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A
For us, because of the nature of what we wanted to build, we had to make electronics in Asia. Whenever you have a business that has physical goods in it, it took me a long time to figure out how harder it is to actually build a business like that because it just requires a lot of money to transform that money into physical things that have to be made and shipped from anywhere that you're going to make them.
B
Most business advice is wrong, built on opinions echoed by people who've never done it. But the truth, it's simpler and harder. You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is Right about now with Ryan Alford.
C
A lot of people talk about startups like a strategy and growth and nothing else, but really, it's survival of the fittest. Today's guest has lived just that, building a company through all of it, the highs, the lows, raising capital and somehow coming out on the other side. Khalil Zahar is the founder and chief operating officer of Fight Camp. He's been punched in the face more than once, but he is here right about now. What's up, Khalil? Welcome to Right about now. What's up?
A
What's up, Brian? How are you?
C
I'm great, man. I know you've had success, but it probably didn't come exactly the way you thought. It never does. Everybody thinks it's glamorous, or at least they used to. Maybe we're catching everybody up now with all the content. It actually sucks to be an entrepreneur because we were in that era, what, five, six years ago. It was just the flashy, hey, the Lambos and all the fun stuff. Hey, I'm an entrepreneur. It might be have gone 180 degrees the other direction. It sucks. You have to work really hard. It's work 500 hours. Do not do it unless you want to kill yourself. But hey, come try be an entrepreneur.
A
The bitch is less compelling than maybe
C
10 years ago, but it's still worthwhile. I told you beforehand, just punching people in the face every day. Being an entrepreneur, that goes all the way around. You're training people to punch bags typically. And I'm actually used your product, it's really cool. The tracker and all that stuff, I was pumped. Another pun intended. But literally, I was amazed how it worked my arm. So, all right. It'll be a little bit of an infomercial, people, because I like this product a lot. It's actually cool as shit. But I do want to pick Khalil's brain a little bit on the journey story. We're really trying to get underneath now. Our premise, Khalil, is most business advice is wrong. We're bringing on the real builders makers that are actually building the shit to talk about it. Just maybe in your own words, that journey, what's it been like, how long we been at this and why bother boxing?
A
Basically I started the company 12 years ago, assembled a group of five like minded individuals which became my co founders, helped us shape this vision over 12 years. We all kind of started out of college really. It was an interesting trajectory because we didn't have a lot of industry experience, we didn't have a lot of processes. We were just young hungry kids with a dream. The origin story of why boxing is for me, I discovered boxing when I was pretty late in my life to be competitive at a Sport. I was 20 when I discovered boxing. I played a lot of soccer growing up. At 14 years old, I discovered B boying, breakdancing, which is actually how I met two of my co founders. I was just heavy into that until basically I was 20. And then at 20 years old I completely fell in love with boxing. It was this art form that was pretty intimidating to me at first. Going to the boxing gym for the first time, I was like, I don't know if I'm just gonna get my ass kicked, I don't know if I even fit in in there. And I found a beautiful community in Toronto. Basically all I was doing it lined up with me moving. I had finished my mechanical engineering degree, I was going to school in Toronto because I just didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life yet. I to continue to compete in B boying and join where the best people are. Toronto also was a great place to develop my English because I didn't speak English for shit. Honestly. I went there, discovered boxing and about two years later, man, I have no idea if I'm continuing to progress here or I'm just plateauing. And this is the cap and this is where I was like, this is crazy that in the sport we're not measuring anything. You're measuring things here and there, but it's very old school. It's very kind of craft warrior minded, which just puts your head down and just trust the process and then you'll feel it in the ring. Me having a little bit of experience with other sports, I was like, man, there's technology everywhere. This is how I kind of Put what I was studying and that sport together. That got us our start literally in 2014.
C
The measurement thing is interesting. My grandfather, who passed away when I was pretty young, probably 15, but at age 10, I would sit in his lap and watch boxing. I age myself late 80s. It's hard to find boxing on TV a ton, but they had it on ESPN. They play back. My grandfather would get out of the chair and do the rope, a dope jab and stuff and taught me how to throw the combination. Just barely, not really teaching me to fight, but he was just like showing me like what it is. My fondest memories are growing up were with my grandfather and to this day I love watching boxing. The sports gotten a little wacky. It's interesting. I did see people training in the classic, like you said, the gym. You're throwing the right form, but there was never a way to really track it because you didn't have sort of the biometrics to do what we can do now with these fitness trackers. In anything we say what gets tracked gets measured. What gets measured gets improved. That's what I loved about this product. It nailed it as far as boxing goes. Kind of the endless jabs and throwing punches around, but not knowing what energy did I exert, how far was I going, Was I improving? Was my form improving? That's always been a very hard thing in technical form sports.
