All right, welcome back to the AGP Consumer Showcase for our next presentation and chat. I have the pleasure of welcoming the Beachbody Company Executive Chairman, Mark Goldston, and CFO, Marc Suidan. Mark will touch on the story, and then we'll kind of dive into a series of questions that I have. The audience, as you know, feel free to ask questions yourself. You can type them into the Q&A box below, or feel free to email me at agray@allianceg.com. Mark and Marc, thank you both for joining me today.
Thank you, Aaron.
All right, so again, to start off, Mark, I want to kick it off to you to maybe provide the listeners who may be new to the Beachbody Company story a quick background overview of the company.
Great, thanks a lot. And welcome, everyone. So yeah, the Beachbody Company has got quite a legacy in the fitness industry. It goes back 25 years. Actually, our co-founder and CEO, Carl Daikeler, was the pioneer, if you remember, doing infomercials featuring fitness programs. So going back in the days of P90X, Insanity, Body Beast, etc . And the company was really a legend in the fitness industry. It used to sell its products through video and DVD. You'd spend about $120. You'd order this, and it would be anywhere from a 30, 60 to 90-day program. The company got very large, very profitable.
It moved into nutrition several years ago, where it now has this bifurcated strategy of being able to not only get you in shape through the exercise programs that the company offers, but also give you nutritional supplements in terms of protein powders, pre and post-workout drinks, hydration, BEACHBARs , which are power bars, collagen. So we've got an entire suite of nutritional products totaling about $250 million in revenue. And then we've got about the same size business in digital fitness. And so the company moved to a subscription model several years ago. Originally, it sold individual programs, sort of a one-and-done, if you will. That's how the company was built. When it went to the subscription business, for some reason, it decided to no longer offer the sale of individual programs. So you had to become a monthly, quarterly, or annual subscriber.
And then we became the Netflix of fitness. So we have a library of 130+ titles, and they cover everything from the rank beginner, actually called For Beginners Only, all the way up to the most difficult, like a P90X. And you can pick based on genre, core, strength, cardio, general fitness, pilates, yoga, etc , but you're a subscriber. And we now have realized that there is a whole market of people who we used to have and who we could still get, who would just like to buy a program and have access forever and not just have to be a subscriber. And so we recently have started a program now where we have a hybrid model where we have both subscription and we have the ability to buy individual programs. And in order to use that program, you have to come to our app to access it.
Our app was named six months ago by CNN as the number one workout app in the world. So it's a great opportunity, unlike the old days of the DVDs where we sold it to you and didn't have an ongoing relationship. Now, if you buy our individual program or a subscription, we have an ongoing relationship with you because you must come back to that site to use it. So that's where we are. The company is essentially a turnaround. It was a de-SPAC several years ago. The company had a market value of over $3.8 billion just a couple of years ago, with basically the same exact asset base that it's got today with its market cap at sub-$70 million. I do turnarounds. I've spent 30+ years being a public CEO. I've run everything from beauty companies like Fabergé, Reebok, L.A. Gear.
He was the original CEO of Einstein Brothers Bagels, original CEO of NetZero, took it public. So I've been doing that. I wrote a book called The Turnaround Prescription, which is a book on repositioning troubled companies. So I came in a year ago to work with Carl and Marc Suidan, our CFO, who's got a great background as well, PwC and McKinsey prior to this in TMT and doing unbelievable numbers of deals. We're basically in here, and we've re-architected this company to put it in a position to be turned around. We're filling the innovation pipeline so that by the end of this year, early next year, we can return to chasing top-line growth. So that's sort of the company in a nutshell.
Thanks, Marc. That was a great overview of where the company's been and where it is today. So appreciate that. One of the things that you spoke towards was shifting back from subscription only to also allowing kind of the à la carte, one-time purchases for a program. So still kind of early days towards that. But can you speak anything towards the consumer adoption? I know you have a win-back initiative to bring back some of those old consumers that you mentioned to before. So any early indications of bringing back just the à la carte purchases and how that's helped?
