Ms. Hagan and Mr. Fisher

Politicos like Chuck Schumer and Marty Markowitz have been quick to claim Mallory Hagan's new pageant title a victory for "the borough of Kings," nevermind that the Alabama native and former Miss New York is a relatively recent transplant. But as it turns out, one New York City tech startup might also be able to bask in the bling of the Miss America crown.

"In case you haven't yet heard, the new Miss America is a @fitocracy community member + trainee of @DickTalens," LoyalCX founder Sarah Judd Welch tweeted this weekend. Mr. Talens--a former fat kid turned body builder--is one of the cofounders of Fitocracy, an addictive fitness app that motivates users by treating workouts like you're leveling up in Everquest or World of Warcraft. 

The app, which recently released an Android version, stands out in the crowded fitness market for its enviable user engagement numbers. Between the web version and online app, the average user is spending 3.5 hours a month on Fitocracy, Mr. Talens said. That's higher than Tumblr, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Mr. Talens said he was actually introduced to Ms. Hagan last April through Alchemy, another New York-based startup that helps users "unlock the power" of their network of contacts. Alchemy "also introduced us to our CPO, i.e. the Cocken in Dick/Wang/Cocken," he told Betabeat, referring to a delightful confluence of names among Fitocracy's staffers.

After meeting Ms. Hagan for coffee, he ended up working with her for two months prior to the Miss New York competition, which she won. "A lot of women have this notion that in order to lose weight, you need to do a lot of cardio, cut out all fat, all carbohydrates, etc.," when heavy lifting and getting the right nutrients yields better results, Mr. Talens said.

But when it came to a national competition on a bigger stage, he admitted, "I really didn’t know too much about optimizing for a women’s physique in bikini competitions." Mr. Talens continued to offer nutrition and dieting advice, but reached out to the Fitocracy community for suggestions. They helped her find a trainer named Sohee Lee, based out in California and Mark Fisher Fitness, a local gym frequented by Broadway stars.

At the same time, Ms. Hagan became active on the Fitocracy app. "She was talking to all the users. All of our community loved her," said Mr. Wang, who sent us to a video she made which shows her going through her training routine. "She created it for Fitocracy users, which was really cool. She’s become a little bit of a cult icon in the fitness world for women."

As the New York Times noted, Ms. Hagan's win has credited to her tap dancing, campaign against child sexual abuse and dexterous response to a question about gun control. But Mr. Talens pointed out that Ms. Hagan had been runner-up in Miss New York twice before she won. "I don’t know if it was necessarily because of the bikini portion of it, but it certainly helped that she got into fantastic shape," he said.

If Fitocracy gets a bump from its Miss America connection, it'll be icing on the cheat day cake. The app was recently featured on "The Dr. Oz Show," and has been focused on customer support to get data back from new users. Mr. Talens said he wasn't actually sure whether to attribute the deluge of new users to Dr. Oz, its recent Android release, or New Year's resolutions. "January is a very big time for fitness companies," he said.

Fitocracy, the New York-based fitness gamification startup that recently graduated from the Mountain View incubator 500 Startups, likes to hire its users. The company announced it has hired a chief product officer today, Jared Cocken, a Fitocracy user and until now, the creative director of the high-profile web design agency The Wonderfactory.

Fitocracy's CEO is Brian Wang and its CTO is Dick Talens, so Mr. Cocken will fit right in. But besides the name coincidence, the startup just generally lucked out with the hire. Fitocracy was scouting for a designer, and Mr. Cocken had been helping them with screens for the iPhone app. "We noticed he was really really passionate about the product," Mr. Talens told Betabeat. They didn't have high hopes, and Mr. Talens says he's still not sure how they managed to woo the talented Mr. Cocken.

"I had a mutual friend do some recon to see if he would be open way, way down the line, and he seemed like he would be," Mr. Talens said. "Sooo we shot him an email at some point and were just like, 'yo dude, you're fucking awesome and Dick has a giant mancrush on you. Is there any way we can make it work?' Didn't expect him to say yes, but he did." (Memo to recruiters: please do not try this at home.)

