Erica: Hello. My name is Erica Grigg of TechInspire.Me. I'm here with Jeff Hyman, the founder and CEO of Retrofit. They are @retrofitme on Twitter. If you're not following them, go do it now. So, Jeff, let's get started. I've got several questions, the first of which is Retrofit, where did this idea come from? What inspired you to start this company?

Jeff: It's great to be here. It came out of personal frustration, like I think most start-ups do. I had gained two pounds a year from the time I was thirty, which is actually the national average. Got to a point where I was substantially over what I felt comfortable with and like most people tried every diet out there and would lose the weight, the weight would come back, would lose the weight, the weight would come back.

Repeat this cycle until I just got fed up and it wasn't until my wife took me to a destination health resort where I really learned that everything I thought I knew about weight loss was wrong. The myths and the hype I was subject to just like anybody else. So working with a registered dietitian and therapist and exercise physiologist and specialists was really able to turn things around and so decided that we could build a company to do that in a more scalable way.

Erica: So, it's almost like a fat camp.

Jeff: Almost like a fat camp.

Erica: Okay. All right.

Jeff: Which many Americans go to these destinations and the challenge is, aside from the fact that they're expensive, it's a very short burst. You're there for five or ten days and Retrofit is a year- long program because we actually think it takes a year to fundamentally change your habits and patterns and behaviors.

Erica: So, tell us more about Retrofit customers. What happens when you go to Retrofit?

Jeff: When you join Retrofit, which we have hundreds and hundreds of customers across the country, you get your own private weight loss team of experts. You get a registered dietitian who will work with you on nutrition and food in a very personalized way. You get a masters level exercise physiologist who does the same on exercise and activity. Probably what is most special is a masters level behavior coach, essentially a therapist, who will work with you on the behavioral or mental challenges around food and your relationship with food and your weight, because half of weight loss is between the ears.

And then we wrap that whole thing up with a couple of really neat Wi-Fi devices. A Wi-Fi scale and a Wi-Fi pedometer that provide immediate tracking and feedback so all the data is sent to Retrofit and your private team can coach you little by little over the course of a year to make those changes.

Erica: Yeah, it just seems like it's not as easy as eat less and work out more.

Jeff: People know this. Right? So it's how do you bridge the gap between what people know and what they should do and by using expertise, an expert team, and making it personalized and holding people accountable, we're seeing remarkable results. Ninety-six percent of our clients are losing weight and over 70% are on track to lose at least 10% of their weight. Ten percent is a pretty meaningful amount of weight loss. That's five to ten times what most weight loss programs see because we are able to use digital innovation to do that.

Erica: And what about long term? Keeping the weight off?

Jeff: The challenge of Retrofit, or the purpose, is to teach people how to make small, we call them baby steps, changes to their behavior every day, every week to actually keep the weight off over time. We're just looking for one pound a week. Very slow, methodical weight loss.

Sure enough, our clients tell us that they had no idea before they worked with us how much they should be eating, how often they should be eating, they skipped breakfast, they thought, you know, the number one thing that people do is skip meals, which is the worst way to lose weight. It's actually a very good way to gain weight. So we teach people how to keep the weight off for life.

Erica: I bet it can be very inspiring to see people's stories of losing weight and feeling better about themselves. Is that what inspires you on a daily basis? What are those other things that inspire you to continue to do start-up?

Jeff: Every Friday in the company we have this email that goes out which includes comments from all of our clients that week and you see people have hope again. These were people that have tried everything including lap band surgery, and for the first time they feel like they can lose the weight and keep it off, which has an impact on their career, their self esteem, their relationship, their sex life, everything. It effects all aspects of someone's life. That keeps us going, right through all the challenges.

We spend a lot of time taking with clients to understand what could we do better, could we do differently, what do we need to change. We just introduced a mobile version, today, this morning, to make it easier to log their activity and food. So that's what keeps us going. It's more than about money, it's a real mission.

Erica: What are some of the challenges that you see on a day to day basis?

Jeff: Weight loss is hard, so no one can say that it's an easy thing. It affects two-thirds of the country now. I think one of the challenges is getting people to believe that they can do it. The average American diets three times a year, they fail, so they've done this 10, 20, 30 times. They've lost the weight, gained it back.

So one of the challenges is to get them to believe in themselves, that this can actually be different. Retrofit is not a diet, it's truly a behavior change program. We never use the word diet, we don't believe in deprivation, we want people to never be hungry, things of that nature. But people come into it and they gladly sign up and they pay us which is terrific, but getting them to believe and trust us and trust experts can sometimes be a challenge, ironically. But then they lose 10, 20 pounds and they're off to the races. They realize, wow, this is actually working and then it becomes self reinforcing.

Erica: How many customers are you interested in connecting with? Is this mass scale or is it more of a very small niche audience?

Jeff: No. We're looking to scale. We've raised venture capital money, so this is about go big or go home, so to speak. You've got 150 million Americans that are overweight so there's no shortage of need, but, that said, we're much more focused on outcomes than many weight loss programs, so every single day we have dozens of metrics that we've reviewed to make sure our clients are on track. We know from the wireless devices if they're losing weight, if they're losing muscle or fat, if they've slept, if they've weighed themselves. We know all this, which is amazing.