Yeah, obviously, because we're public, I can't give any intra-quarter updates. But what I can tell you is this. It's interesting, Aaron, because if you step back and look at this, the company at its peak was selling these individual programs. It really wasn't selling subscriptions. So there's 210 million adults in America, right? There's 150 million of them that are overweight, and there's 75 million who are categorized as clinically obese. So we are just trying to get people to get on a program. What we found is that in our glory days as a company, we got people to buy an individual program. They didn't become a subscriber. When we moved to subscription, we kind of closed the door on those people who said, "Look, I have subscription fatigue. I don't need another subscription. Not that yours isn't great, but I don't need all of that.
I don't need 130 program access. I just want this." It's the people that go to the movie theater versus the people that subscribe to Netflix. Both are valuable, and we decided to go back and offer that again. So we're early days on this, and we've only offered about 12 of our top titles to people to be able to purchase. But hey, it's $59.95, and you own it, essentially. You have access to it forever. Our lowest-priced annual subscription is $179. That's if you take one year. And if you go monthly, it's as much as $360. And so now we have the ability to serve both markets, and we can, more importantly, use it as a marketing tool.
In other words, if you are going to churn as a subscriber, we have the ability to potentially use one of these programs that you can own as an incentive to make you stay. Or we could use it as an incentive on the front end to get you to subscribe. And so we're also now starting to work on ideas, Aaron, on how to pair an individual program that you can own with our nutrition products to give you a holistic picture for your health. So whereas prior to this, we only sold you a bundle, which was a subscription with nutrition and fitness, now we're actually looking at ways to do that with the individual program purchase as well.
Fantastic. No, really appreciate that color there. I want to dive into some of the initiatives you have for growth in the streaming business outside of the à la carte purchases. So two of the initiatives you have for the streaming business include re-engaging prior customers. You guys call it the win-back. You guys have performance marketing 2.0. That includes referral, gifting, affiliates. So can you speak to these initiatives and how you look for them to help the brand return to growth?
Sure. So basically, the company, if you just go back to 2016, not the full 25-year history, just go back 8 years ago, we've got about 12 to 14 million people in a database. We call it the CRM database. These people are largely either former members of the company or pre-qualified leads to the company. Now think about this. In an industry that has a $100 customer acquisition cost on average, to get those 12 to 14 million people, you'd have to spend $1.2 to 1.4 billion to get them. So we have them in this database. And what we're doing is we're cleansing that database to make sure all those emails are good. And we're looking at what people's former purchase habits were so that we can try to tailor new messaging in the vein in which they previously purchased. I'll give you an example.
We've got probably over $1 billion of cumulative former nutritional purchases from our company in that database. Forgetting the digital fitness part, because at one point, we did $800+ million in nutrition. Now we're at about $250 million. So all of those former people who were in there when we were that large are in that database. So Aaron, we're looking at ways. We just brought in a new senior executive to the company a couple of months ago to head that area up. And he and his team are working on sort of a grid to look at those former members and to figure out the best way to incentivize them to bring them back in, essentially at zero CAC. So those people to us can be very, very profitable.
We have to be careful that we don't end up sending out so many of those emails that we get put in a spam bucket. So to be very careful about that, avoiding the blacklists from the ISPs. But having spent 15 years running NetZero and Juno, I know a lot about ISPs and how to keep away from harm's way. So we're really excited about that because we think there is an opportunity there. It's going to take us some time. And then in our performance marketing, we're very rigid in terms of how we do it, Aaron. We set an LTV to CAC metric, and we're vigilant about enforcing it. And so Marc and I and the team, in the one year that I've been here, we've lowered the break-even of the company from $900 million to less than $500 million.
We've taken $125 million of costs out in the last 12 months alone, bringing our total cost savings to $250 million. We raised our margins in the last quarter on nutrition and digital fitness between five and 600 basis points. We cut our debt in half from a year ago when it was $50 million to $25 million today. We had the first two consecutive positive EBITDA quarters in five years in Q4 and Q1. We were positive free cash flow in Q1 for the first time, I believe, since 2020. So we've done a ton in terms of re-architecting, repositioning the business. Now we're filling that innovation pipeline. We're going to come out with two major programs a year, one of which launches next week from us, which is a huge new program for us called BODi LAVA.
And then we have another one coming out in December. So we keep it fresh, but we also market the library to the existing members because the library goes back 15, 20 years, and the average member has only been with us for three years. So to them, a lot of our content is brand new to them. Think about movies that would have come out in a theater that you haven't seen. And then when you go on Netflix or Amazon or Hulu, those are new content to you because you haven't seen those movies. That's essentially how we operate.
