Interview with Michael Ramsey – Co-founder and Co-CEO of Strong Pilates

The brands that win in crowded categories aren’t chasing trends.They’re built from something real.In this episode, I sit down with Rudy Aldana (Co-Founder & CEO of PARCH) to break down what’s actually happening in non-alcoholic—and why most brands are missing it.What we get into:    •    Why non-alc isn’t about health—it’s about identity    •    The real reason consumers feel “off” when they’re not drinking    •    Where most brands go wrong (they keep adding)    •    Why PARCH launched with 4 SKUs—and stayed there    •    The difference between traction and just more ideasThe Takeaway:Go stand in front of the shelf and ask:Why would someone actually pick this?Because in a category full of noise—the brands that win aren’t doing more.They’re doing the right things, better, for longer.

There are some categories where it feels like the world does not need one more brand.Fitness is one of them, especially Pilates.So when I sat down with Michael Ramsey, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Strong Pilates, I wanted to understand how they’re breaking through in spite of that.This was the line that stayed with me:The problem wasn’t Pilates. It was everything else people still needed.    That’s the insight behind Strong.People love Pilates. They believe in it. But they also want strength, cardio, progress, and results, and they don’t want to have to piece that together across multiple studios and memberships.So instead of launching another Pilates concept, they built something different.In this episode, we talk about:What it actually takes to stand out in a saturated categoryWhy differentiation has to live in the business, not just in the brandingHow founder conviction shows up in real decisions (and real risk)What’s changed in marketing and why content now has to carry more weight than everHow to scale without losing the thing that made people care in the first placeOne thing I kept thinking about after:- Winning in a crowded market isn’t about being louder.- It’s about being clearer.- This is a really good one if you’re building anything right now.

Most wearables track one thing at a time: steps, sleep, heart rate. Nanowear is building something entirely new: a single piece of fabric that acts like a full physical exam whenever you wear it.CEO and co-founder Venk Varadan started the company nearly ten years ago with his father, Dr. Vijay Varadan, after discovering a breakthrough textile that can read the body without adhesives or multiple devices. One fabric-based sensor captures heart, lungs, blood pressure, respiration, and metabolic signals all at once; nothing on the market can do that today.Rather than rushing a consumer launch, Venk spent years doing the hard part: FDA clearances, clinical validation, and building the infrastructure so Nanowear’s technology could plug into virtual care platforms, employer health plans, and connected devices people already use.The long-term vision? Over-the-counter diagnostic kits anyone can use at home, real, clinical-grade data you can take straight to your doctor.The path has been long: years of R&D, tough fundraising cycles, and a market that wasn’t ready for a category this big. But Venk never lost sight of the mission.“If we don’t build this, it’s not going to happen.”Next up: a 2026 rollout, employer-led prevention programs, and eventually global access, especially for people far from consistent medical care.A decade in, Nanowear remains a rare founder story: slow, disciplined, and quietly building the future of diagnostics.

When Arisa Katayama had her daughter in LA during COVID, she did what most first-time moms do: focused on the birth and the baby, not herself. Then the fourth trimester hit. Sleep-deprived, still breastfeeding late into the night, she kept opening a half-empty fridge filled with leftovers and frozen pizza, realizing there was nothing truly nourishing or postpartum-safe for her.That moment became the seed for For Her by Arisa, a Japanese-born brand now launching in the U.S. with postpartum recovery soups rooted in yakuzan, a traditional philosophy where TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) meets Japanese home cooking.Arisa’s mission: “We’re here to mother women, because women spend their lives mothering everyone else.”Key takeaways from our conversation:Postpartum first, women’s health always:From supporting new moms to addressing hormones across periods, fertility, miscarriage, postpartum, and menopause.Traditional wisdom, modern format:Japanese and TCM-inspired soups that blend comforting, grandma-style recipes with functional, clinical intention.Built on cross-cultural insight:Started in Japan with shelf-stable pouches; adapted to U.S. preferences with frozen, handmade Orange County–produced soups.Growing slowly, on purpose:Bootstrapped and intentionally rolling out through doulas, practitioners, and sampling before broader retail.Explore more at forherbyarisa.com or on Instagram @forherbyarisa.