Fitocracy's senior engineer, Daniel Roesler, was an early Fitocracy power user. "That means that 2 employees, an advisor and 2 of our contractors have now come from Fitocracy," Mr. Talens said by Gchat. "It just kind of happens... We've tried to source people from outside our userbase but our userbase has some of the smartest techies around and they really understand the domain, e.g. one of our contractors = one of the core Django developers."

He added, "Also it's really easy to run a query in our database for phallic names. Harder to do that elsewhere."

Fitocracy has been on a tear—the four-person startup has more than 250,000 registered users and more than $15,000 in revenue from premium features as "Fitocracy Hero," which includes early access to new features, exclusive badge and a "title," as well as unlimited routines and the ability to copy other people's workouts in one click. "The #1 reason cited for people signing up for Hero is just that Fitocracy's been life-changing and $5/month is less than a cup of coffee," Mr. Talens said. "So we're working on improving our feature set. But that was the top cited reason for upgrading."

Fitocracy CEO Mr. Wang, bottom, with CTO Mr. Talens, outside the pair's office in Soho.

IT STARTED BECAUSE BACK IN HIGH SCHOOL, Dick Talens was too fat and Brian Wang was too skinny. Or rather, Mr. Wang was “skinny fat,” meaning he had stick limbs and belly pooch, as the 25-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate explained to Betabeat during a recent visit to the Soho co-working space where the pair’s startup, the viral hit fitness game Fitocracy, is headquarted.

Mr. Talens and Mr. Wang sit next to each other in a sunny corner alongside their gym bags, with greasy athletic shoes tucked under their desks, an economy-sized bin of almonds and a filing cabinet of goodies such as protein powder, vitamins, oats and Splenda.

Mr. Talens, also 25, is muscular and broad-shouldered. There is hardly any resemblance between the 230-pounder he was in high school and the shredded CTO we found outfitted in a pair of flip-flops, jeans and a backwards baseball cap, typing code on an IBM Thinkpad which he had elevated atop a defunct Dell notebook. While Mr. Talens reclined backward as far as his office chair would permit, Mr. Wang, who has the physique of a welterweight, was a bit hyper. He powerwalked between his Mac and a conference room, preparing for a phone call with a potential business partner, pausing to dump into a thermos of milk what looked like enough powder to make pancakes.

Both Mr. Talens and Mr. Wang are computer nerds who enjoy the genre of online diversion known as “massively multiplayer online role-playing games,” or MMORPGs, like Everquest and World of Warcraft, in which players create a character who grows more powerful the more they play. “I remember one summer, it was like before junior year,” Mr. Talens said. “I’d literally wake up in the morning, play Everquest, like, eat a few times in the day, and just go to bed. And that’s all I did. In a different life, I’m like that kid who got blood clots and died in his room.”

While they still enjoy computer games, at some point the boys transitioned from an addiction to games to an addiction to fitness. Even before they met, they pored over the same online forums where bodybuilders were sharing fitness tips, personal statistics and before-and-after pictures. They met at Penn, over dinner with mutual friends. “It’s actually a very romantic story,” Mr. Talens said. He noticed what Mr. Wang was eating--tuna and broccoli--and thought, dude, he’s like me.

He started prodding Mr. Wang about his diet. “I was like, ‘Are you doing this for health reasons?’ I was trying to flush it out of him,” Mr. Talens said. “And he literally said, ‘I’m cutting right now.’ Cutting is the bodybuilding term for focusing on losing fat. And I was like, holy shit. I’ve never heard anyone offline talk in these terms before. This is only stuff I’ve heard online. And we became best friends ever since.”