A
The most scientific people back then were using clickers on their athletes and these are like the most advanced coaches, Olympic level coaches, professional athletes. They were just recreating punch volume, which punch volume is only one metric and that's not even necessarily the best metric, but that's how archaic it was.
C
If I'm not hitting hard and there's not of exertion.
A
Right, Exactly. That's just looking at it from a conditioning standpoint. You have all this other aspect, which is how is your tactical, how is your tactics changing?
C
If you've got kids in middle school or high school, you already know homework can turn into a whole situation. What should take 20 minutes somehow turns into two hours. And half the time it ends with frustration on both sides. I've got four boys, three of them right in that middle and high school range. So I see it all the time. They hit a problem, get stuck. And it's not that they don't want to figure it out. They just don't know how to get there. That's why I've been looking into Brainly. Brainly is basically a 24,7 AI powered tutor that actually walks them through problems step by step, not just giving answers by helping them understand how something works so they can build confidence and keep moving. And as a parent, that's the part I care about. It's not about the shortcuts, it's about them actually learning the material. It's also just practical. You don't have to deal with scheduling a tutor or trying to find things that line up around sports and everything else. It's there whenever they need it. And it's a lot more affordable than traditional tutoring. Honestly, it just takes a lot of pressure off. Finals are coming up. Build your teen study plan now. It only takes minutes. Go to brainly.comryan to get 50% off your first Brainly subscription with my code RYAN that's B R A I N L Y.com RYAN so there's one thing I've learned running multiple businesses. It's how fast things fall apart when communication gets messy. Missed calls, scattered text threads, team members not seeing the same conversation. That stuff quietly costs you time and revenue. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q U O. The smarter way to run your business communications. It gives my team 1 shared business number so everyone sees the full conversation. Calls, texts, voicemails, all in one place. No more who talked to this customer? Replies are faster, handoffs are smoother, and customers actually feel taken care of. We realized that at my new card shop collector station. Between customers calling about card inventory, grading, submissions, trade offers, and even trade nights, things were moving fast. And when communication wasn't centralized, things got messy quick. I also like that it works wherever I am. Phone, laptop, doesn't matter. I kept my existing number added teammates in just minutes and everything lives in one clean view. And their AI automatically logs calls and pulls out next steps. Make this the season where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try quo for free. Plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com Ryan that's quo.com Ryan that's Q U O.com Ryan Quo no missed calls, no missed opportunities.
A
You actually go within a fight and you get tired and you stop using certain punches you should be using and so forth. Sport is so dynamic that there was just nothing really to help enhance it.
C
That's the problem we solved. We talked about why. What got you into the boxing, why you started the company. But we've been 12 years. What didn't you expect? What did you expect? How did you turn the corner? Because I know you had a few
A
moments of doubt when I got into it the first thing, it's like, hey, I found something that there's a need for it in the market. We're talking in the mid 2010s. This is at a time where like Google was buying companies left and right, where becoming a founder was within four years, five years. You build a company, you work really hard and then you sell the company five years later. If you do well, you can make a lot of money.
C
Four or five years, I'll hit it hard. Then I can buy seven other companies that I really want to do and ride my Lambo all around Miami.
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I was reading a stat yesterday on Instagram. The average length of exit and tech companies has went from basically four years to 13. Now when you look at the journey and you're like, I'm going to spend maybe more than a decade working on this, but basically for me, I spent all of my 30s, late 20s and 30s on it. You start to look at the journey a little differently because like you only have 1 30s, you're not going to relive them. So this idea that you're just going to clock in 70 hours a week for 12 years and basically do all these sacrifices now it has to be reframed a little bit and you have to find your well being and happiness throughout you the whole journey. This isn't a get rich quick type scheme. Like there are some people that do it, but it's really not the norm.
