E7: Interview with Kevin White - Founder & CEO, Spottyr

David S. Williams III and Kevin White

We have a special episode of the OVERcast with a founder looking to change consumer behavior through empowering personal trainers. Meet Kevin White, Founder & CEO of Spottyr . In this episode, we dig deep on his journey, why he founded Spottyr and what transformational change he will make.

Strap in for another great episode of the OVERcast.

Transcript:

(AI Generated)

David S. Williams III (00:01):

Hey everyone and welcome to another episode of the Overcast, the official podcast of OVERLAB where we help entrepreneurs overcome the obstacles in starting and growing a business in healthcare. Today we have an amazing entrepreneur. His name is Kevin White and his company is Spotter. And we are going to go deep on how you have built your company to date, the things that have brought you where you are today in this episode of The Overcast. Welcome, Kevin.

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (00:35):

David. Man, thank you for having me. This is, I've been a fan of the podcast ever since you started this. You told me about this brainchild and blessed and grateful to be here today.

David S. Williams III (00:47):

Amazing, amazing. So other guests we've had who are entrepreneurs, the first question I'm going to ask you is where you're from, what is your background and how did you get to where you are sitting in this chair today?

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (01:02):

Alright, yeah, let's get into it. So we are currently in LA and I'm not from here. I'm from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, so born and raised in the south and I got here by way of West Africa and Liberia. So my family, my dad was an infectious disease doctor, but there was a civil war in the Liberia.

(01:21)
And a year after my parents got married, civil War broke out and they had to flee the country. Even the fact that I'm in the US working on startups and everything is just kind of a crazy story in itself. So grew up in Alabama, I went to Georgia Tech for undergrad, studied business, and growing up I always played soccer, so I was very athletic, competitive. And as I continued to play soccer, that really started to morph into, I started doing personal training. So I graduated school and then once people kind of graduated college, college, you see people fall off with their health a little bit. And this is kind of early days with social media, what's popping coming up. So as I'm working out, I'm posting videos and I'm not even thinking about this as a business, I'm just doing it because I enjoy working out being healthy.

(02:09)
And then people started just naturally asking me, Hey Kevin, what's your workout plan? What's your nutrition? What are you doing? So my mind, my business brain starts to kick in. I'm just like, well, maybe I could start doing personal training. So I started doing personal training and started to build up a following in-person business, doing online. And because I was also working in finance, I started this brand called Chief Fitness Officer, so CFO. So I thought I was going to be a CFO in my winter. And so I was like, I'll just do CFO and another. And so as I started this business and I got to see the joy of how exercise and fitness and eating clean, all these preventative measures, the transformational force that it had on my client's lives. And I really thought like, man, I need to be able to scale this out.

(02:57)
And as I started trying to manage my business, I was like, man, this is kind of tough of building my website, my online brand delivering the programming at this point everybody's sending out PDFs and sign up for my PDF or how am I collecting my payments? Is that just Venmo cash appelle? But I didn't have any of the business insights that I learned from working on Wall Street from working in corporate finance. And I saw that a lot of these other coaches, I had this kind of finance and business training. A lot of the other coaches out there, they don't have this, they'll get you in shape from point A to point, but they have no idea how to run a business. So I'm thinking now I'm like, okay, well how do I actually fix my own problem and then also help these coaches so that they can scale up and help more people and then have more impact. And so as I'm going through this process, I'm working at this company called SalesLoft, which is a software startup,

(03:53)
And I really got to see this subscription SaaS business model to understand how, oh, this is how companies and tech scale. So then I had to figure out, I was like, oh, this is the intersection where we can actually build a platform that helps coaches scale up their businesses and that they can turn around and go have more impact. And then that brought me to UCLA. We're here obviously on Anderson's campus, did their business creation program. I was actually a TA in that program and we incubated spotter through this journey that was, we started Spotter, I came to Anderson at 2021 and we officially started Spotter in 2023 and we've just been off to the races ever since then.

David S. Williams III (04:37):

Oh, that is great. We love the Anderson stories, both alums. So we are grateful for UCLA, Anderson also for being a co-partner for Overlap. Yes. And we do have this beautiful studio here, most definitely in the Anderson school. So this is interesting. You mentioned your background, Georgia Tech, business, athletics, wall Street and all of these things. Then entrepreneurship. Talk about then this entrepreneurial journey with Spotter and you can give us the spotter kind of what is it like that, what is a spotter? And then talk about the journey. Where did you start in 2023 to where you are now?

