How RP Strength Bootstrapped to $20M+
Meet Nick Shaw — co-founder & CEO of RP Strength
Hey, it's Alex!
This week, we're chatting with Nick Shaw — co-founder and CEO of RP Strength (Renaissance Periodization), the fitness company behind tens of millions in subscription revenue, over 3 million Youtube subscribers and one of the most trusted names in evidence-based training and nutrition.
From personal training across NYC subway stations to building a 30-person team generating $20+ million annually, Nick shares the real story behind RP's growth — including a $100K app development disaster, the $2-5M revenue "messy middle" stage that nearly had him burning out, and why authenticity beats viral marketing every time.
If you've ever wondered how to scale from services to products without losing your sanity, this one's packed with hard-earned lessons.
Dive in below!
Quick Stats
🤝 Business Model: SaaS fitness apps + digital products + coaching
💰 Annual Revenue: $20-30 million
👥 Team Size: 30-35 people (including coaches)
📊 Profit Margin: 50%+
💸 Funding: Bootstrapped
📱 Revenue Breakdown: 80% apps, 15% YouTube, 5% other
⏳ Time In Business: 12+ years
😤 Times Almost Quit: At least once
Starting the fitness journey...
This is mostly all I've ever done…
I've been running RP along with my colleague and co-founder, Dr. Mike, since around 2011, 2012. Before that I was actually a personal trainer in New York City, straight out of college.
Dr. Mike and I both went to the University of Michigan — that's where I met him in the student weight room, because we're just a couple of meatheads that like to lift weights. He convinced me to do a powerlifting meet and I was hooked. I needed something competitive to channel that competitive drive I always had growing up playing sports.
He was two years ahead of me in school, finishing his master's degree from Appalachian State while I was finishing up my undergrad at Michigan. He was going out to New York City and said, "Hey, why don't you give some thought to coming out here and being a personal trainer with me."
I'd never been to New York City in my entire life, so I thought it seemed interesting. One of my roommates from college drove out there — it's like a 10-hour drive. We show up Saturday morning, probably around 2 AM, 116th Street up near Columbia.
It was my first experience ever in New York City.
I got the job and was there for almost two years before I started doing some training on my own. Then that morphed into Dr. Mike and I coaching people online around 2012.
Recognizing the online opportunity...
When I first started it, we didn't know online coaching would become what it is today. Here's how it worked: Mike had left New York City and was down at East Tennessee State getting his PhD in sport physiology. I was still in New York. We were referring people back and forth because I was only training people in person and he was coaching people online.
It was not a big thing back in 2012. Maybe even 2011. We kept doing that and thought, "Why don't we just start a company where you and I are in business together?"
We never thought it would grow into something where we were doing different digital products and apps. It was just him and I coaching people online. This was when you could get a lot of bang for your buck on Facebook…
You didn't have to spend any money on paid ads. You posted something, all of your friends saw it, their friends saw it if they commented.
We had a really simple business model: coach people online, do a really good job, provide good customer service, make sure we're friendly and prompt.
We get people results, the rest will take care of itself.
That was literally how we started.
Social media started to take off…
We had to hire more coaches to keep up because it started to spread. Luckily, Dr. Mike was in a PhD program, so he had other students down there that already had master's degrees or were studying sport physiology at the PhD level. It was a very natural progression to hire some of his classmates as coaches.
The pivot from in-person to online...
I was still training some people in person in New York City, and I just remember thinking, I can't do this forever. I'm up early, I gotta train late, I'm all over the city — up and down the subway, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, midtown, downtown…it was a lot.
When I started to first get into online coaching, I was like, wow, this is really cool. I can sit at home and write programs and respond to emails, and I don't have to travel all over New York City.
Maybe when I first started online coaching, I was about 95% in-person, 5% online. Over the years, it started to shift — 75/25, then 50/50, and then all of a sudden the coaching became more online. When my wife and I left New York City in 2015, I've never had to train anyone in person ever since then.
The first digital product breakthrough...
2014 came around and someone suggested, "Hey, you should get on Instagram." Instagram was the perfect medium for us because before-and-after pictures were a huge thing.
We decided Dr. Mike would create all the products.
He wrote The Renaissance Diet 1.0 that came out in October of 2014. When we launched this ebook, it sold several thousand copies in the first week at around 30 bucks a copy. All of a sudden, we're making $60,000, $90,000, $120,000 in the span of a weekend or a week.
That's where we started to see the future is probably selling digital products. How do we take this coaching model that we have, which is a little bit expensive, and make this into a product that people can just buy?
Mike took literally just a weekend to create a bunch of Excel spreadsheets that were based on a person's gender and weight classes with built-in diet progressions. If we're coaching someone and they stall out, I know exactly what I'm going to do. You can set up algorithms and progressions — it's not that hard.
So in February of 2015 we came out with what's called the RPD templates — these Excel spreadsheets. We had no idea how well they would do, but we thought this was kind of cool.
We launched them and they sold maybe a thousand or so at 80 bucks a pop.
Then something really interesting happened. About two to three months later, the people that bought them originally started posting their results online. That is when it really started to take off because people started mentioning us, sharing their pictures on Instagram. It took on a life of its own.