Right. And speaking towards that new niche around the streaming platform, so that's for the consumers who are new to the platform, but ones who have been with the platform for a while, how do you create the new niche, right? Is it from just kind of adding on to the existing platforms that you have and just giving variations, or are you bringing on whole new platforms? How do you ensure that there's also newness for the legacy consumer that's within streaming services?
It's a great question. Again, using Netflix as the example, there's a lot of movies you haven't seen that are in that library. So with a library of 130 titles and 9,000 individual videos underlying that, you could work out for the rest of your life and never make your way through that library. So what we try to do, Aaron, is we try to make people aware of the fact that we've got all of these genres. We got core strength, weight loss, muscle building, cardio, pilates, yoga. So we have all of these different focuses. So what you find is people go on a fitness journey. So they may start out on our beginning programs, and then we can pull them through as they get more fit to doing things that are more challenging or in different areas. I wanted to lose weight. Now I've lost weight.
I'd like to build muscle. I've built muscle. Now I want to improve my cardio. I've done all of that. Now I want to get more flexible and improve my stretching, do yoga, pilates. We have all of that. So what we like to say is we're the only company that provides you with fitness, nutrition, and wellness sort of in this triad that nobody else really does. And we're really good about now focusing on the nutrition as an augment. So we have meal plans, we have nutrition, and we have fitness. And so it's sort of this all-in-one package for you to better yourself at whatever level you want to pursue.
Fantastic. Yeah. A lot of newness in there, a lot of programs offered. Getting the awareness out there. The app has 4.9 stars on Apple, over 200,000 ratings, right? Talked about being rated number one on CNN last year. So how do you look to build awareness even more for consumers, whether or not this offering's even available, this Netflix of working out available to them at home, or those who are already doing it but not utilizing your platform? How do you build the awareness?
Well, we spend tens of millions of dollars annually on direct-to-consumer marketing. It's what we call our DR group, direct response. And so you see us on Meta, Google. We use other non-digital mechanisms as well. And we're building our awareness there. But the awareness that we're building is program-specific awareness. So we're not out there advertising BODi or formerly Beachbody. Now, you know the company name change happened a year ago. It was the Beachbody Company. It changed to BODi, which stands for Beachbody On Demand Interactive. But so basically, if you think about it, BODi is like Mattel. People aren't buying the Mattel part of it. They're buying Barbie. They're buying Hot Wheels. They're buying the toy. So our programs are what people are selling. That's what we market.
We also have tens of thousands of people in our direct selling network who each have their own contact lists that they are constantly marketing to. So we're sort of carpet-bombing the effort, both with person-to-person contact, digital marketing, non-digital marketing, and then obviously the word of mouth that occurs when you're part of a community and part of a network where you've got over a million, two million to three members who have their own contact base of people that they're sort of proselytizing about what they've done, the improvements they've experienced, and why you should use this.
Right. Thanks for that, Mark. And Mark, you mentioned the direct marketing. And earlier, when it was the win-back, you mentioned a new hire. I'm not sure. Were those related? Can you talk about maybe that new hire? Or was there a new hire in this marketing effort that you made?
New hire came in to run especially the CRM win-back email area of the company. So emailing, texting, current members, and former members. The other part of the company, which is the marketing part of the company, is a separate part of that company. And then within that, we've got our direct response business where they're just focused on direct response marketing.
For the win-back, maybe what was happening prior to with the new hire and the changes that are being made that give you confidence and be able to win those customers back?
Yeah. Well, it's interesting. When I joined a year ago, the effort really just started to kick off when we brought up the idea of what are we doing with this large CRM base of people. We live in a fitness industry with $100 CACs. And here we've got 12 to 14 million people who we have no CAC because we already have them. And so the issue became, cleanse that list to make sure those emails are still valid. One. Two, put together some sort of an infrastructure to clean what they had purchased before and then start doing tailored messaging, but measure it on a frequency where you don't hit spam alarm bells from the ISPs. That's a time-consuming process. It turned out, frankly, Aaron, to be more time-consuming than we thought it was going to be. But you got to do it the right way.