The two now live together in Clinton Hill, having learned how to tolerate each other’s constant company after a few hellish months training together for the Mr. Penn bodybuilding contest. A little over a year ago, they quit their corporate jobs (Mr. Talens was working for Comscore and Mr. Wang was slogging through a gig as a product manager at a Connecticut-based agency) and moved to Brooklyn with the plan to launch a startup. After kicking around a few ideas—gift recommendations, sponsored weight-loss contest—they hit on Fitocracy, a website for tracking personal fitness in a way that resembles a game. Fitocracy rewards users for working out the same way Everquest rewards players for killing dragons.

The basic functionality, however, is logging your workouts. Type in an activity, “push-up,” for example, and Fitocracy will suggest categories--”push-up,” “handstand push-up,” “reverse grip triceps pushdown”--and pop up a description of how to do the exercise correctly. Betabeat, at 5'0" and 95 lbs., received 52 points for entering 20 push-ups. Eighty-two more points, and we’d be promoted to level three. You can add notes to each activity and comment on other users’ exercises. After logging enough workouts, users will start to receive badges, like “No Stranger to the Rack,” for performing a barbell squat for 1.2x your body weight, or “Hello There!” for posting ten comments on Fitocracy. Users can also follow each other’s progress and share updates with friends, join groups and earn “achievements.”

Fitocracy launched by invitation only in February, and the crowd went wild. Users on fitness forums would start “invite trains,” threads where everyone would post their invites, and the site would get flooded with 2,000 new users from a single site. Last month, the immensely-popular nerd web comic XKCD featured a Fitocracy sex joke, which brought in so much traffic that the site crashed. Fitocracy now has about 55,000 users, with almost 60,000 more on the wait list. The startup hired an engineer and early power user and was looking for angel investment two months ago; the founders may be ready to announce funding soon.

Mr. Talens works out three times a week for about 45 minutes, doing mostly deadlifts, squats and bench presses—but fitness is 80 percent diet, he told Betabeat. “I try not to be too anal about it, but I try to keep my feeding period from 12 to eight,” he said, and only eats two meals a day, which he says has several benefits including prolonged lifespan and a higher naturally-occurring GH level when the body is in “fast mode.” The popular idea that one should eat six smaller meals throughout the day in order to keep the metabolism running is “bro science,” he said—folklore that gets passed around the gym.

Eating two meals keeps him from thinking about food all day, he said. “Those meals are also glorious, which I’ll show you in a second, for somebody who likes to eat like me,” he said. “When I say I like to eat, I mean I like to eat huge quantities of food.” He giggled. “Like, enormous quantities of food.” Giggle. “I can make it when ever you want to take a little tour of the kitchen.”

We agreed, and Mr. Talens pushed back his chair and padded over to the kitchen, where he used a scale to measure 16 ounces of cooked chicken breasts, followed by three cups of white rice; opened a can of black beans, and extracted two strawberry-frosted Pop Tarts from a box, put each food on its own paper plate and microwaved it all. He brought the feast into the break room and began devouring it with plastic silverware, stacking the plates as he finished each course. Mr. Wang joined us. He had no lunch. “If I’ve worked out that day, then I’ll eat right after and that will probably be my biggest meal of the day,” he said. “The other day I just had a whole bunch of oatmeal and whey protein. And today I had a whole bunch of ice cream sandwiches and whey protein.”

Mr. Wang doesn’t always have time to eat at work, he said, although he keeps chicken, boiled eggs, tuna and some veggies around. The boys also schedule a regular FreshDirect order delivery to the office. “We’ll make a beeline for the tuna cans,” Mr. Wang said. “They’re coming in today!” said Mr. Talens.

Fitocracy hit the web in an opportune moment. Startup guru Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4 Hour Workweek” has made body-hacking trendy among the web-savvy set with his current bestseller “The 4 Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman,” and an instructional blog post titled “From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks.”

Betabeat noticed a copy of the book on Fitocracy’s filing cabinet. But when we mentioned it, the founders started rigorously shaking their heads. “That was a gift,” they said.

“What Tim Ferriss has done is surface a lot of stuff that fitness geeks have known for a long time,” Mr. Wang said charitably. “Even though some of the claims he makes in there are completely outrageous and misleading.”

