📖 Read the full transcript of this episode
Eight years ago, Derek suffered a leg injury while working as a bouncer at a bar in downtown Vancouver. Unable to walk, he began writing articles on health and fitness online. Today, he runs one of the biggest YouTube channels for that niche, alongside three other successful businesses. In this episode, he discusses the importance of maintaining your audience’s trust while opening up the current struggles he faces as an entrepreneur.
00:00 Introduction: From Bouncer to Blogger
00:42 Daily Routine and Night Owl Lifestyle
03:18 Building a Business Empire
05:54 The Journey to Success
13:41 Transparency in the Fitness Industry
38:35 Navigating Fame and Public Perception
41:45 The Double-Edged Sword of Fame
42:38 Managing Wealth and Business Strategies
45:28 The Challenges of Product Development
47:19 Exploring Digital Products and Content Creation
49:39 Personal Enjoyment and Financial Management
52:25 Investment Strategies and Wealth Management
59:37 Productivity Hacks and Tools
59:51 Book and Product Recommendations
01:04:14 Sleep Optimization
Twitter/X: @derek_fitness
Instagram: @moreplatesmoredates
YouTube: @MorePlatesMoreDates
Auto-generated from YouTube. May contain minor errors.
is it a good job being a bouncer no I was bouncing downtown Vancouver I ended up getting injured one time it wasn’t the Sucker Punch that injured me it was the fall on my leg while I was immobile I basically started writing blog articles so basically getting punched in the face launched $100 million Empire like oh my God could you think of something more absurd well dude I’m so glad we could do this this is awesome we’re both in Vancouver both Canadian appreciate you doing this thanks for having me how’s your day going what have you been doing today basically woke up and came here so haven’t done a whole lot yet and you’re if I understand it you are a night owl still yeah brutal one you go to bed at like what time it depends but it is typically I would say on an average day 3:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. that’s where I used to be and then I had kids yeah and when it’s PST and you have businesses to operate in EST yeah brutal I used to wake up I used to go to bed at 5 and at 4:00 a.m. I’d drive to a Subway there’s a 24-hour Subway I’d eat Subway right before bed and then I’d sleep in until 2 or 3 in the winter the sun would set right as I was waking up and I’d get like 45 minutes of sun and now I’m a morning person because of kids and if you have kids I’m sure you will be too but it’s kind of a nice life like no one bugs you what do you do at night like what do you do with all that time all the stuff that is difficult to focus on in the day when your phone is exploding essentially
so I’m sure you could attest to the fact that you can pretty much spur work out of thin air just by you respond to one thing it equals an answer so even though you’ve responded to things you’re actually just spurring further threads of the same existing problem potentially it’s not always solving it sometimes you’re just initiating more back and forth and often times the day gets burnt up just by nature of answering all that stuff in business hours because those people are then on point to answer you back and before you know you haven’t got anything new done you’re just kind of addressing surface level tedious tasks that you probably shouldn’t be touching and often it’s pretty difficult to get removed off of everything you shouldn’t be notified on but you see stuff popping up all the time and it’s pretty hard to not jump in and restrain and just let it be and often times I’ll just burn the entire day overseeing it micromanaging seeing what people are commenting on posts especially if I’m daily posting that’s really difficult to get away from is the response to today’s video you’ll find yourself jumping back in to get either a dopamine hit from the views climbing or just general feedback and see what the comments are like but at night time everyone’s asleep you can actually focus on new stuff is what I find with no interruption it’s like the real airplane mode
you’ve done a really interesting thing so you’ve built this huge audience you have how many followers two million or something on YouTube and yeah across everything how big is it I’m sure there’s overlap but it’s a few million so you built this huge following and unlike most influencers you’ve actually built your own businesses which probably adds to your stress load can you talk a little bit about what those businesses are and then I know you have business partners how do you operate the whole thing like you’re still deeply involved in it obviously but how does it work my primary three businesses are gorilla mind which is a dietary supplements company and energy drinks primarily focusing on Sports Nutrition and cognitive enhancing nootropics essentially Marek Health which is a telemedicine company focused on concierge level preventative medicine getting access to high-quality medical providers to interpret really elaborate insightful diagnostics to determine how to proactively avoid getting sick disease whatever or to optimize your current states and then the third business is more of like a miscellaneous but it is getting more directional now called intelligent and intelligent.shop it’s started with men’s hair loss prevention products in particular because that is a niche that I’m really interested in the science of and it segregated also into fragrances men’s fragrances as well as skin care so it’s more like a men’s self-care line
and you also make money from advertising on the YouTube channel as well and how big is this whole empire I don’t know like how would you define how well like revenue how big is it like 100 mil bigger smaller I think cumulatively I’m pretty comfortable with just saying it’s nine figures plus cumulatively that’s gross by the way how many years in are you now eight I guess crazy and so where were you eight years ago just was bouncing downtown Vancouver and finished my undergrad in marketing which is totally useless by the way but besides the point trying to figure out what I wanted to do essentially I was bouncing downtown and thought I would go get a job downtown Vancouver as an accountant or a marketer for some company I really had no conception of what I was going to do I just knew that it was something in the business realm and I had entrepreneurial tendencies but it certainly was not something I had a blueprint to follow and when I was bouncing downtown sometimes you get in fights with patrons and I ended up getting injured one time what happened so basically it wasn’t the Sucker Punch that injured me it was the fall on my leg basically I fell down and my leg developed like an internal bleeding of sorts and it just swelled up like crazy and I was basically unable to return to work until it had kind of drained itself
so while I was immobile I basically started writing blog articles so I started writing about men’s fitness so basically getting punched in the face launched a hundred million Empire yeah that’s crazy what a weird thing did you feel pretty sorry for yourself when that happened not really because it’s kind of part of the job sometimes you get is it a good job being a bouncer no well I guess it depends you got good stories yeah it was definitely fun while I was doing it sometimes but you’re often on call too and even on Christmas sometimes it’ll be people want to go to the bar and they decide to open up and somebody needs to come down and you might be the guy who you get time and a half but you’re still there on Christmas so it was good though for somebody who at least at the time wanted that experience and a job it kind of checked two boxes because I was never a partyer necessarily but I liked the concept of immersing myself in that world so you get punched in the face you’re out for a bit and then how do you start the business or how do you start posting online how does it all happen so fortunately WordPress blogs not such a high barrier to entry that somebody totally inept to how you would start a business is still capable of starting one so I was able to spin up what otherwise looked like a horrendous site but functioned and I could write articles
and I had seen one of my current business partners develop an online persona at the time he was probably one of the front-facing influencers of the self-improvement community I think he had 40,000 something subscribers which at the time in 2015 2016 was like you’re the man that’s a big following so he was super influential on me using a framework of he did this from scratch just writing content becoming an affiliate for stuff that he’d recommend making commissions off of it developing an audience and looking at how he did it was a big inspiration and blueprint for me to get started because I don’t think I would have otherwise because I just couldn’t wrap my head around how you could get from A to B what was your first piece of content the first article I wrote was how to bulk without getting fat part one specifically so I did a part two after but yeah it was basically just the standard fitness bro questions how much protein should I have what calorie surplus should I eat what year was this 2016 that was already it’s so interesting because at that time I would think there’s probably tons of websites that say this you’re not doing anything new and yet you still somehow managed to build this huge following what were you doing anything different than everyone else well I think the perception that it was saturated was probably not as real as it is now so now super saturated whereas back then you could still get millions of views on a basic fitness video