C
The raw and realness of what you just said, Khalil, is actually really interesting. The giving up your 30s, people come into things. Unless you're trust fund baby or come for money or just you won the lottery or something, we all work to live. Certainly if it's work that pays well, it's probably typically not easy working for someone else and clocking out and having that job that pays well, but doesn't have necessarily the upside or the pressures. So the positive and the negative of entrepreneurship is a different experience than being an entrepreneur in your 30s. You said that prime time, peak performer. Most energy in your life, probably 30s are like this combination of energy and just enough wisdom. Your 20s, you're stupid. You got all the energy in the world, but you're a dumbass 30s. Hey, I still got the energy. I still look like I'm 20 something and I got a little wisdom behind me. Oh, I'm real dangerous now.
A
I agree we're speaking a lot about the negative side, but I would never give it back. No, it's still extremely fulfilling. If I would have to like Say what surprised me the most is the stuff that I thought was hard is actually not the stuff that is hard. The real hard part was elsewhere. I thought the hard part was actually getting people to buy your stuff and then make a good product. Probably actually at the beginning, I thought making a good product was the hard part. Turns out at the beginning, selling it is much harder than just making it. And then you start to get some success. And then the hard part is leadership and assembling and running a team in a way that it stays cohesive, does what it's supposed to do. Which sounds weirdly easy when you start like, yeah, like I'll have just like these 25, 30 people working for me. I'm just going to tell them what to do. It's actually much harder to get them to do what you think they should do and for them to understand what they need to do and why they're doing it while also being all very happy to work together.
C
Yeah, it's one thing to be a really great donut maker. Man, that recipe is awesome. You make a great donut. It's a whole nother thing to build a factory and what it takes to run the factory. It's hard to be an entrepreneur, it's hard to grow a business, it's hard to do these things, but that was rewarding. Khalil, talk to me about what have you learned? Someone like yourself, you've got a successful company, what's the biggest thing other than things that were hard, things were easy, but we'll unlock something.
A
I want to stay away from all the generic stuff that people say that still applies, but still is a little bit known. A principle that still to this day is very true. We had the chance to be funded by Y Combinator early on in our journey and one of their principles is such a simple principle, but I think still ultimately kind of gets forgotten a little bit is growth solves 80% of your problems. Basically, whenever you have a growing company, the business is performing. It's really a cheat code. It's like you can get away with so much stuff. You can afford better people's performance. It's a little bit of a self fulfilling prophecy where now every person you collaborate with, from partners, external brands, all the way to your investors, everyone becomes a higher quality which then kind of feeds into the whole circle. There's really something about trying to position yourself as part of that loop, really make the most out of it. Because whenever your business is not growing much, everything is harder. From convincing someone to join your company. There's obviously there's a fundamental probably reason your customer are probably not that happy about your product because you're not growing. The whole job of doing a good job as an entrepreneur then starts to get a lot harder. Sometimes in the midst of having 1700 different challenges, I find that a little bit of clarity and just focusing on what can I really do to grow. Most likely this is probably the best thing I can spend time on. That's one learning.
C
Would we define growth as sales?
A
Could be sales, but it could be retention. I would say just growing in terms of revenue.
C
If you keep more people, keep more revenue revenue.
A
If your revenue is growing without just like burning a bunch of capital, but let's say you're growing, you still will have a much easier time being successful.
C
That's good. I'm writing a book called Lifetime Loss because you've heard of lifetime value. Lifetime loss. In a world obsessed with sales, don't ever forget about your customers now.
A
It's way cheaper to keep a happy customer than to find a new one.
C
As we're hearing in this conversation with Scott Clary, entrepreneurship today is really about how fast you can adapt. Whether you're building a business, a brand, or a career. The people who win aren't necessarily the ones following the traditional playbook. They're the ones willing to rethink how value gets created and where opportunity is actually moving. That same shift is happening in investing. Sharp investors are applying that same entrepreneurial mindset to their retirement. That's where blocktrust IRA comes in. Instead of relying on outdated traditional allocation strategies, you can move your IRA into Animus AI, an advanced system designed to help identify opportunities and navigate changing market conditions. Since 2020, Block Trust IRA's Animus AI has significantly outperformed Bitcoin as a benchmark. Visit writeaboutcrypto.com to get started and see if you qualify for up to $2,500 in bonus crypto. Block trust IRA smart crypto investing powered by AI if sales is the lifeblood, customers are the oxygen. Equally important, growth and brand and perception are reality. People want to attach to a winner. People buy winners. People join winners. It's real hard to enact change, to get momentum or get a loan from the bank or do anything from a place of negative energy. Negative growth just sort of downward slides and it's like it's combination of brand. If you believe in the cosmic universe of positive and negative energy, there's nothing more true in business than if something's positive, man. Oh, everything.
