[00:00:00 – 00:00:07] Nitin Bajaj

Welcome to the industry show. I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj. And joining me today is Aryan Davani. Aryan, welcome on the show.

[00:00:08 – 00:00:10] Aryan Davani

Thank you, Nitin. Pleasure to be here.

[00:00:10 – 00:00:13] Nitin Bajaj

Great to have you here. Let’s start with who is Aryan.

[00:00:15 – 00:01:03] Aryan Davani

That’s a big question. Aryan is a community builder.

I’m an entrepreneur. I’m a lifelong student, and I’ve always been curious about all things. Also the founder of IcePass. It’s a wellness company that we blend age old practices like sauna, cold plunge, breath work into modern lifestyle. And I’m a first generation immigrant from Iran. I grew up in a tough neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens, New York. And after finding my way to San Francisco and navigating both corporate life and startup life, I found healing in practice of cold plunging and breath work and sauna.

And so IcePass was born out of a desire to make these modalities that I didn’t have when I was younger affordable and accessible to everyone.

[00:01:04 – 00:01:28] Nitin Bajaj

Wonderful. You started answering my second question almost like you read my mind. So tell us amongst the many options you had, corporate life, comfort, convenience, why take this unchartered territory and go into entrepreneurship, and why specifically with, healing and what led to IcePass?

[00:01:30 – 00:02:27] Aryan Davani

Yeah. IcePass started my my last startup, we were selling software to cities. And before that, I cut my teeth in technology sales at a company called Oracle. You might have heard it. And it was a very cutthroat environment. And after my last startup, I really got burnt out, and it was a lot of traveling. And it was a unhealthy lifestyle living out of my bag, wining and dining.

I was having to drink for the job and entertaining clients. And so I really wanted to become the healthiest version of myself. And I work so much, and I love what I do in developing business and finding opportunities. And I just wanted to align my personal goals with the company that my next company that I want to start. And so that’s how I stumbled into health and wellness. And I cherry picked some of the previous business models from my last startups, and I blended them into the brainchild of IcePass.

[00:02:28 – 00:02:49] Nitin Bajaj

That’s amazing. So you hinted a little bit at what IcePass is, and, obviously, we’ve talked about it. But give us a flare for what is it the impact you’re creating through this. And I would also love for you to share the different locations you have and the number of members that are coming in and taking advantage of this.

[00:02:50 – 00:04:21] Aryan Davani

Sure. I would describe IcePass as a new kind of wellness club, more of a modern urban bathhouse for the soul. So we combine cold plunge, sauna, breath work. We have weekly events where we bring people together. They’re all sober events. And I realized that people are tired of going to bars and swiping on apps, and they need a what I call a third third space where they can connect. And it’s really based on community.

So you can think of it as a gym for your nervous system, but way more fun. And so we host all sorts of classes from meditation and breath work and contrast therapy to really fun events like Friday night sauna socials. You think about tiki torches, bonfires, DJs, wellness brand activations. We have salsa and sauna socials where we teach salsa dancing, and then you can jump into a cold plunge in a sauna. We also have one event that we’ve had about six of so far. It’s our most viral event, and that’s called icebreakers, which is a conscious dating experience where you come and we will start off with something to ease everybody like a heart opening cacao ceremony or a sound bath. And then we will match you with randomly with a stranger for a two minute cold plunge, And we have floating laminated note cards of icebreaker questions where you ask each other.

And and if things go well, you can ask that person for a second date in the sauna, and that’s become really popular.

[00:04:22 – 00:04:34] Nitin Bajaj

Love that. That’s, that’s pretty cool. I’m, again, looking forward to experiencing some of these and being a part of some of these events and hopefully co hosting a few of these in the future.

[00:04:35 – 00:05:17] Aryan Davani

Absolutely. And to answer the second part of your question, we started about just under two years ago. We started with one gym, one cold plunge. We didn’t have a sauna at the time, which is why it was called IcePass. And and then we quickly grew to four locations in the first year. We hit our hundred member milestone in the first four months, and we’re we’re now at about 300 monthly recurring members. We’re opening our fifth location in about three weeks, and all of this has been done without any sort of paid marketing.