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (05:19):

Yeah, so Spotter, we're building the go-to platform for fitness professionals who are looking to take control of their business. It helps 'em automate their admin work, track their client progress and helps them scale without the burnout. And that burnout piece is key. Eight out of 10 coaches quit within the first year because they can't figure out how to run their businesses. And what does that, if you think about that, the CDC says 42% of the US population is obese. So there's people who need this help and there's coaches who have this expertise, but they're missing each other. And so it's like, well, how do we help these coaches stay in business so that they can then go help folks out? And so while spending my time at Anderson, we went through the business creation program, we did tons of market research, we did a lot of the stuff that doesn't scale, just went knocked on doors at gyms, talking to personal trainers, everybody who we talked to, we got 'em on our wait list.

(06:17)
And really just understand, hey, what problems are you actually solving, right? Because with entrepreneurship, if you have a problem, okay, yes, you want to solve your problem, but you want to make sure that that's one data point, you want to make sure go take that problem and ask a hundred people, do they have that same problem? Is it worth actually solving, looking for signal? Exactly, looking for signal and cut the noise. So we did that and that really helped us inform the initial MVP of our product. And I met my co-founder David out here, just very serendipitously. That's actually a pretty good story. We met at A-U-S-C-U-C-L-A tailgate and one of my classmates randomly introduced me to him

(07:00)
And he actually, we went to find out, we went to Georgia Tech together and I didn't even know, we didn't know each other on campus, but he happened to be in California because after the pandemic he was looking to do something entrepreneurial, but he didn't know what to build. And I was actively looking for a co-founder and CTO. So we started working on this together. That is crazy. And that happened in 2021. So this is again kind of getting into the story. So we're doing this research, we're trying now we're okay, now we know how we're going to build it. And then as we started to do that, we had a team of Anderson classmates as well who were helping us build out the business plan, doing the financial model, looking at how we're going to go to market. And in May 20th, 2023, we started writing our first lines of code. And with that first lines of code, we had close to around a thousand coaches already on our wait list, kind of signed up ready for the platform. And from there, from that May, 2023 until October, we got our first product out.

David S. Williams III (08:02):

Nice.

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (08:02):

So we got our first product out, we had coaches on the platform when we started getting feedback. So we launched a product. It came out with features like scheduling payments, we had nutrition on the pipeline, but then we also had the ability for coaches to put this on their calendar as well. So that was the core baseline features that we launched with, and it really helped these coaches save time and organize their business, which was one of the main drivers that we saw that was taking these coaches out of business. Got it.

David S. Williams III (08:32):

Got it. And it's interesting when you're coming up with your roadmap at that time, what features were that signal also then came through those hundreds of interviews you had done in terms of figuring out what the roadmap was going to look like, what features had to be in that earliest version, the MVP as people call it.

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (08:51):

Correct. Yeah. So we did some shout out to Anderson, some sophisticated marketing conjoin analysis in order to kind of lock into what that feature set would be. But we knew it was going to change too. So we knew that obviously as you get more feedback, because this is one of the things my co-founder always talks about is a survey can only tell you so much, but until you get something in somebody's hands that they can use touch and feel, then you'll be able to kind of get that iterative feedback loop and be able to adjust quickly. So once we got that product out, we were able to start to really get that feedback loop. And then actually what a lot of you guys don't know, David is also serves as my mentor and as we had the product out, he's like, Kevin, you've got some of these coaches on the platform now for two, three months, that's good and all, but how are they going to pay? We went and asked one of our coaches who was on the platform who was seeing some value, and they told us that they'd be ready to pay around a hundred dollars a month for

David S. Williams III (09:49):

It.

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (09:50):

We just gave 'em a discount and we locked in our first paying customer there. So that was kind of the story of how we got to our first paying customer from idea to first paying customer.

David S. Williams III (09:59):

That's right. This journey aspect that I kind of wanted to get you to is really talking about how did you go from idea then to product and then the feedback loop is so important. So I'm really glad your co-founder continuously looped you into that and reminded you to get more and more feedback. But what it really does come down to, especially in the B2B SaaS model, is who was willing to pay

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (10:21):

Correct?

David S. Williams III (10:22):

And then how much are they willing to pay? Correct. And so you did take that on, you found you had paying customers, but I remember from discussions we've had also is that you also learned that there are new features, new things that people be even more willing to pay for. Talk a little bit about that learning and different things that you heard from your marketplace. And the reason why I'm asking just so the context is for the audience is that once you have that first product, it's not

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (10:50):

Done.