Reinventing Practitioner Commerce with Jon ArmstrongWhen tech entrepreneur Jon Armstrong set out to simplify his own supplement routine, he uncovered a much bigger problem: practitioners were losing patients, and profits, to Amazon. His answer was GetHealthy.store, a turnkey e-commerce and marketing platform that gives health and wellness professionals custom storefronts, operational support, and access to thousands of vetted, clinical-grade products.Key takeaways from our conversation:Built for how practitioners really work: “We provide fully functioning custom stores for doctors, nutritionists, and health coaches, without them managing images, pricing, or fulfillment.”Quality over chaos: Unlike Amazon, GetHealthy.store is a “closed and managed marketplace,” offering only clean, high-quality, research-backed brands.Fixing the convenience gap: “I was buying from four or five different places… so I thought, why not build something better?” The platform gives practitioners a seamless way to keep patients purchasing through their trusted ecosystem.Using AI to prove outcomes: By integrating diagnostic and purchasing data, Jon’s team is piloting tools that show how protocols and supplements impact real health markers over time.With GetHealthy.store, Jon Armstrong is modernizing the backbone of functional and integrative medicine, empowering practitioners to grow their businesses while giving patients a better, cleaner, and smarter way to get healthy.Learn more at GetHealthy.store or contact [email protected].

After two decades in biotech and a near-fatal heart attack at 43, Gary Seelhorst realized that success without self-awareness isn’t sustainable. He left corporate life to build Prime Peak Executive Coaching, a practice that helps leaders align peak performance with personal well-being. What started as volunteer work guiding veterans through career transitions has become a fast-growing, referral-only coaching business for executives and founders.Key takeaways from our conversation:Wellness drives performance: “When leaders are in an optimal state, that’s when executive business coaching really works.” Gary integrates mindset, nutrition, and energy management into every plan, bridging the gap between corporate achievement and personal health.Lessons from the edge: “Ten years ago, I had a massive heart attack… I wasn’t out of shape, but I was in the red all the time.” His experience reshaped how he teaches resilience and balance to clients facing the same high-stress demands.From Navy SEALs to CEOs: Prime Peak began at a wellness retreat where Gary coached veterans re-entering civilian life. “They’d been elite operators, but needed to learn how to transfer those skills to business.”Coaching with chemistry: With a background in biochemistry and management at Pfizer, Gary brings science to strategy, optimizing performance through neuroscience, cortisol timing, and cognitive energy mapping.Human over hype: “Find your key demographic and don’t try to be all things to all people.” Prime Peak’s growth has come organically through results, not algorithms.With Prime Peak Executive Coaching, Gary Seelhorst proves that sustainable success starts with self-care and that the most effective leaders are the ones who learn to coach themselves first.Learn more at Prime Peak Executive Coaching and listen to Gary’s full conversation on The Irresistible Factor podcast.

Economist turned founder Mette Dyhrberg didn’t plan to enter healthcare; she just wanted her life back. After collecting six autoimmune diagnoses in her twenties, she started tracking everything she was doing, eating, and feeling for months and months. She then used that data to uncover the cause of her symptoms and reverse them within 16 months, something that the medical community was not able to do. That personal discovery turned into MuneHealth, a platform created to help patients with autoimmune diseases find and fix the unique triggers keeping them sick.Key takeaways from our conversation:From patient to pioneer: “I went from being disempowered as a patient to empowered as a human.” Mette’s decade-long experiment with her own health became the foundation for a data-driven approach to autoimmune recovery.Precision over restriction: “82% of what the triggers are is dietary.” MuneHealth replaces elimination diets with AI-guided tracking that pinpoints exactly what’s causing symptoms—no guesswork, no deprivation.Human support, powered by tech: “We just use tech as a vehicle for delivery.” A few minutes of tracking a day and personalized guidance from experienced care teams, each of whom has reversed their own autoimmune disease, help patients change behaviors that truly heal.Access through insurers: With autoimmune disease disproportionately affecting women, MuneHealth currently partners with UnitedHealthcare to bring the program to more patients who’ve “given up hope of feeling like themselves again.”Scaling empathy: Mette believes healthcare change starts with results, not lobbying. “If you can deliver results powerful enough, that has to be the way forward.”With MuneHealth, Mette Dyhrberg proves that data and empathy together are not only the foundation for a successful company, but they can help rewrite what it means to truly live with autoimmune disease.Learn more at munehealth.com and listen to her full story on The Irresistible Factor podcast.