A
Everything.
C
And when it's negative, man. It is the exact opposite. Everything else is harder. You nailed it. Speak to that a little bit more.
A
Early on, we just developed a tech that is a tracker you put on your wrist. But we transformed the business in 2018 to be an online platform to train and learn boxing and martial arts. You use the tech to make the workouts interact, active. When Covid hit us in 2020, we were perfectly positioned at a very unique place. It was very bad for the world, but very good for us. Where the company grew in a way that I don't think I'll ever see this again in my lifetime. A crazy amount of growth at scale that just didn't stop at that point. It felt everything was possible. Like, it felt like literally like I couldn't go wrong. Every strategy, every tactic, every person that we speak to that is an A plus talent, everything was lining up to be very easy to win. And then Covid ended, ended about a year and a half later from where it started. And things started to get very, very hard. And momentum was declining. Literally. It was the longest hangover of my Life really for four years straight between 2021 to 2025. The business kept losing scale because we had grown so much during COVID Then all the gyms reopened. You basically 5x your competition. Suddenly you go from not having gyms to go to and home being the only place where people train. Suddenly home fitness is only 20% of the market. This was super hard morally, momentum wise, even for the team. Internally it only literally took us. This is like the first year, beginning of 2025 all the way to today where momentum is up into the right again. One of the lessons that I had for me was at some point surrounding yourself too much by negative momentum is going to be detrimental even though the people are skilled. Because like for us we had to cut down the company multiple times. That's extremely hard from a team member standpoint. You don't know if you're going to be next. You don't really have a say in the decision. You're just there and you can feel a little bit powerless. We really kept the team, tried to keep as many people as we can the whole time. The last reduction in force that we did, we went from 50 people, give and take to about a third of that. We really like cut pretty deep. And one of the selection criteria to decide if we would want to keep someone or not is their just own motivation. Are they a momentum giver or they are a momentum taker? We made that decision because previously we Kept some people that were very skilled and very good at their job. But ultimately if there is an energy around them that felt like it was just things were just getting harder and they wouldn't do their best work. Since we did that and we are only kept people that were motivated and really wanted to actually see this through, the company has actually recovered really well. We're super lean, but actually feels like we're faster than ever.
C
Managing people is hard. And I've seen this. You really nailed the like the three bucket of employees or team members. You've got the plus the adders. They don't have to be perfect, but they're adding value. They're in it. The energy's there. You know where they're at. You've got the neutrals that are probably skilled, aren't hurting you, but also aren't maybe probably pushing you up and you need some of those. Not everyone's going to be plus then you got the detractors and they might be highly skilled, might even be successful. But if they are pulling the whole boat down and maybe they're the only ones doing well, they're a salesperson. Their sales are really good individually, but they kind of have a negative chi on the whole business and energy and what they say behind everyone's back, that's the snake in the grass too. That's the ones that get you. You don't even know they're there. Like, dang, man, numbers look good.
A
Momentum is a real thing. Not later than a couple weeks ago, I just like spoke to my co founders and I was like, listen guys, I need some of your energy and optimism in some case because I feel like I'm carrying optimism. Obviously they responded super well with that is their experience by now. But it's a thing that affects the founders directly too. You should never run out of optimism because if you do, the company is going to die.
C
Yeah, you've always got to believe you're the chief belief officer. I mean that's what it is. If there's any doubt that the chief believes, oh, you're done. So Khalil, I had my notes. There was an overseas decision that might have helped save the company. What was that?