It’s really just been focusing on building that that community and finding out what’s most valuable in terms of services and learning a lot along the way in terms of operations as well before we start expanding rapidly.

[00:05:18 – 00:05:41] Nitin Bajaj

Congratulations on the successes so far, and I know the best is yet to come. As you’re going through this, coming into the startup environment, you’ve had some experiences there. There are many challenges. And if I ask you to call out the biggest one, what would that be?

[00:05:44 – 00:07:55] Aryan Davani

Yeah. And that’s hard to list just one. But right now, if you ask me what the biggest challenge is, when I we have a unique model where we take underutilized real estate at existing businesses. And we’ve we’ve transformed that space into a wellness zone where, you know, people can use their app to self check-in. So if there’s not a need for an employee to be there, our job is to keep the facilities as quick meticulously clean and hold those weekly socials that I talked about. But what I’ve recently realized is that there’s there’s a lot of people that are using the service that are not actually members. And when I first started IcePass, I always thought to myself because this had come up.

And I said, look. The people that are getting into that are waking up at 6AM and going into 37 degree water, these are very affluent individuals that and they’re very successful, and they’re biohackers and entrepreneurs and health and wellness enthusiasts. These are not the same people that are gonna, in some ways, I stealing. And but what I’ve learned is that if there’s a gap in the system, people will take advantage of it. And it was my responsibility to take that into account. And as we scale, these are some of the lessons that I’ve learned is you have to have, you know, systems in place and security in place to where in in order to enter into the facility, there’s technologies now that you can use your phone to just tap. You can assign digital keys.

But I I had no idea until I just recently just over the past few weeks. I have cameras at each location now. I have ambassadors that are constantly verifying members, and I realized that dozens of people just over the past few weeks that I’ve found that are that are using the facilities without paying. And I’m very kind in the way we approach them, and I’d say more than half the time, they do sign up and they apologize, and it’s a learning lesson. And I think it’s karma for all the times in my twenties when I’ve I found the loophole and I’ve snuck into a festival or I’ve snuck into a it all comes back around, but it’s a learning lesson for everyone.

[00:07:57 – 00:08:19] Nitin Bajaj

Well, how do I put this? That’s a very mature way of looking at things even in a spot where, you know, when we’re just getting started, there’s only that much to go around, and you need to be optimizing on every aspect of the resource. That’s a very mature head on your shoulders there, so congratulations.

[00:08:20 – 00:08:21] Aryan Davani

Thank you for that.

[00:08:22 – 00:08:32] Nitin Bajaj

Now on the flip side of challenges come opportunities, and I would love for you to share the one that’s most exciting for you.

[00:08:33 – 00:12:37] Aryan Davani

Yes. There’s a lot of very exciting, opportunities with IcePass. We started with our core membership model where we’re disrupting the contrast therapy market. If you go anywhere in town, it costs on average about a hundred to $200 for an hour of contrast therapy, and we charge that for a month. And you get unlimited access to not just one, but all of our locations, all of our classes, all of our socials. And so we’re offering tremendous value, and we’re scaling very fast with our decentralized model. So right now, as mentioned, we have multiple locations across West LA.

1 of the things that I’m most excited about is, one, entering into the space of corporate wellness. Coming from the corporate world and even the startup world, burnout is a real thing, and there’s a mental health epidemic. And in the past, working on sales team, business development teams, constant happy hours, or whether you’re in finance, people are drinking and doing different types of drugs to just handle the stress or celebrate, if you wanna call it, their successes or connect with their coworkers. And so for me, I think that there’s such a big opportunity in working with not just big companies like Google and Apple that all we have off they have offices all here in at West LA, but working with start ups and midsize companies to where they’re subsidizing the cost of our already low low membership fee. And now we can make it to where for under a hundred bucks a month, they can offer it to their employees or they can pay for that cost themselves. And now whether it’s on their way to work or on the way home or even on their lunch break, instead of grabbing that cup of coffee, they can pop in thirty minutes, get a quick sweat in, some breath work, a cold plunge, and come back to work feeling more productive. And the study show that for every dollar that a company invests in their employees’ wellness, they’re getting $3 back in productivity and absentee costs.

