What's up everyone this is Alex Lieberman co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew welcome back to founder's journal my personal audio diary where I give you the business builder the tools

You need to think better in order to build better whether that's building a business a team or new product today

I'm bringing back a fan favorite start-up crossfit. Let's hop into it

So for those of you that were not part of start-up crossfit last time, here's how it works. I take a business idea that I've thought of or a business idea that was submitted by the founder's journal community and I take it through the gauntlet. What's the goal of this? Basically it's to determine if this business idea is poised for success or primed for failure and it's also just getting us all in that

a bit of working through ideas, analyzing them and also realizing that like not every business idea is going to be the perfect idea and that's okay it is a process. What I'm going to do is give the idea a letter grade at the end to give you a sense of how bullish I am on this business. Let me start with the questions that I'm going to ask about this idea and that you should really think about asking about any business idea or side project idea that you have.

There are six questions that I ask when assessing the feasibility of any business idea. The first, how painful is the problem? The second, why is the solution significantly better than what's already out there? The third, how defensible is the business at scale?

The fourth, what's the ambition of the business? The fifth, what makes me a good fit or a bad fit to start this business as its founder? And finally the sixth, how can I test this idea quickly and cheaply but with high fidelity?

High fidelity meaning I have a good sense after the test if this can be a legit business or not. So now what I want to do is break down the idea and answer each of those six questions as we go through.

The name of the business and I came up with it in about five minutes so it's not perfect but it's good enough is sub 30. Sub 30 is a global exercise movement that combines content and community to make getting healthy actually fun.

The problem that sub 30 solves is that working out sucks for many of us. It's boring yet it is incredibly necessary. So people either choose to suck it up and they just hate working out and working out at the gym to they join a group workout class which can be really expensive or inconvenient or three they just opt out of working out altogether the worst of the three options.

With sub 30 what you end up doing is you take a short fitness quiz where you provide your fitness level types of exercise that you prefer to do and how often you're going to commit to exercising sub 30 then places you into a fitness group that will be your group throughout the sub 30 program.

You'll have a calendar of all of your classes that can be integrated with your Google counter whatever calendar app you use and each invite will link to a zoom link where you'll do your 30 minute or less classes each day with your group.

And here's where sub 30 is different. There are no instructors sub 30 will carry 30 minute hit workouts designed by professional instructors but classes will be for and by the community.

Members of the sub 30 community will have the opportunity to volunteer to lead classes which just requires a training from sub 30 the corporate brand and being given the workout that sub 30 designs and then you're given a music playlist as well that you use during your zoom with the group and in doing so by leading or volunteering to lead these classes you get a significant discount on your sub 30 membership.

This makes it a super capital efficient business model since you don't have instructors but it also creates a truly deep sense of community since no other workout brands or exercise companies I can think of or truly community lead.

So that's sub 30 now let's go back to the six questions I asked in the beginning question one how painful is the problem.

From my experience very painful unless I am playing a sport I freaking hate working out I find myself getting distracted I find any specific discipline of working out like CrossFit or spinning to become unbearable after a month or two of doing it and all that said I understand how important exercise is for my health which basically guarantees pain in either direction either I hate the exercise while I'm doing it

or I hate myself for not exercising if I decide to skip a day so I would say the problem is pretty painful question two why is the solution significantly better.

This is where I honestly think that sub 30 is sub optimal I think the solution is better but not significantly better.

I think that it's better from a business perspective in the sense that it is a model based off of restricting time versus say taking an exercise trend that could become a fad where it's big today but not big tomorrow.

I also think it's better and unique in the sense that it is a truly community lead fitness business but I worry that it is not significantly better for a few reasons.

First, there are a lot of hit based exercise businesses out there from berries to f 45 to peloton's app and while the emphasis on community I'd argue is greater here I don't think that it's a 10x better solution.

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