A
Early on, we chose an interesting business. Nowadays being a founder, this day and age of software is amazing. Especially now that you have AI literally like three people. Companies can make hell lot of money and build like pretty complex products. Even when I started making software, if you had the team that can build software, it's the cheapest products to make. Basically you're making ones and zeros for us. Because of the nature of what we wanted to build, we had to make electronics in Asia. Whenever you have a business that has physical goods in it, it took me a long time to figure out how harder it is to actually build a business like that because it just requires a lot of money to transform that money into physical things that have to be made and shipped from anywhere that you're going to make them. We were able to get away with very little money because we had a lot of knowledge inside of our co founding team. My co founder Alex and my other co founder Alex were both electrical and software engineers. So they were able to make the devices but it was super risky. We got to this stage that we call the valley of death for hardware startups, which is when you basically know you can, you have customers and they can buy your product, but you don't have necessarily enough money to produce it. You've done all the hard part. You validated that what you're going to build is great, that there's a market for it. You might even done back in the day, Kickstarter starters to fund their first batch. But then making their first batch took longer than they had expected. So now they don't have the money to deliver the product. This little moment wipes out 90% of the hardware startup. We were able to get to a first batch of 3,000 units and it's in Hong Kong and it's about to get shipped and we have customers sending us hate mail because they've been waiting longer than they expected to get their product. And we're like, yeah, it's coming out, it's coming out. And we get a batch of 10 pairs that we test in our super small office in Irvine in California. Four out of 10 don't work. This is like 7pm and we were all excited because we're finally going to test the batch and like we grabbed the box. It looks great. Some guys are like opening beers and it's like awesome. We're going to ship this. And this is in 2017. My co founder Alex comes to me and he's like, hey man, can I speak to you for a second? Yeah, what's up? We kind of have a 40% failure rate right here and I'm not sure why. This is during Chinese New Year too. So we can't speak to the China team because they're out on vacation. He was like, I think we're done guys. This is it. We start thinking about what to do. We had all these guys that were waiting for their units. That helped us fund the whole thing. We had like $50,000 in the bank, which sounds like a lot of money, maybe for early founders, but this is basically a month and a half of salaries and expenses just to run the business. I think we all need to go to China and figure this out. That's just the only thing that we have to do. The flights to go there, they were like $18,000 from the $50,000 we had. We start having conversations and then we call our partners, see if we can get a hold of them. Turns out six. Six of us at the time, there was a. There was a seventh that was there too, but couldn't make it. Six of us, we grabbed literally a flight. Next day, during Chinese New Year, we get on the flight. Literally everyone is Taiwanese or Chinese. We're the white guys going to Asia. My partner Alex is like, hey, I found a way to isolate the bug. I think we can reprogram these trackers by buying a bunch of ipods and all scattering in the room. And we just reprogram them during three days. And this was like 12 hour days for three days. We had calculated that we can reprogram the batch of 3,3000 pairs. The main reason was because we needed basically a bluetooth device that was cheap enough for us to buy it and communicate through the trackers to flash the firmware. Four days later, we went from like 40% failure rate to 8%. We were able to get through the
C
valley of death of hardware startup, ingenuity and resourcefulness.
A
That was a very symbolic trip throughout our trajectory. We called even some of our investors. They were kind of throwing their hands in the air. It's like, listen, these things happen. You can try to ship them. I don't really think the company will survive. And it was just kind of really took.
C
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A
Y A N bet on ourselves to like, figure this out without a lot of assurance. And everyone was kind of caught off guard. But it felt like a story that unified us. As long as we have each other and we just jump into the challenge head on, we can figure out anything.
C
Did y' all figure this out on the plane ride or literally when you got there, somebody told you I couldn't
A
help because this was all electrical engineering and firmware engineering. Two of the six really worked on this. One guy organized the flights. The other guy tried to get a hold of the partner to get access to the stuff. So we had to pay a security guy to open the door for us at the fulfillment center so we can stay there. And we paid him like triple the rate because it was Chinese New Year. The fourth guy was just honestly ordering pizza and beer and just being like, let me know what you need. The two engineers found what they thought was the root cause but didn't have a solution yet. But that was like, okay, I think we at least know it's solvable on the plane. Alex, our CTO built a solution and tested it. He didn't sleep. He's the only one that didn't sleep on the plane.
C
When you got China, did you just have fun at Chinese New Year?