And then as you probably know, it’s very tough to retain and attract the best employees. And so the number one reason why people quit or move to another job is because they don’t feel appreciated or you know? And companies like Google have shown if you’re investing in keeping people at the location or at if you’re investing in wellness, you’re able to attract the best people as well. So that would be one of the biggest opportunities for us. The second opportunity would be franchising. And I wanna make coal plunging. So in five years, I see there’s a huge gap in these major markets where the sales for cold plunges are exploding, but there is millions of people that live in these major hubs that don’t have a backyard or for for someone who hasn’t done it yet is not gonna go and spend $10,000 for it, a cold plunge or $20,000 for a sauna.

So making having these access points in places like Austin, New York, Miami, LA. These are all opportunities, and what we wanna do is give opportunities to facilitators that may not have a ton of money to start a franchise. But with because of our business model of no rent, no utilities, and taking underutilized space and doing a revenue share, we can provide through our partnerships with our sauna and cold plunge partners for for less than 50 k. You can own your own business. And from day one, you’re generating revenue without having any of the overhead. And the best part about that is you can keep adding locations. If you wanna build your own mini empire in your community, you can have multiple locations.

And so it’s it’s a business model that’s meant to scale, and and it’s a fast way for us to grow and provide access to as many people as possible in the short term over the next couple of years.

[00:12:37 – 00:13:07] Nitin Bajaj

That is super exciting. And, again, congratulations on figuring out that that model. And I think the time is right, especially for coal plunging. There’s a wave of people that have been trying it for several years, and they’ve seen the results. There is science to back that up. And I think you’re for many things to work, you have to be at the right place at the right time, and I believe that’s that’s what you’ve done with IcePass. So looking forward to the continued success.

[00:13:08 – 00:13:09] Aryan Davani

Thank you. It seems.

[00:13:10 – 00:13:32] Nitin Bajaj

Now as we look forward, I like to pause and reflect, and I would love for you to share two moments from your life. One, where things did not work out as you had expected, and there was burnout failure lessons. Another where things exceeded your own expectation and became a success beyond your imagination.

[00:13:36 – 00:15:33] Aryan Davani

Yes. In my twenties, growing up without much money at all and and growing up in a poverty stricken environment, in my twenties, starting to make more money than I knew. Like, for me, it was a lot of money. And working at companies like Oracle and sales, if you’re good, you can make you can make a good income. And for me, I had the concept that money would buy happiness. I was very naive. And so that that caused a lot of that caused a lot of burnout for me.

And what I realized is I hit a ceiling where I had enough money to travel whenever I wanted to and buy whatever. I’m not a very materialistic guy to begin with, but it was something where I realized that the more money I was making, was not making me happier. And so when I turned 30, I went to Burning Man, and it opened my eyes because the whole concept of Burning Man, despite what a lot of people may think that it’s just a drug induced music fest, there’s, you know, there’s a deeper mission and why they started Burning Man, and there’s a lot more to gain from that. You can take what you want from Burning Man. And what I realized is, you know, because Burning Man is based around the concept of there’s no such thing as money, so you can’t buy anything there. Everything is free, and everyone is just giving. So I realized how good it felt to give.

And so I when I came back from Burning Man, I within a week, I left my job at Oracle, and I decided to travel for a year and a half. And I went to 20 different countries. And I really went on a path of self discovery. I did multiple Vipassana where you sit by yourself in a room for in a pagoda for ten days, and you meditate for about thirteen hours a day on vegan diet. You’re only eating once a day, and that turned out to be a huge blessing for me.

