Right About Now with Ryan Alford - With $50K Left and a 40% Failure Rate, How FightCamp Rebuilt After the COVID Boom and Bust

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

In this episode of Right About Now, Ryan Alford speaks with Khalil Zahar, CEO of FightCamp, about the realities of building a startup from the ground up. Khalil shares the challenges of launching a hardware-based business, including manufacturing risks, financial pressure, and the critical “valley of death” stage that many startups never survive. They also discuss the importance of growth, team dynamics, and maintaining momentum through both high-growth periods and difficult downturns. This episode offers practical insights and hard-earned lessons for entrepreneurs navigating the realities of building and scaling a business. 🔑 Topics Covered Startup challenges in hardware businesses Growth and revenue as key drivers Leadership and team management Navigating setbacks and failure Building long-term resilience 🤝 Connect Ryan Alford 👉 https://www.rightaboutnow.com 👉 https://www.instagram.com/ryanalford 👉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanalford Khalil Zahar 👉 https://www.fightcamp.com 👉 https://www.instagram.com/fightcamp 👉 https://www.instagram.com/khalilzahar

For us, because of the nature of what we wanted to build, we had to make electronics in Asia. Whenever you have a business that has physical goods in it, it took me a long time to figure out how harder it is to actually build a business like that because it just requires a lot of money to transform that money into physical things and have to be made and shipped from anywhere that you're going to make them. Most business advice is wrong, built on opinions, echoed by people who've never done it. But the truth, it's simpler and harder. You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts.

This is right about now with Ryan Alford. A lot of people talk about startups like its strategy and growth and nothing else, But really, it's survival of the fittest. Today's guest has lived just that, building a company through all of it. The highs, the lows, raising capital, and somehow coming out on the other side. Khalil Zahar is the founder and chief operating officer of Fight Camp. He's been punched in the face more than once, but he is here right about now. What's up, Khalil.

Welcome to write about now. What's up? What's up, Brian? How are you? I'm great, man. I know you've had success, but it probably didn't come exactly the way you thought. It never does. Everybody thinks it's glamorous, or at least they used to.

Maybe we're catching everybody up now with all the content. It actually sucks to be an entrepreneur. Because we were in that era, what, five, six years ago? It was just a flashy, hey, the Lambos and all the fun stuff. Hey, I'm an entrepreneur. It might be have gone 180 degrees in the other direction. It sucks. You have to work really hard.

It's work 500 hours. Do not do it unless you want to kill yourself. But, hey, come try to be an entrepreneur. The bitch is less compelling than maybe 10 years ago. But it's still worthwhile. While I told you beforehand, just punching people in the face every day, being an entrepreneur, that goes all the way around. You're training people to punch bags typically.

I'm actually used your product. It's really cool. The tracker and all that stuff, I was pumped. Another pun intended. But literally, I was amazed how it worked my arm. So, all right. It'll be a little bit of an infomercial people because I like this product a lot. It's actually cool as shit.

But I do want to pick Cleo's brain a little bit on the journey story. We're really trying to get underneath now. Our premise, Khalil is most ambitious. Dennis' advice is wrong. We're bringing on the real builders, makers that are actually building the shit to talk about it. Just maybe in your own words, that journey. What's it been like? How long we met at this?

And why boxing? Basically, I started the company 12 years ago, assembled a group of five like-minded individuals, which became my co-founders, helped us shape this vision over 12 years. We all kind of started out of college, really. It was an interesting trajectory because we didn't have a lot of industry experience. We didn't have a lot of processes. We were just young, hungry kids with a dream. The origin story of why boxing is, for me, I discovered boxing when I was pretty late in my life to be competitive at a sport.

I was 20 when I discovered boxing. I played a lot of soccer growing up at 14 years old. I discovered beboing, breakdancing, which is actually how I met two of my co-founders. I was just heavy into that until basically I was 20. And then at 20 years old, I've completely fell in love with boxing. It was this art form that was pretty intimidating to me at first. Going to the boxing gym for the first time, I was like, I don't know if I'm just going to get my ass. kicked. I don't know if I even fit in in there. And I found a beautiful community in Toronto.

Basically, all I was doing, it lined up with me moving. I had finished my mechanical engineering degree. I was going to school in Toronto because I just didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life yet. I wanted to continue to compete in be-boing and join where the best people are. Toronto also was a great place to develop my English because I didn't speak English for shit, honestly. I went there, discovered boxing. And about two years later, man, I have no idea if I'm continuing to progress here or I'm just plateauing and this is the cap. And this is where I was like, this is crazy that in the sport we're not measuring anything. You're measuring things here and there, but it's very old school. It's very kind of craft warrior-minded, we just put your head down and

just trust the process and then you'll fill it in the ring. Me having a little bit of experience with other sports, I was like, man, there's technology everywhere. This is how I kind of put what I was studying and that sport together. That got us our start literally in 2014. The measurement thing is interesting. My grandfather who passed away when I was pretty young, probably 15, but at age 10, I would sit in his lap and watch boxing. I would age myself late 80s. It's hard to find boxing on TV a ton, but they had it on ESPN. They played back. My grandfather would get out of the chair and do the rope-a-dope jab and stuff and taught me how to throw the combinations just barely, not really teaching me to fight. He was just like showing me like what it is. My fondest memories

or growing up were with my grandfather. And to this day, I love watching boxing. The sport's gotten a little wacky. It's interesting. I did see people training the classic, like you said, the gym. You're throwing the right form, but there was never a way to really track it because you didn't have sort of the biometrics to do what we can do now with these fitness trackers.

In anything, we say, what gets tracked, gets measured, what gets measured, gets improved. That's why I love about this product. It nailed it as far as boxing goes, kind of the endless jabs and throwing punches around, but not knowing what energy. did I exert? How far was I going? Was I improving? Was my form improving? That's always been a very hard thing in technical form sports. The most scientific people back then were using clickers on their athletes. And these are like the most advanced coaches, Olympic level coaches, professional athletes. They're just recreating punch volume, which punch volume is only one metric. And that's

not even necessarily the best metric. But that's how archaic it was. If I'm not hitting hard There's not exertion, right? Exactly. That's just looking at it from a conditioning standpoint. You have all this other aspect, which is how is your tactical? How is your tactics changing?