he got a silver medal in Olympic Games.
Based on this story we can forecast what kind of future we will experience for those who want to learn more about any sport in the world. In Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu we’ve noticed that it is not just practitioners that can take advantage of an e-learning platform, professors can also use this to organize their classes or even to remember technique details that we sometimes simply forget when preparing lessons for students.
In my experience in the startup ecosystem, mostly in Brazil, what we have performed as a cockroach startup (with less than ten team members) was like a dream that came true. It’s tough for a Brazilian startup to achieve this number of paid users in a few months of product — of course, we had to become an international company (with a multilingual product) to target the global market.
After this remarkable experience with the Mastering Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu course, this week we are releasing our next endeavor: RENZO GRACIE ONLINE ACADEMY. It is a weekly training program for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioners to supplement not just their technique acquisition but their entire lifestyle through the martial art.
Those who train BJJ know that it’s not just a sport or a hobby, it’s an actual lifestyle. Everything you do as a practitioner revolves around your academy; your teammates turn into close friends; your eating habits are driven to improve your conditioning; your workout is always planned to complement the training session on the mat.
Targeting these aspects, we created an online subscription program which provides a full schedule of video lessons containing exclusive content formulated by Renzo Gracie and presented not just by him but by the professors from the Renzo Gracie Team and other top-notch colleagues.
To celebrate this release, we are offering a unique promotion for early-bird users who have signed up for the annual plan. It’s a retrogressive promotion that provides a discount for users according to the sales sequence. Starting with 50% OFF, it decreases after every 50 sales, so hurry up and reserve your place with the highest discount to learn with this team of experts.