David S. Williams III (10:50):

It's not over. So yeah, so tell me about that.

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (10:53):

Yeah, again, great question. So the feedback, and one thing about feedback is you can't make assumptions in that feedback because easy as the entrepreneur will think the answer, especially if you're coming from that space with the domain knowledge. But as you start to get more information, you really can't lead them to anything. And so once we put the product out, started listening more than talking, it was clear that these coaches wanted, okay, we're helping the coach out, but they also want a good experience for their client, so they want a client side, so that's client facing with the app. Got it. So once we understood that, so it was like, okay, we have this SaaS model, but we know we need to integrate the client. So that's one. But then second and probably I more important, but sequentially you need to have the client side first is the coaches want more clients on the platform, so more clients for themselves. So it's like, okay, you can manage the business, but hey, I need more revenue. I need to grow with my business, so can you help me find clients? And so in that journey, we've listened very intently and so it's allowed us to make this pivot towards how can we actually help these coaches get more clients? And that's really led us into looking more, initially we've been fitness, but really coming more so bridging the gap between fitness and healthcare.

(12:16)
So how can we partner with healthcare providers, insurers so that coaches can then partner with these folks So when a doctor might prescribe or for exercise could send a patient over to the coaches who we now have on our platform. And that's been a key unlock for us and what's really been a lot of signal for us that we've seen the coaches be very interested in this and that's what the direction of where we're going

David S. Williams III (12:40):

Now. That is fantastic. It's so interesting, and I obviously think it's not so obvious on camera, but I do tend to work out, also enjoy exercise and so forth. But I think one of the things that you talked about is this idea of integration into the healthcare side of things.

David S. Williams III (12:57):

Correct.

David S. Williams III (12:58):

And I go to the doctor and I also have a black male doctor and I had to seek him out because understanding how black men as we are deal with our health is something that having a doctor who's also a black man was going to help me in a lot of ways, and I knew that. But when I leave, I get my doctor visit summary. My doctor visit summary tells me my BM, I says, am I in range? Am I obese? I come across as obese because you got to

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (13:35):

To watch those settings.

David S. Williams III (13:36):

That's true. I mean, my body fat is low, let's put it that way. But I'm telling this story because everybody gets this MyChart, which is Epic is the largest electronic medical record provider. It will provide all this information to patients and to doctors at every appointment. That means you have a universe

(13:59)
Of people that can be referred, the more partnerships you're able to start making in the healthcare world. So when I hear you say that and I'm like, wow, this could be a real service for doctors and providers to say, Hey, look, this guy can bring people who really do need some personal training help, and then you can tell me about this. But then how can you match them up? How can we get to them and really give them some opportunity to change their profiles, their weight profiles, their nutrition into overall health. And so I think that is a super interesting on lock that you mentioned,

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (14:38):

Right? Yeah. There's a study out of case Western Reserve in Ohio where they ask doctors like, Hey, are you prescribing or referring exercise? And out of that population, I think it might've been about 1500 different hospital groups that only 15% of them were. So there's a big opportunity to be able to bridge that gap of connecting these patients with these coaches that need it. And the reason why that they stated that they're not doing this is because there isn't an institutionalized place that they feel comfortable with, especially outside of, if it's outside of their network to send their patients to. So it's like if we can show that our coaches have the credentials, the results, which we do have, and we just need to be able to package that, and then we can also then start to work with these different hospital groups in order to bridge that

David S. Williams III (15:35):

Gap.

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (15:35):

And so I think that there's in that 85% that kind of can represent how many millions of people who could actually use this preventative help that could then take off some of the burden of how much we have to spend annually on healthcare costs for obesity. Not just obesity, diabetes, hypertension, all of which can be not eradicated, but mitigated with healthier lifestyle choices such as exercise, nutrition. And that's truly what our mission is at Spotter is where we're trying to help people live healthier and happier lives through technology and experiences. And a lot of times when people talk about here's spotter in the names like spotter, when you think about spotter, like somebody who's helping a lifter in the gym, complete an exercise. And when you have a spotter, you typically do more than what you actually would do by yourself doing a bench press and you get stuck. I know you can probably do three 15, but if you don't hit it three, but if you have a spotter, you're going to be more willing to go for it. And so we take that ethos and really want to apply it to these coaches and to everybody who we're helping out and really be able to bridge that gap. It's more than just a coaching platform, it's really the preventative infrastructure layer between fitness and healthcare. And we want spotter to be at the center of that.

