Tobi Pearce - Co-Founder of Sweat | The Founder Who Sold for $400M Says Most Business Advice Is Worthless

Success Story with Scott D. Clary

Success Story Media

How To, Business, Education, Self-improvement

4.6 • 326 Ratings

🗓️ 17 May 2026

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

➡️ Join 321,000 people who read my free weekly newsletter: https://newsletter.scottdclary.com ➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory Tobi Pearce is an Australian entrepreneur and co-founder of Sweat, one of the world’s most downloaded fitness apps. He built it alongside Kayla Itsines starting in his early twenties, scaled it to tens of millions of users across 150+ countries, and sold to iFIT Health & Fitness in 2021 for roughly $400 million. Pearce did it with a lean, data-driven approach that leaned on community and digital distribution over traditional marketing. He’s known for dismissing conventional business advice as generic and context-free. Post-exit, he’s focused on investing, mentoring early-stage founders, and sharing unfiltered takes on what building and scaling actually looks like. ➡️ Show Links https://www.instagram.com/tobi_pearce/ https://x.com/tobi_pearce11 https://au.linkedin.com/in/tobi-pearce-251918b1 ➡️ Podcast Sponsors Hubspot - https://hubspot.com/ Huel - https://huel.com/scott (Code: scott) iDigress Podcast - https://www.idigress.fm/ Odoo - https://www.odoo.com NetSuite - https://netsuite.com/scottclary/ Indeed - https://indeed.com/clary Framer - https://framer.com/design (Code: SuccessStory) LinkedIn Ads - https://linkedin.com/scottclary Priori - https://priori.life/ Mars Men - https://mengotomars.com/ Granola - https://www.granola.ai/success Upwork - https://upwork.com/ Xero - https://www.xero.com Dell - dell.com/dell-pro AutoPilot - https://www.joinautopilot.com/landing ➡️ Talking Points 00:00 – Intro 01:25 – Why Most Business Advice Fails 03:27 – Where Real Advice Comes From 07:57 – Stories Aren’t the Lesson 10:45 – Why Thinking Beats Tactics 23:15 – Selling a Company for $400M 24:52 – Sponsor Break 26:49 – How to Sell Your Company Right 29:47 – Was $400M the Right Move? 31:15 – Sell or Step Back? 39:43 – A Founder’s Decision Framework 42:29 – The Mindset Shift 43:44 – Hiring A-Players 51:02 – Sponsor Break 53:13 – Can A-Players Hurt Culture? 1:01:04 – Tobi’s Best Mental Models 1:10:50 – Advice to His 20-Year-Old Self

Transcript

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0:00.0	HubSpot is a success story partner.
0:01.7	Now, think about listening to this podcast right now.
0:04.1	You are probably multitasking.
0:05.5	You are probably catching maybe 70 to 80% of what I'm saying.
0:08.9	Now, flip that and imagine catching only 20%.
0:12.0	It's not a good use of your time.
0:14.3	That'd be insane, right?
0:15.3	But this is the reality for most businesses.
0:17.9	Most businesses only use 20% of their data. That's like reading a book with 80%
0:23.7	of the pages torn out. You are making decisions with a fraction of the picture. All the important
0:29.3	details that get buried in the call logs and the emails and the transcripts and the chat messages
0:33.7	and it's just floating around doing nothing for you unless you use HubSpot.
0:38.3	Their customer platform brings all that unstructured data together and turns it into insights
0:43.1	that actually help you grow your business because when you know more, you grow more.
0:47.6	And when you're running a business on 100% of your data instead of 20, the decisions get
0:52.9	a lot easier.
0:53.9	Visit HubSpot.com to get the full
0:55.8	picture today. You say that most business advice is crap. More often than not, it's marketing material
1:01.2	and highlight real stuff. The majority of the conversation online is often about the story and what
1:06.3	happened. It's not necessarily about why and how. That isn't value. And people think that's advice,
1:11.5	but they often think that the story is the advice. The best possible advice you can get in the world
1:16.5	is actually free and it is feedback that you get from doing. What if the biggest opportunities
	...

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