Because if you do it the wrong way, you end up getting blacklisted for sending out too many emails. You don't want to do that. So that's kind of what this new gentleman who came in a couple of months ago is focused on. And we're just now starting to push that out.
Okay. Great. A question came in that I think aligns well here now. How are you looking to increasingly pitch yourself in terms of on TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram, utilizing influencers? I know on Instagram, you were hosting something last week with some of your content creators. How are you looking to utilize these social media platforms to push the brand?
That's a great question. We have also hired an agency as part of our arsenal that is highly focused on tapping their network of over 2,000 influencers focused on fitness and wellness who are putting messaging out based on our content. One. Two, we provide templates for the people in our direct selling organization to essentially be able to grab our content and co-mingle it with their content that they can then put out to their contact base. So it's basically a viral approach that we utilize our direct selling network for this outside agency effort that we've got. And then certainly the members, the people who are actually using the product.
You see a lot of before and afters posted of people who said, "Wow, I signed up for BODi's 21 Day Fix or 80 Day Obsession program and look at the change in me." That becomes a viral marketing effort in and of itself.
Okay. Yeah. Absolutely. Great to hear there. Want to shift a bit over now and go to the nutritional business. Right. You talked about some of the sales of clients that you had. It had been at $800 million, now closer to $250 million. But more recently, you've seen some green shoots there, right? Some sales quarter-over-quarter growth in the Q1. So what were some of the main factors in the decline, right? And then what gives you more confidence in terms of the stabilization and potentially returning to growth for that business?
Yeah. Great question. It was a lot larger previously because our direct selling organization was much larger. We still have tens of thousands of people. At that point, we had hundreds of thousands of people. So just the law of numbers alone suggested that as that part of the selling effort declined in terms of numbers of people in the selling organization, so too did the nutritional part of the business decline. But I will tell you, principally, we have had a focus in this company on using nutrition as part of a bundled focus. So we're selling you a fitness program and nutrition in a bundle. We call it a Total Solution Pack. And it sells for approximately $200, $219. Sometimes it's on special a little bit lower.
But what we don't do and what we haven't done recently is focused on the fact that our individual nutrition products, Aaron, if you did a chart comparing features, would be at or near the top in almost every category in which we compete. We have not really focused as much on educating our selling organization on the product benefits that we've got against the major competitors in each of those segments. We focused more on selling you a holistic package of a digital fitness and a nutritional solution. Nothing wrong with that, but there's a whole massive market out there. Let's face it, nutritional supplements are a $164 billion market. Digital fitness is a $13 billion market.
So our opportunity to take these world-class products that we've got and now refocus our selling organization on feature benefit selling separate from just selling bundles with fitness and nutrition, that's how we're going to regrow the nutrition business. In addition, we've got some new products in the pipeline. You might see us in direct response marketing. We've never marketed this product on Facebook, on Google. It's only been sold inside the direct selling network. We never sold it over the wall, so to speak. We just started an Amazon program. And you saw we had a 50% quarter-over-quarter increase, small base, but nonetheless, good green shoots, to use your term. But Aaron, we were sort of confined before. Now we're kind of going to offer it on a broader spectrum.
But even within that network, we're recalibrating these people to focus on feature benefit selling of individual products in individual categories because we crush the competitive offerings.
Yeah. And off of that, right? So then how do you look to leverage the two businesses, right? Streaming and nutrition. Do you see opportunity within that, especially as you look to get more of a siloed focus potentially on products and the offerings? Can you then tailor that towards the different streaming platforms that you have that could be aligned well for that? Or where do you see opportunities to add some?
Yeah. Interesting. I mean, even if you look at the GLP-1 drugs, which obviously have become a big topic of discussion and are getting large adoption, one of the major negatives of a GLP-1 drug, as the company said, publicized, is you lose lean muscle mass. It's a major negative. And as you know, when you get over 40, the last thing you want to do is lose lean muscle mass because that leads to balance problems and falls and all kinds. So we're really saying, "Look, the market is focused on weight loss. That's great. They're using drugs as sort of a stimulus to do that. But you must maintain your cardiovascular health no matter what. You must maintain some level of lean muscle mass. You must change the way you eat. Otherwise, those drugs are not going to help you.