David S. Williams III (17:01):

I love that. It's interesting that spotter analogy in the name. Most of the time you have a spotter, it's because you're trying to do a heavy lift and losing weight, managing your health is a heavy lift for a lot of people. I like the way you did that. Oh, that was nice. I did that there, right like that. But that's how it struck me when you said, I was like, you know what? It's a heavy lift, so let's have everybody get a spotter, if you will. So that's interesting. One of our previous guests, Jamie Fernandez, Dr. Jamie Fernandez works at ed, which is the largest FQHC in the country, has 700,000 patients. And she said in her episode, I prescribe digital health products like I prescribe medications because these digital health products and engaging in these digital health products can help patients live better lifestyles, make better decisions. And those are her words. What's interesting is she might be someone to talk to about prescribing exercises or exercise regimens, but also say, Hey, look, personal training for people that she's managing in her family practice could be a very interesting source of potential patients for

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (18:23):

Spider trainers. I think that'd be an interesting conversation and it sounds to me that she might be one of the 15 out of that, not be willing to make that recomme referral

David S. Williams III (18:36):

For sure. She is the associate medical director overall, but she is the leader of digital health for all of Ultimate.

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (18:43):

Okay.

David S. Williams III (18:44):

So one of the things that we talk about in the Overcast is how can our audience help our guests? And so this is just an immediate connection that I can see and I'll make sure that I'll do an intro to you for Dr. Jamie because she's looking for different solutions to bring into Ultimate. Thank you. Okay, so we are going to get deeper on how the audience also can help in a moment. Let's go talk about obstacles. What are the main obstacles that you're having to building out spotter and to what you envision it to be? And then what are the things that you're doing to reduce those risks overcome, as we say, with overlap those obstacles?

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (19:30):

So in the startup landscape, especially when you're early stage, you hear kind of the, I won't say cliche, but there's lack of capital or you having the right team. And I think for us, one of probably the two big things that have been obstacles that we're working through is capital, but I also think it's about how we think about capital, which is what I'm really starting to understand and making sure that people understand the vision well, clearly, and I'll explain what I mean by that is some feedback that I gotten recently from just talking to investors and just a broader community is around you have to have a telescope in one eye where you see talk about the future, but then you also have to have a microscope in the other eye where you're executing on the plan that's right here in front of you right now. And a lot of people talk about spotter and it's like there's competitors in the space where you hear about, oh, there's an app for coaching, and we're more than just an app for coaching. So it's making sure that the people who we need to partner with, who were raising capital from understand that vision. So that's probably one thing that we're doing and overcoming right now.

(20:51)
But double clicking on that, when you think about capital and do you go raise venture? Is that from Angels? Are you bootstrapping? What ends up happening is I think that founders tend to think that the goal is to raise this company raised, this company raised that. And what that does is it distracts you from building a good business. And what I think is more prudent, and then this is not just, this is from lived experience, but then also data points. The data shows us is that if you can focus on just building a good business with good unit economics, you can self-fund itself or there's other pathways or you can find partnerships where it's strategic partners that actually help you raise the capital. So instead of going and chasing investors, go build a business that's solid and then be chased. And so I think that mindset shift is how I'm overcoming the point of raising capital and trying to get to market. We built a product out and we're growing, but capital could be seen or lack of capital could be seen as an obstacle, but it's really just making me become more focused on the fundamental core economics of my business.

David S. Williams III (22:18):

And we don't have to disclose the money, but you've raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for spotter to date. You've built out an MVP, you've built out beyond this MVP, you have paying customers on the platform. Correct. You've done all of the main milestones, things that you'd want to do as an entrepreneur starting the company. You've learned about things that need to appear in the roadmap. You're starting to see some pivot areas or at least areas that you can add in toge a real resource to your customers. But this PR aspect around venture funding is something that I talk to all entrepreneurs about through overlap through all of my other outreach programs that I do. And I'm glad that you're talking about this as a real way for entrepreneurs to think the mindset shift, because we do see a lot of PR around large raises that gets huge headlines and lots of media coverage, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they have good businesses. And I have so many examples where companies have raised money and lots of my tens of millions of dollars and didn't last two years because they didn't have fundamentally good businesses.