A
Not for the first four days. Because the first four days we were super jet lagged and the job was all right. Everyone has these ipods and we're all going to spread out in the factory. And he had taught us the reprogramming procedure for 12 hours straight. We're just reprogramming electronic devices, not speaking to anybody. After we were done, not everyone stayed, but I stayed with a couple of our partners and we celebrated it properly.
C
Tell me what fight camp is, who it's for, what people can expect. Hit all those key points for me.
A
Fight camp, the number one platform to learn and or train with boxing or martial arts. From home. We basically have the deepest curriculum that you can find online on how to a get started if that's where you're starting all the way to just I know my foundation and I'm just trying to train with a quality instructor from home. This is not your Taebo. This is not some choreography music induced like this is actually real martial arts training. But it's made to be engaging. We have different track, we have boxing, we have kickboxing, we have a Muay Thai program, we have MMA basics with Stephen, Wonderboy, Thompson, etc. Etc. What makes this product special is we are using our technology that we initially developed for professional athletes to track your progress and engage you during your workout. Because that's one of the biggest problems with training at home, is very little motivation to just push yourself outside of your own motivation. And this actually keeps you accountable and engages you to really push past the normal point that you would probably be giving up on if you just didn't have anything. The last piece is we make equipment that is specifically designed for your home. Our freestanding bag is literally the only freestanding bag that you can really hit hard without it just knocking it down. Without all the hassle of putting a hanging bag in one of your support beams with the chains and all that, you can move it around. We even designed the sound sleeve. If you want to train in it early in the morning or at night, not bother your fans, family or neighbors, that's FightCamp. We're expanding actually this month and we're reviving the initial product that we launched with, which is made for professional athletes. For the first time in eight years, we actually are launching a product that is aimed for people that already go to the gym and wants to challenge themselves, monitor their progress, see how they perform, and benchmark against others without having the whole content classes on top of it. It's a lower price subscription. Think of it as like Strava, but for boxing, martial arts.
C
Nice. Very cool. And you can have a friendly competition board. I am a big dude. I've got one of these at home. I'm going to be a little bit of the salesperson here For Khalil number one, the hardware and software is premium. It's the only bag I've ever had that I can hit. I'm 65275 and it can take everything I could throw at it and doesn't move. It's got a water base, premium quality gloves, and these trackers that you put in the wristbands that literally you've got a TV screen. If you choose to do the monitoring, you can choose the trainer type. Literally, it's interactive with you. It feels literally they're talking to you, they're giving your feedback. It feels like a real live experience. Literally every hit is being tracked on the screen. Plus in the gloves. It's really cool. There's a whole sequencing with it that feels very natural and also motivating. It'll kick your ass if you do it. I love the product, man. It's cool.
A
Awesome. Thanks, Ryan. I'm happy you like the product.
C
It's premium, man, and it's cool. Those trackers, they've got those little rechargeable sensors that go in the gloves. If you hit that bag, it registers on the screen. It's all connected, it's legit. I really love your authenticity and realness here. Give some deets on social web, all that stuff for learning more about Fight Camp and what you're up to.
A
You can find everything about our product and content library and so forth on fightcamp.com in one word. Then you can follow us at Fight Camp on Instagram. We are also on TikTok. We have a huge YouTube channel with lots of videos and tutorials on breaking down techniques. Our whole voice and role and purpose on YouTube is to make this super deep protected knowledge accessible. Accessible to everybody when it comes to boxing and martial arts. If you're just curious, you can go on there and find a lot of breakdowns, a lot of onboarding and beginner techniques on there. If you want to get started on my end, you can follow me on Instagram. I am at Khalil Zahar K H A L I L Last name Zahar Z A H A R And I'm actually trying to post a little more on there but you can reach out to me and super happy to connect with you guys.
C
Cool. It's been fun, man. I really appreciate you coming on.
A
Likewise. Thanks a lot for having me.
C
Hey guys, you're to find us. Ryan is right. The hi. Find all the highlight clips. You'll find all those links that Khalil just mentioned and I'm telling you, you need to get fight camp. If you're bored with your routine, it will mix it up. If you're a little curious about boxing but aren't sure how to do it, it feels like the most natural at home training you will get without actually a person there. Go check out fight camp and look in business and in life we're all getting punched in the face. But just remember, it's not about how you punch. It's about how you get up, how you respond, and you get after it. We'll see you next time. Right, right about now.