So we're not necessarily looking to grow very, very quickly, we're looking to grow well, which means smart, and outcomes. The nice thing about weight loss is when you lose 30 pounds, you can't hide it. Everyone sees you've lost it and says that you look great, how'd you do it? I did it with Retrofit. And so it may be cliche, but we kind of think that if we do a good job the rest will take care of itself, so we don't spend a lot of time on marketing or any of that noise. We really invest it into the product itself and let the results speak for themselves.

Erica: In terms of the challenges, I heard that securing VC funding has just been like Hell. For you, was that another challenge, securing that VC funding?

Jeff: Yes, it always is in the early stages of a company, but when you find a couple of people that are simpatico and really believe in the size of the opportunity, which in weight loss there's no shortage, when we shared with them the failure rates, so 95% of people that diet gain the weight back within 12 months, 95%. So, basically, dieting doesn't work, and when you start to run the numbers and show people that there is a different way and a better way we were fortunate early before we raised money to attract some of the top obesity experts in the country as participants in designing the program, when we found a few VCs that got it, it was a week and we were done.

You've got to kiss a lot of frogs to get there, you know, we met many VCs who had no interest or didn't like the category or they liked the category but didn't like the fact that this was really an execution play, we didn't have any proprietary technology or software, but you just need a few frogs and we found them.

Erica: Cool. So turning around those challenges and making them into successes, what about some success metrics. How do you measure success with Retrofit and what have some of your successes been?

Jeff: We measure many things. We call this data-driven weight loss, so we're very obsessed about metrics. We measure everything from how much weight on average clients lose per week. The safe standard is between one and two pounds. You don't want to lose too much, you don't want to lose too little. It's a narrow band. We measure drop out. What percentage of clients drop out of the program, which in our case is extremely low.

We measure our male to female ratio. One of the challenges with many weight loss programs is they are about 90% female, 10% male. Ours is 50/50, which is very unusual. We've actually cracked the masses with men. We track steps per day so we know that activity throughout the day, which we use a wireless pedometer, leads to weight loss so we track that; with a goal of 10,000 steps per day. We track how many hours, on average, our clients sleep. If you don't sleep at least six and a half hours, it's very tough to lose weight. Many of our clients sleep two, three, four hours a night. They have sleep apnea, they're on their cell phones, or their iPhone, checking email until midnight.

It's such a data rich environment that one of the challenges is to make sure we're tracking the right metrics, and not garbage vanity metrics which don't do anything. And then we track, of course, our business metrics. How much does it cost to acquire a customer? What is our average revenue per customer? Those types of things.

Erica: What about some success metrics that you've seen in terms of users and potential other kinds of success because you've got quite a few, but could you tell us about that?

Jeff: Yeah, sure. One of the ones that we feel most proud of is our dropout rate. It's kind of weird to focus on a negative situation, but in weight loss it's been proven, as with many recovery programs, alcohol, drugs, the longer someone stays with the program, the better they do, no matter what the program. The problem is, in weight loss most people last three weeks and then drop out. It's just not long enough for the change to take hold.

Our dropout rate is 4%. Industry metrics are hard to find, but it seems like they are between 25 to 50% is the average dropout rate so we're a fraction of that, which is part of what gives us confidence that because people are sticking with the program, just losing a pound a week, nothing sexy or fast, but you get to month three, you've lost 12, 15 pounds, you get to month six you've lost 20, 30 pounds. That's not only meaningful weight that someone sees and feels a difference, but it's enough to change their blood numbers. It's enough that they can start to go off medications and you've made a significant health impact on their lives. So dropout rate is one example, but like I said we track a lot of stuff.

Erica: Wow. In terms of those successes, what is next? What are some of the upcoming features that you might be adding over the next 6 to 12 months that you're looking forward to?

Jeff: As I mentioned we launched mobile this morning, mobile access, which makes it much easier for our clients to interact with their team of wellness experts, to log food, that type of thing. We don't pre-announce a lot of features, but just to give you a sense of where we're heading, there are many segments in the U.S. when it comes to weight. You've got people that are overweight, looking to improve their health or lose weight, you've got segments that are not overweight but also looking to improve their health. We're looking carefully at that segment.

We're looking at the adolescent segment. That's a huge challenge right now with childhood obesity, childhood diabetes, and one of the interesting challenges is that you need to include the parents in that discussion. The mom buys the food or the dad takes them to McDonald's or whatever it might be, and unless you incorporate the parents, it's not going to work. We're looking at that segment, as well.

Then the last thing I'll share is that, obviously, as a Skype- based business model we have the opportunity to go overseas. You've got countries where the obesity rate is actually growing faster than it is in the U.S. So China, India, a huge new middle class, seeing fast food for the first time, seeing cars for the first time, it's not surprising that obesity is skyrocketing. Those are areas that we are interested in penetrating as well, not just the U.S.

It's a big mission and it's a big vision and we're committed to helping people lead more fulfilling lives through healthy living as opposed to by dieting or by surgery or by some magic pill that I don't think will ever come. So those are some examples of where we're heading.

Erica: I'm really excited to have this conversation and stay in tune with Retrofit. So, thank you.

Jeff: Thanks.