Radiologist turned founder, Dr. Cristin Dickerson, didn’t plan to run a company, she just wanted to do her job. But after seeing hospital acquisitions triple imaging prices and claims processes fail patients and doctors alike, Dr. Cristin looked to an unlikely category to find a solution. She built Green Imaging: a “Travelocity-style” marketplace that buys unused scanner time, bundles the entire episode of care, and passes transparent savings to employers and patients.Key takeaways from our conversation:Unused capacity, fair bundles: “We started buying the extra time on the scanner, our radiologists read it, and we bill a fair self-pay price.” The result is one all-in rate, no surprise CPT add-ons or separate radiology bills.Employer-first economics: “Employers can waive member co-pays and deductibles with Green, and still save money.” For self-funded plans, members pay $0 out of pocket while plans avoid hospital rates and unbundled charges.Concierge beats DIY: “Consumerism has failed in healthcare, when people are under stress, they want to be taken care of.” Green Imaging leans on live, multilingual concierges to educate, schedule, and simplify every step.Hospital alignment without bloat: By leasing time (they’re Green’s patients) and using Green’s radiologists, exclusivity hurdles drop—unlocking partnerships such as PET/CT reads and filling idle capacity.Bootstrapped resilience: “I worked full-time as a radiologist until 2020 to subsidize it.” The team survived a co-founder’s sudden passing, COVID’s volume collapse, and an IP lawsuit, without layoffs, growing to 5,000+ facilities and ~3M covered lives, still majority physician-owned.With the success of Green Imaging, Dr. Dickerson proves that there are creative ways to solve all kinds of problems. Even the behemoth of healthcare. Learn more at Green Imaging, and check out Dr. Dickerson’s book, Aligned, for a plain-English guide to making healthcare incentives work for patients, employers, and clinicians.

“It was very hard to accept, but I had to face the reality that our business was never going to give us the return we deserved. That was a mature set of decisions, to give up on dreams and accept defeat,” she says.As you can see, Kelly Spillane has lived both sides of the CPG journey. She started in Ireland as a founder, building a jam and marmalade company with her sister and even landing on supermarket shelves and high-end delicatessens in Paris, London, and New York. But after years of incredibly hard work, she faced a tough truth: the business wasn’t going where she hoped it would.Instead of walking away from the industry she loved, Spillane turned her hard lessons into a career helping other founders succeed. Today, she leads investments and accelerator programs at Whole Foods Market, guiding early-stage brands with the perspective only a former founder can bring.Key takeaways from our conversation:Agile growth first: “Being lean and agile is the number one thing. Not raising money for as long as you can is really the number one thing, along with the lean and agile.”It’s all about people: “In reality, when you’re investing money, you’re investing money in people. So I look at the founders, their vision, their experience, and whether they’re coachable.”The value of the journey: “Even though I didn’t achieve my big dream of making lots of money, I found myself, and I found lifelong friends. The journey was still worth it.”From winding down her own company to mentoring the next generation of founders, Kelly Spillane’s story is a reminder that resilience, focus, and adaptability matter as much as vision in building lasting businesses.

What began with Matt’s own martial arts injury grew into a business model that now includes international instructor training, wellness retreats, and tailored protocols for everyone from elite athletes to entrepreneurs. His story is both exciting and inspiring. But building Cold Club hasn’t been easy. Matt has had to navigate the realities of entrepreneurship, scaling globally, wearing every hat, and planning for sustainable growth in a crowded wellness industry.3 Key Takeaways1. Building Requires Vision and Systems“Tons of challenges. I need a bigger team. That’s step one. I need people to fill the different roles. As an entrepreneur, I work all the time, and I’m happy to work, but what I’m really trying to establish right now is a very clear, systematic approach to regular offerings worldwide.”2. Scaling Means Thinking Globally“Where do we see ourselves? We see ourselves as like a very powerful global network within the next three years. I think we will be in just about every continent. I see us as a very strong group. Leading wellness, we will be among the best known in wellness in the next three years.”3. Collaboration Is the Future“Collaboration is the future. And it’s the only way to sort of leverage the existing tools and systems that are out there to break through the noise. We’ve got to get signal. How are we going to get signal in today’s world? It’s really hard. And so collaboration is really the key.”From personal healing to global expansion, Matt Soule is proving that Cold Club is more than a wellness trend, it’s a movement built on resilience, innovation, and entrepreneurial grit. His journey is a reminder that scaling impact takes both passion and persistence.