We started working with some small to mid-sized influencers that were using our products, getting good results. I ran our Instagram account, which is now over 900K or something. At the time it was in the thousands. I remember every milestone that we hit — 10K, 25K, 50K, 100K. These were really big milestones.
Those first big revenue moments...
I grew up probably lower middle class in a rural town of about 2,000 people. My dad worked in tool and die, and we didn't make a whole lot of money. My mom was a waitress. We never really had a lot of money.
When Mike and I first started, we're like, "I don't know, we could make like $100K a year? That would be amazing." Then all of a sudden you start doing this...
I remember in 2016, we would run sales selling templates at $79 instead of $99. That was probably some of the first times I learned about scarcity. When we tell people it's their last chance to get the sale, it's astounding how many people buy and how fast it is.
I remember in 2016, we would run sales selling templates at $79 instead of $99. That was probably some of the first times I learned about scarcity.
We’d run a sale Friday through Sunday…
Usually it does well at the beginning, tails off a little bit on Saturday. And guess what? When we tell people it's their last chance to get the sale, it's astounding how many people buy and how fast it is.
I just remember sitting in Miami with Mike, and I would look at the orders coming in. I'm talking every second an order would be coming in — that's $80. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. I just remember thinking, I don't even know what the fuck to do. This is crazy. This is absurd.
I remember thinking, how do I not mess this up?
Neither of us came from money. Mike was born in Moscow, came to Detroit when he was 7 and lived in Section 8 housing. We're just like, what do we do?
We basically did one of two things: invest some back into the company and invest a bunch into stocks because we're like, what happens if this stops? We know what it's like to grow up without any money.
It was a really trippy feeling…
It is one of the coolest feelings in the world knowing that many people are interested in your stuff.
The painful app development lessons...
We definitely knew we had product-market fit when we started selling the diet templates. So we thought, we can probably make this into an app. The first struggle was maybe why we were in Miami — we went down there with some app developer.
They heavily insinuated it would cost around $100,000 to $150,000. This is 2016…
We probably paid them $40K already to go over the initial spec sheet. Then they come back with their scope of work and it was literally 7x what they insinuated. We're just like, "F off, we're not doing this."
Then we ended up working with someone local here in Charlotte — another complete disaster.
They just didn't understand what we were trying to do.
Then we kind of lucked into Andrew. He didn't work for RP at the time, but he knew Mike through online stuff. He came out and was like, "Hey guys, I'm a software developer. I really like RP stuff. I really like what you guys are doing. Can I help?"
That was 2017, and he basically just led the charge ever since then as creating the diet app. I think it helped having someone that knew what we were trying to do, lived the lifestyle — that was a big help.
A lot of people, if they are service providers and they decide to get into the product stuff — I would never in a million years recommend that you go build your own app…
Go find a coaching platform software that can do 80% of what you want.
The 20% that's missing is not worth the headaches and hassle of probably a three-year process and probably end up spending at least half a million dollars.
Structuring partnerships and equity...
That's a loaded question because it was not this thing that just worked perfectly from day one.
For the longest time, it was a battle because we didn't know how to structure it properly.
We did a lot of stuff on a handshake deal for the longest time. If anyone's into law and they're reading this, they're like, "Oh my God, this guy's stupid."
I hear that.
But Mike and I operated on literally a handshake deal, and there's probably no one in this world that I trust more along with my wife.
We knew how to create win-win situations rather than win-lose.
One of the benefits that most of the RP people have is we've always been more long-sighted.
Let's play the long game.
It's not worth it to screw people over or do something the wrong way to gain a couple extra dollars right here, right now, even though it's going to cost us in the long run.
As of last year, 2024, we actually had a restructure and are set up much more typical to a traditional tech company. There were definitely some tricky parts along the way — for the longest time, our app team was only incentivized by app sales, so there was always this bit of like, they don't really care how the rest of the company's doing.
There were definitely some tough moments and decisions, but now everyone's in alignment.
Navigating the messy middle… ($2-5M Revenue)
Once we figured out some email automations that allowed our digital products to be sent automatically, it unlocked maybe the first true hockey stick for RP. I remember it caused all sorts of issues where my wife and I had to run all of our customer service.
It was a very trying time because we also had two small kids at the time and we could not take a single day off. We could not take time off because we would only get further behind. Before we would go to sleep at night, every email was caught so we could at least start the next day "fresh."
We had a full-time nanny and we would hire a babysitter on the weekends because we had to work…
A break to us would be going to Costco for the afternoon, maybe going out to lunch. We're like, hey, let's try to put away our phones for two, three hours. Let's go to the grocery store, we'll go eat some real food, sit down.
You do that for a year and a half, two years, you kind of hate everything. Throw in two small kids to the mix — yeah, it's a recipe for stress and burnout.
It was absolutely the closest to burnout I've ever come.
That was probably at least one time I almost quit because sitting there, it was tough, man.
We knew that we had to hire some people. We ended up hiring our first-ever customer service person.
We were hesitant because of the time we’d have to take away from the business to train someone, but then we did it anyway.