[00:15:35 – 00:16:29] Nitin Bajaj

That’s amazing. And I’m a student of Vipassana myself, so it’s not an easy thing to do, especially the first time around. And it’s a test of you on many different levels. So I applaud you for having taken that journey and also going on that self discovery process. It I believe as entrepreneurs, we that’s the one thing we learn is what are we made of? And it helps us dig deeper into ourselves to find a new version of us. And yeah.

So I’m glad you had that experience. Now moving aside from work and talking about what do you do to switch off to de stress? You’re in the business of de stressing others. What do you do to de stress?

[00:16:31 – 00:18:23] Aryan Davani

I really love to spend time with friends. I have a small group of friends that we like to get together and friends that I grew up with in New York and friends that I lifelong friends that I’ve made in San Francisco. And so I really like to spend times with spend time with friends and family. I’ve realized how important that is the older I’ve gotten, especially, and I like to stay connected as possible. So I’ve really made an effort, especially in my in my twenties. I felt like I was disconnected from a lot of things, and I was so engulfed in work. And so whenever I do have time, I like to whether it’s on the phone or making a trip to reunite with some of my friends, it’s one of my favorite pastimes because those are the people that remind you, especially in places like LA where everyone has a transplant and you can lose yourself pretty quickly if you’re not staying connected to those people that remind you who you are.

I also love to stay active. I’m on I’m still on my own wellness journey, and I align myself with the brand with as many people that I see as embodying the brand. But for me, I’m still trying to become the healthiest version of myself. I Socrates had a quote where I’ll paraphrase, but he said that every man should realize the potential of his body. Yeah. The full potential at least one point.

And I just turned 40. I still have a lot of energy, and I’m trying to use that energy to stay as healthy as possible. And with all the partnerships that I have with Equinox and Nike and running studios. I started running recently, which I I’ve learned to really love. It’s in addition to things like meditation and breath work, and I love basketball. So even though I’m not I I could never make the basketball team, I still I live right by the Venice Courts where one of my favorite basketball movies growing up was White Man Can’t Jump, and

[00:18:23 – 00:18:23] Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

[00:18:23 – 00:18:33] Aryan Davani

That movie was filmed right less than a five minute walk from where I am. And so I love to just grab the basketball and go and play some pickup games as well whenever I can.

[00:18:33 – 00:18:50] Nitin Bajaj

Amazing. We get to make the best of what LA has to offer, and I’m glad you’re enjoying that. Now onto my favorite part of the show, which we call the one line life lessons. Aryan, I would love to have you share your life lessons with us.

[00:18:53 – 00:20:44] Aryan Davani

Yeah. So five one liners. Okay. I think one is build and they will come. I used to do a lot of chasing. And so I realized whether it’s in relationships or in business, the right people will find you. And so that brings me to my second one liner, which is don’t chase, attract.

And if you’re operating at a certain frequency and vibration, the right people will find you. My third one would be discomfort is the doorway. I’ve realized very, very quickly, especially over the past few years, that the more I push myself to do things that I don’t want to do, the more quickly I get the things that I wanted, and there’s no shortcuts. So I don’t know if that counts as the fourth one, but I could use that as someone that was always looking for the loophole. There there really are no shortcuts. And, man, let me think of the fifth one. I would say you are the healer.

So in a world where we’re always looking for a quick fix and pharmaceutical industries are making billions of dollars off of our problems, All of the solutions are inside of us already and just the elements of air, which is breath work, and fire, which is sauna, and the cold. These are are the water. And there’s earth water. All these earth elements, you tap into those and they can solve. We have people with autoimmune disorders, Lyme disease, Hashimoto’s disease, people that are going through recovery from hard drugs. And so just tapping into what’s inside of us already and just nature’s elements can solve good amount of your problems, if not all of them.

[00:20:45 – 00:21:14] Nitin Bajaj

Well, Aryan, thank you so much for sharing your journey, your life lessons, but also for helping the community heal. And you started off by saying that you’re a community builder. I had a builder and a healer, and I appreciate for all that you do for everyone and wishing you all the best and continued success, and glad to have you had on the show.

[00:21:15 – 00:21:18] Aryan Davani

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me in the team.