(23:34)
And when we have our conversations, and we've talked obviously more than just this, one of the things that I warn entrepreneurs is try not to get caught up in the, it's great to have that dream of raising all these monies and being successful enough to have those headlines and do what you could do with all of that money, but don't let those headlines discourage you if you're not raising those kinds of dollars. Build your business

David S. Williams III (24:04):

For sure.

David S. Williams III (24:05):

So what are the things that you have, well, let me back myself up here on this, back on this mindset and obstacles. You have a new mindset or a shifted mindset. You're now changing the way that you're approaching your business, yet at the same time you recognize these opportunities, how are you prioritizing what to do and how are you managing your time in that? Because I also find resource perspectively, not just financially speaking, how do you deal with your own personal constraints in making these decisions and prioritizations?

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (24:40):

Yeah, great question. And I think about it as almost like MDAs, there's an order of operation, if you remember that from grade school of course. And by sharing up, so kind of putting on my business hat and my finance background, it's like if we can reduce burn, get our expenses under control, then you can actually have to worry about how much you need to raise or whatnot. Because then you can just focus on, alright, what's actually going to be the key revenue drivers for the business? And then that buys you time again, kind of what the PR and the VC model, and don't get me wrong, this is not like a get on VC mode. It's there's a time and place for everything.

David S. Williams III (25:25):

Absolutely.

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (25:25):

And if you can buy yourself time to be able, because if you stick around long enough and you have smart, talented people on the team, you're going to figure something out. That's right. And whether it's that business, whether you need to shift, make it pivot, you'll find out what you need to do. So it's really about just being able to give yourself time. What we've been able to do is really pare down focus on what's actually going to drive the needle, move the needle for our business, which is revenue. And what's going to drive that is figuring out what coaches want. And we know that's clients and so well, how can we optimize that so it's reducing those costs and then it's, okay, well let's just focus on purely product market fit. Nothing else matters. And that's what we're driving to. And I think if you can just get to the basics, remove all of the other, chasing the glamor, glitz and glamor, that's how you make a strong business. And that's how we've been able to, one of our core values is focus wisely. And so that's what we've been able to do is focus wisely.

David S. Williams III (26:26):

I love that. I kind of want to shout that louder for the people in the back. Focus on your business, focus on product market fit, and that's going to drive all of your success. I love that. My next question really is how can the overcast overlap family help you? What are the types of things that you're looking for from our audience, which tends to be other founders, usually digital health, healthcare services, investors, as well as industry champions at a lot of healthcare organizations. When you think about that audience, what are the things that can help you and spotter

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (27:06):

At this point? Great question. I think for us, any connections with healthcare providers who might be interested in working on a partnership to be able to explore what that would look like for having a group of highly qualified coaches that could be beneficial for their patient population or employee population. So employers as well, that would be very helpful. Also, anybody that maybe around grant funding or something that's like S-B-I-R-N-S-F related, those things also help serve as proof points for their business. And obviously we know the government has funding for that. And CHCF, shout out to them as well. Shout

David S. Williams III (27:50):

Out to California Healthcare Foundation.

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (27:53):

So I think those would be the main things for us. And obviously any coaches that need help. So strategically, this was a very big point for us starting the business off, Hey, do you go B2B or in, do you start working with studios or do you start working at the coach level? Which is, I mean these coaches are businesses, but they're individuals, right? But we really wanted to start at the coach level because that's the front line of the people who are actually doing the work. And if you get their buy-in as you come out with other products or services, they're already, oh, we trust spotter, so we're going to already be bought in. And then so the SMB is going to have to get on board. That medium-sized business enterprise is going to have to get on board who the people want, right? So that's why we started this way.

David S. Williams III (28:44):

Okay. Well good. Everybody in the audience, we're talking about healthcare professionals, providers, we're talking about coaches, we're talking about other people who are interested in personal training. We want you to reach out to Kevin and Spotter. What's your email address?

Kevin White, CEO Spottyr (29:00):

Yeah, you can find me@kevinatspotter.io. And spotter is spelled S-P-O-T-T-Y

David S. Williams III (29:07):

R.io. Excellent. And I will put all of that on the website, all the contact information so people can go in there and also reach you that way. Alright, Kevin, it has been an absolute pleasure having you here on the Overcast. I've had fun. I had one. The pleasure was mine. And stay tuned for the next episode of The Overcast. Until then, keep shining.