It sucked for a little bit, and then we started to notice things being taken care of, so we could spend time on tasks we’d been neglecting.
I was never one that was like, "I need to know everything."
I always thought along the lines of, can we bring on a consultant part-time?
I don't know anything about email marketing. Cool, let's bring in a guy that knows some stuff.
It's a very hard spot to be in because you don’t want to hire a full-time person because you know no one cares as much as I do, but it’s impossible to do everything.
Usually when you're not in it, it's a much easier thing to see. When you're in it, it's not easy to see.
Learning leadership and management...
When you're a smaller company, your hands are in everything. As the team grew over time, it became trickier to completely let go of stuff. Nowadays, most of my days are spent on meetings with people — what are we working on? What's going on? What's the update for this week? What's the plan? Are we on track?
A lot of times I kind of feel lazy.
I'm like, do people think that I'm not doing anything?
I'm asking, "Do you guys need help with some emails? Do you guys need help with social media?"
Most of the time they're like, "No, we got it. We're good." They can do the job better than I can.
I don't have a huge ego, which probably plays into a strength of how you can become a good leader. Lots of reading, learning, podcasts, joining various groups. I was in EO (Entrepreneurs Organization) for a while and then for the last almost three years I've been in Vistage.
Vistage has been great because it's all founders or CEOs in the group — 12 people get together every month. Business is business and people problems exist in essentially every type of business you can imagine. You get to learn and see how other people do stuff and gain insights from businesses smaller than yours and much larger than yours.
If you want to be a leader, you don't have to have all the right answers.
Mike and I don't know much about coding — that's why we have Andrew.
He knows a lot about coding. Andrew recruited our whole software engineering team, people he used to work with. They're all very senior-level guys. We never would have been able to do that.
I think that I'm probably pretty good at business development, relationship building, especially with people in the fitness space. I usually get along quite well with people, and I think that's played to my advantage.
The importance of authenticity in marketing...
I just treated Instagram like a game — what works?
Let's try some stuff.
The cool part was probably 90% of the content was generated by our users. I would just share the best stuff. I'm not a creative person when it comes to social media, but I just kept using other people's stuff and funneling it onto the main page.
A lot of these strategies don't really work anymore…Things change over time.
But it was always just an experiment — what's working? Cool.
Hey, I think this is going to work.
Oh, that bombed.
It's just a lot of trial and error.
Now, because we've been around long enough, I've seen when you don't really care about something that you're promoting, it shows.
People can see through it.
Maybe in 2017, 2018 you could get away with promoting some detox bullshit, but nowadays people see right through that.
The biggest part is really just leaning into stuff that you authentically like, love and use.
Our apps — we use them every day. The couple partner companies that we work with on our YouTube channel, like Genius Shot — we use it, I love it. It's the only supplement we've ever promoted.
Here we are a decade later — we've had lots of opportunities to do our own supplements, but we didn't.
Why?
Because there's so many supplement companies, it's all more or less the same. But Genius Shot is something we'll get on board with because we do think it's the way of the future.
You really have to lean into the authenticity around stuff.
Obviously if you're just starting out, it takes a long time to build up an audience.
You don't need many people — you can make a hell of a living, six maybe even seven figures, just from coaching people with a higher-ticket model.
You don't need a crazy amount of followers.
Key lessons and advice...
Extreme Ownership was one book that I thought was really good — it's written by Jocko Willink.
You listen to enough of his podcasts, it becomes clear that if you want to be a good leader, you probably have to be pretty humble.
You don't need to know it all.
Stephen Covey's 7 Habits talks about being proactive, not reactive…
Something that successful people have in common is this internal locus of control — stuff happens, can I do anything about it? If not, I'm going to try to focus on what I do actually have some control over.
You really have to care about people.
If you approach people from just a transactional thing, people don't love that.
They see through it.
But if people know that you actually give a crap about them, they're probably more willing to do those things.
Current operations and future thinking...
We're somewhere in the $20 to $30 million range with probably 30 to 35 people if we include our coaches. Our profit margins are quite high — over 50%.
Our people are all quite well compensated.
That's just not how I want to do business…
We have a model where we're okay having one person that's probably worth one and a half, two people and paying them above average. Most of the people we hire are referrals, and because we have a big audience, it's usually not hard because people are attracted to the company.
We're not going to treat people like crap.
We're going to pay them above average — 75th percentile, something like that. You do that, treat people well — we don't have a lot of turnover.
I think that we will continue to make our apps better and better. If we do that and continue to put out tons of free content, those two things will probably take care of themselves.
I'm only 37.
The oldest person in our company is early 40s, so we've got some runway ahead of us.
Does that mean an exit? I don't know.
You never know what the future's going to hold.
If someone comes in, a tech company wants to offer a bunch of money because fitness is a big thing and health is a big thing — we'd be silly not to listen.
But no immediate plans because someone asked what I would do if I didn't do RP right now?
I’d probably coach people in the fitness space. laughs
I like everyone that I work with…I get along well with them.
We've got a good thing going and we're all aligned.
I'm not looking to get out anytime soon.