B
Here's the truth. Information doesn't change your life. Execution does. So don't just listen to this episode and move on. Take the idea, make the call. Launch the thing. Fix the problem. Build what you keep talking about building. For more, follow Ryan Alford on Instagram at Ryan Alford and watch or listen. Listen to every episode@ryanisright.com this is right about now. Now quit waiting. Go win.
Podcast: Right About Now – Legendary Business Advice
Host: Ryan Alford
Guest: Khalil Zahar, Founder & COO of FightCamp
Episode: “With $50K Left and a 40% Failure Rate, How FightCamp Rebuilt After the COVID Boom and Bust”
Date: May 8, 2026
In this candid and unvarnished conversation, Ryan Alford sits down with Khalil Zahar, founder and COO of FightCamp, to dissect the rollercoaster journey of building a tech-powered boxing startup through a decade of grit, hard pivots, and high-stakes decisions. Khalil recounts the true, often harsh realities of entrepreneurship—far from ‘LinkedIn fluff’—and details how his team almost lost everything during a critical hardware failure, only to rebuild after the COVID boom turned bust. The episode is loaded with honest reflections on leadership, growth, team dynamics, and the nuanced battle between positive and negative momentum in business.
“You start to look at the journey a little differently because you only have one 30s, you're not going to relive them.” (09:46, Khalil)
“There's technology everywhere. This is how I kind of put what I was studying and that sport together.” (03:54, Khalil)
“Growth solves 80% of your problems.” (12:40, Khalil)
When the company is growing, everything becomes easier: attracting talent, working with partners, and even morale.
“If sales is the lifeblood, customers are the oxygen…People want to attach to a winner. People buy winners. People join winners.” (14:27, Ryan)
“The company grew in a way that I don't think I'll ever see this again in my lifetime. A crazy amount of growth at scale...” (16:17, Khalil)
“Momentum was declining. Literally. It was the longest hangover of my life.” (17:34, Khalil)
“One of the selection criteria to decide if we would want to keep someone or not is their just own motivation. Are they a momentum giver or a momentum taker?” (17:59, Khalil)
“Whenever you have a business that has physical goods...it just requires a lot of money to transform that money into physical things...” (20:03, Khalil)
“Four out of ten don’t work...He was like, ‘I think we’re done, guys.’” (20:54, Khalil)
“Four days later, we went from like 40% failure rate to 8%. We were able to get through the valley of death of hardware startup, ingenuity and resourcefulness.” (23:29, Khalil)
“As long as we have each other and just jump into the challenge head on, we can figure out anything.” (25:12, Khalil)
“For the first time in eight years, we actually are launching a product that is aimed for people that already go to the gym and want to challenge themselves, monitor their progress, and benchmark against others...” (27:21, Khalil)
On Entrepreneurial Myth vs. Reality:
“It actually sucks to be an entrepreneur...500 hours...do not do it unless you want to kill yourself. But hey, come try be an entrepreneur.” (01:22, Ryan)
On Sacrifice:
“You only have one 30s, you're not going to relive them.” (09:46, Khalil)
On Growth:
“Growth solves 80% of your problems...It’s really a cheat code.” (12:40, Khalil)
On Team Dynamics:
“Are they a momentum giver or a momentum taker?... Since we did that...the company has actually recovered really well. We're super lean, but actually feels like we're faster than ever.” (17:59, Khalil)
On Surviving Hardware Crisis:
“We had $50,000 in the bank...The flights to go there were like $18,000 from the $50,000 we had...Four days later, we went from like 40% failure rate to 8%.” (20:54–23:29, Khalil)
On Leadership:
"You should never run out of optimism because if you do, the company is going to die." (19:30, Khalil)
| Topic | Timestamp | |-----------------------------------------------------|---------------------| | Intro & Khalil’s Backstory | 01:20–05:27 | | Approach to Growth & What Surprised Khalil | 09:00–12:40 | | Defining Growth & Retention | 13:57–14:27 | | COVID Boom & Post-COVID Slump | 16:17–17:59 | | Team Restructuring – Momentum Givers & Takers | 17:59–19:51 | | Surviving Hardware Failure in China | 20:03–25:12 | | What FightCamp Is & Recent Product Expansion | 26:36–28:29 | | Where to Find FightCamp & Khalil | 29:37–30:23 |