And mindfulness will become a key part of your journey as sort of the new you arrive." So we are the perfect adjunct to that trend because we can give you exercise programs to help your heart, help your cardiovascular system, help people who are either diabetic or prediabetic, help people with their training program, give them nutritional supplements, give them meal plans that we make, and also help them with mindfulness. And so the way we look at it is we're the completion of the equation. Other companies are just focused on nutrition, just focused on fitness, just focused on wellness. We're the only one that pulls all of it together.
While some of those companies are being hurt by the adoption of the GLP-1 drugs, we actually see that it's something that's going to be a boost to us because everybody knows of the negative side effects, and we're the antidote to that. We look at that as being a huge positive.
Fantastic. Great. Looking forward to see some of those initiatives kind of fruition. I want to dive in a bit more to the cost-cutting and profitability. You talked about it before, taking notable steps on the restructuring front, over $200 million in savings, I think, since 2021, helping get the company positive EBITDA two quarters straight now, positive free cash flow the last quarter despite the challenged sales trends. So you've also talked about seeing more room for incremental cost savings, I think roughly $250 million in total. So can you speak towards, after already taking all those measures, where do you see opportunity for incremental cost savings, either via gross margin or SG&A?
What about Marc Suidan, our CFO? Take that?
Yeah, Aaron. I would say the majority of the remaining portion would come from sales and marketing by opening more efficient channels. Marc talked a lot about the win-back campaign that has zero customer acquisition cost, the freemium model. Those are people we're already paying to get them there. Typical conversion rate when you do direct response marketing is around 2%. We're right around there. And then that other 98% is disappearing. So by capturing them, we try to convert those people as well. So it's all these new mechanisms that drive way more efficiency in our conversion rates of sales and marketing. At the same time, we have an affiliate program that Mark mentioned, and that has compensation rules around it. We did look at that compensation plan to reward higher performers and draw back from those that are more passive income earners.
So the totality of all that results in some $50 million in 2024 savings. That's solely incremental to the $200 million. That assumes a $500 million or so run rate business.
Yeah. No, Marc, you can certainly find the cost savings in a business. No question. So now let's get to some of the long-term margin opportunities, right? You have it disclosed somewhat in your slide deck, right? So if we take a gross margin, you say blended 65% to 70% sales and marketing, about 45%, then SG&A 20% to 25%. So if you kind of take some DNA assumptions, you can make an assumption about 10% EBITDA margin. That's what your margin was back in 2019. So how do you think about the EBITDA margin opportunity as you finish off these cost savings and have these sales growth initiatives?
I think as the sales growth initiatives kick in, we have the lowest cost structure this company has had in 10 years. We've been measuring it for 10 years. It's the lowest it's been in that 10 years of measurement period. So if we're to go back to, let's say, our 2019 revenues.
Marc froze. Marc, you there?
Yeah, he froze for me.
Yeah, I'm there.
Yeah, Marc, you froze. If you go back to our 2019 revenues of $780 million, Marc, we made $78.5 million of EBITDA back then?
We had $755 million of revenue with a 10% EBITDA, a bit higher than that. It was $78 million of EBITDA. If we were to have these revenues again, our EBITDA would be at least twice that, well over $160 million. So we've created an incredible amount of operating leverage in this business, Aaron. Our aim is to make this gap net income positive, right? And then when you add that 10% add-back to that, less the 5% or so of CapEx, it would get you to a 15% free cash flow business. That's our long-term aim. But for now, as you noted, we said we want to be in the high 60s% gross margin. We attained that in Q1. So it's interesting when you look at that dashboard on our IR chart that says where we are, where we want to get to.
I mean, we've been closing a lot of the gaps. Right now, the big gap we're closing is sales and marketing. Sales and marketing was running at 55%. Right now, it's running around 50%. We want to get it down to 45% initially, hopefully even lower in the long term.
And that's going to be the biggest contributor. And just differentiate, our margins on digital fitness is about 79%. And our margins on nutrition are about 60%. So we think the 79% can go up into the 80%. And we think the 60% can go into the low 60%. I mean, a year ago, it was 53%. So listen, I spent the majority of the last year here with Marc kind of attacking what we've just described. Now, our future focus, and a big part of mine is working with Carl Daikeler on this innovation pipeline so that we can get to the point where we're turning the top line growth because you want to take advantage of the operating leverage that we've built into the P&L. And the only way to do that is to generate more top line.
