January 16, 2024

January 30, 2024

5YF Episode #7: Mindbody CEO Fritz Lanman

AI entrenches vertical SaaS, predicting customer behavior, global wellness in 2024, and the future of fitness w/ Mindbody CEO Fritz Lanman

5 year frontier

Episode Transcript
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Mindbody serves over 60,000 wellness businesses in 150 countries, giving us a deep look at tomorrows fitness industry. An operating system for businesses unlocking growth and predictive actions driven via their huge data set — now turbocharged by AI. From offering customers credit to forecasting churn, the future of vertical software / SaaS takes a leap forward in the coming years.

We have more visibility into more businesses and more consumers than anyone else in fitness and wellness industry, so I can predict…better than Google can

What you’ll hear:

👽 AI’s role is capturing share of customers wallet

➿ Future of ecosystems, network effects and data moats

🌟 Virtual reality, quantified self, and the fitness influencer

🧮 Embedding finance into software

🧗🏻How wellness spreads from country to country

♾️ And plenty more!


AI is not something all of us should be building, its something all of us should be training

Our guest:

Fritz Lanman is CEO of Mindbody, the leading software platform serving fitness and wellness studios in over 150 countries. An incredible success case for vertical software that has grown to serve 60,000 businesses representing more than 20M consumers. Supporting them with a comprehensive suite of tools from scheduling to marketing. Mindbody went public on the NASDAQ in 2015 and was taken private by Vista Equity in 2019. Fritz came to Mindbody via the acquisition of Classpass where he was first an investor then CEO, and still serves as CEO today. Starting his career at Microsoft Fritz is a 3x entrepreneur, passionate about advanced software and data, and has an enviable angle investment track record that includes Pinterest, Square, Wish and Flexport.

Make it seamless for your customers to have their data vended and synchronized

My takeaway:

Entrenched vertical software providers like Mindbody are beautifully placed to leverage AI to make full use of the data, customer access, and tribal knowledge they have on an industry. Their customers will expect them to and those who fail to adopt and innovate will risk losing their footing. Understanding, predicting, and personalizing to their customers’ user base will take a leap forward and increase stickiness while opening new opportunities for cross-sell. A data-rich operating system where AI models can be deployed and vendors integrated into for win-win-win outcomes.

- Daniel Darling

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