MTNTOUGH Man Dustin Diefenderfer 

The King Of The Fitness Hill Reveals His Business Secrets To Success 

The ibex is one of the toughest animals on earth. They survive on rationed lichen, live on the edge of disaster, and, once mature, become one of the most iconic trophies in the world. 

The prior statement could also describe startup life and the entrepreneurs who choose it. Meet Dustin Diefenderfer, one of the toughest G.O.A.T.s on the mountain. From his humble beginnings training athletes in a local park to nine years later leading a $7 million international fitness app company designed to train the toughest backcountry hunters, Dustin has changed not only his life but the lives of tens of thousands of the app's users.  

H&B: Could you please give me a little bit of your backstory and a bit of history on MTNTOUGH Fitness Lab? 

D.D.: I was a Montana kid and spent a tremendous amount of time in the backcountry my entire childhood. I came from an outdoor enthusiast family, and my dad was one of nine kids—seven of them boys—who grew up outside of Sheridan, Wyoming, in the Bighorn Mountains. So, I had all of these uncles, and all we did was backcountry deer hunting, backcountry elk hunting, flyfishing in high mountain lakes, camping and skiing every chance we could get, both because of where we lived and because that was just our family culture. 

I went to college at Montana State University in Bozeman because of the backcountry opportunities. When I got into college was kind of when my gym rat life started. I played soccer growing up, but in college I started lifting all the time at the gym. Ironically, the guys that I started lifting with were all wildland firefighters who wanted to lift to be better firefighters. So, it was this different style of training. They didn’t want to be bodybuilders. They didn’t want to be ultramarathoners. They wanted to strength train so that they could handle fire season at high elevations in rugged terrain and with heavy packs on their backs. I wanted to lift to be a better backcountry archery elk hunter. So, that was kind of the original seed, the original formation year, of MTNTOUGH. 

What came next? 

I ended up launching MTNTOUGH in 2016, and it was an untapped ocean. No one had products or programming for the backcountry mountain hunter, and many, many people were intimidated by the West. When we launched, we launched preseason prep, and it was kind of like the market was just sitting there waiting for us to exist. We went online right out of the gate. It was video-based on demand on a web portal since day one. There was a lot of PDF training, but we knew we wanted a global community from the beginning. And part of that was from my entrepreneurial background of trying other businesses throughout my life. I knew it needed to be accessible to anyone in the world. Now, there are brand new workouts being added every single day. 

That’s awesome. What is the business model? 

It would be defined as a recurring revenue subscription business model. It’s a full app native on iPhone, Android, and all your smart TV streaming platforms. So in full, it’s a streaming-video-on-demand, recurring revenue subscription business, which is really cool. When we started the company, it was transactional, so people were buying a program for a flat fee for lifetime access. When apps took off in the App Store, we knew we were going to have to go in that direction.  

We shifted the entire business to a subscription business. The great thing about that is subscription businesses are well known and documented to be the king of business models. You build up this community that is renewing on their card runs. Their card is either running every month or every year. And as long as you can continue to keep them happy with good content and new content, that base just continues to grow and grow. 

When you first started, what was the bank account like?  

That’s funny because one of the big entrepreneurship questions that’s talked about a lot is, do you start your passion dream project while you have a different full-time job so that you have this security blanket, allowing you to get your dream off the ground? Or do you just fully dive in? When you fully dive in, you have to make it work because you burned the ships. And when you burn the ships, there’s no plan B. My experience was kind of a hybrid of that. I was in corporate ranch real estate and was super miserable because I’m an outdoorsy guy, an active guy. 

I started MTNTOUGH on the side with no capital out of the park behind my house. I had no gym, no equipment, no people. I drew an ibex on a napkin and gave it to my buddy, who turned it into a real logo. I hung a flier with the logo at our local archery shop and wrote, “I want to train backcountry hunters. Call me.” And three guys called and I started training them in the park behind my house. And as soon as the park session started to grow, I quit that corporate job and started building MTNTOUGH.  

What came next financially? 

In those early years, the business went from park sessions into a lease facility, which I was able to lease out of cash flow from the classes. I was running MTNTOUGH class three times a day out of that lease facility. Then I started having to go to a lot of different capital ideas when we went from the lease facility into our own facility. Before that, everything was bootstrapped. Like if I needed to buy dumbbells, I had to have enough class members so that I could get some cash to go buy dumbbells. Then when we went into our own facility—we call it the lab—when we went in there, we needed about $300,000 worth of equipment to kind of pimp that facility out. And that was all done through traditional bank financing.  

What was one of your first big wins? 

You know, our first big win was we’ve always had tremendous success being extremely authentic, being who we are, and living the MTNTOUGH lifestyle. Hands down, being authentic is a big factor that led us to get to where we’re at today. We had just taken the program online, and I asked Sitka if I could write a fitness article for them. Sitka Gear was blowing up in that era and was the king of backcountry performance and camo. They were growing extremely fast, and I was just some dude that was training people in the park. So, we wrote this beautiful blog article with beautiful photography for Sitka with no resume, no experience, no credentials. And they ran it. Even today it still pops up as the number one player in our Google Analytics. Without that article, things would have been completely different. 

Can you give us a rough idea of your top-line figures? 

If we look at going into Q1 of 2025, we’ll have 20,000 to 30,000 subscribers. So with that, it should put us around seven to eight million dollars in recurring revenue business.  

So, in nine years you went from having to rob Peter to pay Paul for weights in the park to a multi-million dollar recurring revenue business? 

Yep, pretty crazy. We’re always about 90% subscriptions and 10% other, with the other being our lifestyle apparel. We love our apparel. It is amazing for the community to be able to wear sweet MTNTOUGH shirts and sweet MTNTOUGH hats. And it becomes a crazy, powerful marketing tool. We view it more as community engagement and marketing, even though it does drive decent revenue for us. 

What’s the long-term goal? 

It took a while, but we are finally at that spot where if we added 10,000 customers to the MTNTOUGH app today, we wouldn’t have to change the facility, the team, or anything in the business model, which is a really good spot to be at. 

Now, we have this big goal, this big milestone, of transforming 100,000 lives. So, we’re on our way to 100,000. We call it transforming lives because we train people physically, mentally, spiritually, and nutritionally.  

Editor’s Note: For more information on MTNTough Fitness Lab, visit mtntough.com.