Yeah, yeah. It sounds like with all the initiatives you've taken on the cost-cutting side, it won't take much on the top line for that to be seen on the bottom line.
Right.
So, appreciate that. We're going to dive into some Q&A now. We've got a number of questions from some folks on the call and some emails I had gotten. So one question here, just in terms of the CRM database that you had spoken about before. I know you had mentioned some numbers there, Mark. Just, can you speak towards how you kind of validate those and just to ensure that the emails are still kind of active? Have those been kind of any issues as you just started this win-back program there?
Yeah. So when I used the term cleansing before, that's what I was talking about. So we basically have to take that database and literally cleanse it to make sure that all of those emails that are in there are still valid. And that's a time-consuming process. And that's what our team has been working on. And they've gotten just about all the way through that. And so we will be validating all of those emails. And then we have to then measure the amount of emails we can send out to those people so they don't just get deluged with what would be perceived by them to be spam.
So that's why it's so important, Aaron, to that question that we try to tailor the emails to what they were previously purchasing from us so that it looks like a targeted win-back as opposed to just a random carpet bombing of a, "Hey, we're back." Nobody wants to get those kind of emails.
Yeah. No, absolutely. Mark, can you talk about the overall consumer base for the streaming business? I believe it skews more female than male. So if that's true, and do you have some efforts to maybe get them more balanced or cater more towards the male consumer?
That is a great—that is the billion-dollar question, my friend, because in this company, in its glory days, it was about 50/50, men, women. In fact, when I joined a year ago, actually a year ago last week, I'd say 85% of the notes I got from people were from men in my LinkedIn that would say, "Oh, I used to use P90X. I used Body Beast. I used Insanity." Okay. Interestingly, 98% of our direct selling force is women. So they're largely calling on women. And so we've got close to a 90% women, 10% men mix there. Our ability to reach men is really more on the direct response marketing side. And you'll see that on Meta and Google, etc.
But we, in the last several years, largely because that direct selling base is almost entirely women, we have sort of abdicated a large amount of male fitness nutrition consumers. Because remember, half the fitness market is men, and half the nutrition market is men, and half the people who go to gyms are men. And yet we've become this very female-focused from a user base standpoint. So the TAM is enormous for us, and it is untapped of late. So we've got specific programs we're putting in place to try to go after that and recover what we used to have. And by the way, Aaron, that's completely non-cannibalistic. If you bring in a man, it's completely non-cannibalistic to the female franchise. So we've identified this as a key strategic initiative over the next 12 months.
Okay. Great. That's great to hear there. A couple of questions here on the nutritional. You spoke towards some of the products being sold on Amazon. Can you speak towards the early day indicators of success there? And how comfortable are you with the current price points versus some of the other brands that are being sold on there?
Again, good question. Well, we're happy because we've had a 50% quarter-on-quarter increase in Amazon on our products. Our price points are absolutely premium priced. There are two reasons for that. One, and I say this in a positive sense, we've almost overbuilt our superfood, which is Shakeology. It's an amazing product. It has got everything you could imagine in that product. Nobody really matches up with us in that case. So when I say overbuilt, it's we built it above what the market standard would be. That product is premium priced, partly because of what's in it. The other part is because we have a compensation structure within our direct selling network, as Marc alluded to, where we're paying out, Marc, what, 45% to 50% compensation.
So when you factor that in, if you're paying out 45% to 50% compensation, you have to have a relatively high price point so that after you cover your cost of goods and you pay out the comp, you still have enough left over for your EBITDA. So you cannot undercut your direct selling network by selling a product on Amazon at a lower price than the direct selling network can sell to their customers. So we have to make sure that our products are worthy of the elevated price point that they've got in the competitive set and that therefore we compete that way. We have the ability going forward with form factor to sell smaller portion sizes instead of 30 days, sell 20 days or 14 days, which will bring the absolute price level down and make it a more appealing product.
And we're looking at all of that.
Great. Outside of Amazon, what are some other distribution channels you might be looking to sell some of these Shakeology or other products? Is it going to be more fine-tuned to Amazon for now?