The boys pointed to the blog post about gaining 34 pounds of muscle in a month as an example. A lot of the weight Mr. Ferriss gained was probably water weight, they explained, and the fact that he was a wrestler in high school and already had a muscular frame would have helped accelerate his progress.

The fitness industry is also rife with sham before-and-after pictures, they said.

Mr. Talens pulled out his cell phone. “Here’s a before-and-after,” he said, showing Betabeat a picture of a bloated belly in a mirror, followed by a picture of the same belly, in the same mirror wearing the same basketball shorts, but with a chiseled six-pack. “Guess how many weeks apart that was?” We had no idea. “That is six hours apart,” he said. The chiseled picture was actually the before shot, he explained. “This is like, in the morning when abs were still visible, I was like okay, I’ll take a picture of myself,” he said. “And then, six hours later”—he tabbed to the bloated picture. “That’s just water weight! Water and food.”

“We don’t want to turn this into a Tim Ferriss bashing session,” Mr. Wang said, so we moved on to prodding the boys for fitness tips. “What should a person who smokes, gets irregular sleep and doesn’t exercise do to be more fit?” we asked. “Stop smoking!” Mr. Talens said, incredulously. “And get regular sleep. That’s really important.”

Playing computer games also seems to help. Mr. Wang still has time to play Starcraft, he admitted to Betabeat, although he gets to the office every day at 8:30 a.m.

Mr. Talens, however, only plays Fitocracy. “I’m the exact same person I was when I was a fat kid,” he said. “Except instead of leveling up my character, I’m leveling up myself.”

Want to try Fitocracy? Click here. Invite code: BETABEAT.

Mr. Talens

This is a guest post by Dick Talens, an amateur competitive bodybuilder and the co-founder and CTO of Fitocracy.  He once looked like the kid from Up (except much rounder) until he traded in his video game time for gym time.  Over the last eight years, he's spent 1000+ hours reading about nutrition and training so that others don't have to.  He tweets about startups and fitness @DickTalens, or you can find him on Fitocracy with that same handle.

Over the last decade I’ve gone from comically fat (note the homeless guy laughing at me) to amateur competitive bodybuilder.  At the same time, I’ve whittled down the hours I spend working out every week from 20+ to less than three, and improved my results.

Because I co-founded a startup, I obsess over the ROI of my time on fitness for myself and my trainees. There’s nothing more painful than seeing people spend hours every week on the treadmill without seeing any change.  So how do you remain fit* while working 80+ hours/week at a startup?  Here’s what you should know.

(xkcd.com)

Nerd hero and minor internet celebrity Randall Munroe, author of the witty geek comic XKCD, just made a New York start-up's day. Competitive fitness game Fitocracy has been picking up users at the rate of a Katamari, but today the co-founders were shocked and amazed to see their creation was the basis for today's comic, "Oversight."

"Holy crap @Fitocracy is on the latest xkcd comic!!!" co-founder Dick Talens tweeted this morning. "From now on, nobody can ever doubt @DickTalens's and my geek cred. @Fitocracy was just mentioned in today's @XKCD!!" his co-founder Brian Wang echoed. The pair has never been in contact with Mr. Munroe, Mr. Wang said.

The alt-text on the image, where Mr. Munroe often hides a extra joke, says: "I felt so clever when I found a way to game the Fitocracy system by incorporating a set of easy but high-scoring activities into my regular schedule. Took me a bit to realize I'd been tricked into setting up a daily exercise routine."

The fan website Explain XKCD.com (necessary as the comic's jokes often depend on knowledge of math, physics or coding) unpacks the comic thus:

Stick figures having sex!  Against a wall! Over a couch!  In some sort of high flying sex swing!  Fitocracy is a web site that turns workouts into a social game by awarding points, badges, levels and all sorts of other gamification.  However, according to this cartoon, Fitocracy does not consider sex to be an activity acceptable for its site, despite the high flying nature of Cueball and Megan's sexual workout.

The fitness monitor Fitbit, however, gives users a little more credit.