Well, for now, it's Amazon. We're working on some other new ideas I can't really talk about for new products in the nutrition area that, should they come to fruition, might be sold in an entirely broader retail distribution network. So outside of the direct selling network, the likes of Target, the likes of Walmart, invite a bunch of people of that nature because there's a massive industry being sold in those retail outlets. And we've got some amazing brands here and some big ideas in the pipeline that, should they develop and come to fruition, they might be marketed in a broader retail environment.
Yeah. Okay.
At great margins. At great margins. Because they wouldn't carry with them that 40% to 50% compensation attachment.
Yeah. Yeah. And on the nutritional side, going back to more of the direct selling, on the subscriber side, right? So we talked about sales, right, and kind of the trends we're seeing there and some of the green shoots. Underlying that on the nutritional subscribers, right, has that trend kind of been in line? Is that kind of a leading indicator there? You're seeing more subscribers? Are you seeing changes in purchasing habits? Can you talk a little bit more in terms of what you're seeing in terms of trends with nutritional subscribers?
We have not. I mean, we had a bump of late, which was nice. But prior to that, we were coming off of sort of a declining trend. And that's sort of what made us realize that we need to do a better job of isolating focus on the nutrition product for that selling organization to be able to go out and let's face it, we have 100 and call it 150,000 nutritional subs. We had 1.3 million digital subs. There's no way that only 12% of all the people in that digital fitness subbase are using nutritional supplements. Only 12% of them are using our supplements. And so what we have to figure out is why are we not selling it directly to them? Are we not feature benefits selling it?
How can we go to people who we know are using these products and make them aware of what we have to offer, not just selling them in a bundled package? You get what I mean? It's like, think about your spectrum package. You've got phone, you've got internet, you've got television. They're not telling you what the speed is, unless you ask, of your broadband or how many channels. So we're not focused on the individual component benefits of the products. We're focused on the benefit of the whole package that we're selling you. So I think we're missing an opportunity, and we're getting refocused to be able to give these people the factual ammunition they need. So when they call you, Aaron, they can tell you on a feature benefit standpoint why you should buy this product versus whatever you're buying today.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay.
The attach rate of nutritional subscribers or subscriptions to digital subscribers should go up. It used to be a bit higher than 20%, kind of hit a low of 10%. Now it's in the very low teens. That effort Marc's talking about, that's the low-hanging fruit, bringing that number back up.
Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense there. We've talked about the ability to buy some of the fitness programs à la carte, right? And you talked about in terms of helping bring consumers back in. But can we also kind of talk about how that could help to bring in the new consumers? So how do you think that offering will help increase the TAM or addressable market of consumers who'd want to now become a part of BODi?
Marc?
Just to make sure I got that right, Aaron, you're saying by selling more of those digital subscription programs, how we're going to?
No, my intention was to explain the LTV. Before you just had the subscription, right? And now you're selling the à la carte programs. We talked before about how it's helping bring consumers back who used to be part of the program. But now I want to talk about how it's also helping bring in new consumers who might not have because you only had the subscription offering.
Yeah, absolutely. Listen, our subscriptions held up really well, right? If I look at our monthly retention rate, it's really done well. Despite our price going up 80%, we stayed at 96% monthly retention rate. All we're doing is opening up the aperture for what the consumer wants. And if a consumer just wants to do one program for a lifetime and they don't want to pay for a subscription, we want them all in, right? We don't want them to get subscription fatigue. And so there's a lot of people in our current database who just want to do a single program. Or we may just advertise a single program.
Now, that person that's a new subscriber that we advertise to a single program that says, "Come to this program for 60 days, you'll feel and look differently." Once they're in and they do the 60 days, we engage them in the 60 days through different communications and notifications and emails and so on to say, "You should be consuming these other products along the way." That's how you start upselling the nutrition to the $60 purchase. So the lifetime value of that customer is way higher than $60. It becomes what do you upsell them while they're doing that program. Once they finish that program, you say, "Usually, people who finish programs like this move on to one of these three programs. Why don't you try to sign those?" And frankly, what we're finding is a lot of them actually sign up for a subscription, funny enough.
Now, they're coming in that way, and then they're going back to the subscription, which is a great LTV, by the way, right? Because if on average we keep people for 24 months, that's a great LTV for them to stick around for that long. Our ideal is that LTV keeps growing by increasing the attach rate of nutrition. Because remember, with nutrition, you're charging them on average somewhere between $80 to 100 a month. With a digital subscription, it's $180 a year. I mean, after two months of nutrition, you made just as much revenue-wise. After three months, you made the same margin. It's a really good business if you're able to really increase that attach rate.
Yeah. The key to our turnaround success after we've done all the re-architecture is, sure, there's incremental improvement that we can make in digital fitness, but we're already doing really well there, and we're a big factor. It's on that nutrition side. We've got amazing products. We saw the decline that we described. We know the opportunity is there because we did it before. And going back and getting growth on the nutrition side, for example, all these people that are buying these $59.95 programs, they have to come to the app to access what they own. So they can get access to it forever. They've got to come back to the BODi app. Well, we then have the ability every time they come back to upsell them on something as an adjunct to what they're doing. So we never had that in the DVD days.
You got your DVDs, and you were done. I mean, you watched them. You might come back later. You might not. So this is not a one-and-done. We're creating a relationship continuum here that is really unique. And we're in the early days of it, so we got to get it right. But our opportunity, to Marc's point, to create an LTV, which is far in excess of what it could just be as digital fitness, is great.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Hey, Aaron, I'm seeing some questions in the Q&A. Let me tackle a few.
Yeah, yeah, go ahead. I was going to hit through them. If you want to go ahead, that's fine.
Yeah. I see two of them. Let me hit them up straight. So the first one is, why would a consumer how do we convince a consumer to buy Shakeology at two to three times the price premium of other protein products? So we have protein supplements. They're not priced like Shakeology. They have about three or four ingredients in them. They're very price competitive. Shakeology is price competitive for the market it's in. It's a superfood health mix. There's something like over 60 ingredients in Shakeology. And if you go compare it to similar products like AG1 or Ka’Chava, they're the same price point. So I just want to make sure we're comparing apples to apples because people may think of Shakeology, and unfortunately, that may have been of our own making, and we're undoing it now. Shakeology is not a simple protein supplement.
It's really meant to be a dense dose of nutrition to keep you healthy. So I want to tackle that one. There is no two to three times price premium on Shakeology. That's the wrong way to look at it because we have other products for that. On the email database, somebody asked, so we said we have an email database of 14 million, and we're still working that database. I think somebody's asked, are they valid emails? These are valid emails. Yeah. They're valid emails, right? If something's not valid or if the person opted out, they're not in the 14 million, okay? But in the 14 million, there's a very big difference between somebody who left us in the past year versus somebody who left us 8 years ago, right? Somebody left us eight years ago, and they were 60 years old. They're 68 today.
Maybe this is not the programs for them or for different reasons. They're just not interested anymore. They got interested in something else. So the reality is your 14 million is very different, namely based on recency. So you just go take it one versus two versus three versus all the way up to eight layers, eight years layers. So that's more what Marc was talking about. We measure whether people open up the emails or not. If somebody doesn't open the email and you keep hitting them up, then the ISPs will shut you down. So we just have to be careful on how much we send people who are less active in opening their emails versus people who are more active. Frankly, we got room to ramp it up there.
But then that takeaway is in a business where you're spending categorically $80, $100 CACs, when you have a large member base, a former member base with no CAC associated with it, you can afford to be cautious. You can afford to be measured till you get it right. Because if you get it right, you got a real gold mine there that you can tap. And if you try to rush it because you're trying to get greedy, because you get this big bucket of essentially free people to go after, you'll mess it up.
Okay. Fantastic. I think we're coming to an end here. Marc and Mark, thank you so much for joining me here today.
Thank you, Aaron. We really appreciate it. And if anybody wants to follow up, they can follow up directly with Marc. And I know you've all said if they wanted to schedule some one-on-ones, they could do that through you guys and communicate back to us. But we really appreciate you having us, and we appreciate all the people who listened into this today.
Yes, absolutely. Thank you for joining in. Again, reach out to us or them at AGP, the Beachbody Company trading on the New York Stock Exchange, ticker BODI. Thanks again, and appreciate it. Bye, guys.
Thank you, man.
Take care.