michokest

Thanks for sharing! You’ve talked about your ontology, can you explain a bit more about how you build it?

Good point. That's attracted a lot of criticism to the post.

The rationale behind that is: We want a strong company culture. As a fitness startup, that involves things beyond work, which include working out, brainstorming over walks and lunch, etc.

The way we see it is, we want our team to be based in Berlin. If somebody isn't, that isn't ideal, and thus we offer a lower compensation to discourage it.

By investing in Berlin and Barcelona, where I've paid from €50k to €150k approx per apartment, and leveraging 50-80%.

True :) that probably deserves clarification: I made a clear separation between "spending money" (rent, travels, food, leisure) and "investment money".

Anything spent is either an investment, where I try to keep returns over 5% yearly, or just everyday stuff. I've found that everyday stuff ends up not being very different than my previous spending levels.

EDIT: I also live outside the Bay Area, which definitely helps.

Last year I sold some stock from my last startup, a little over $1m after taxes, and I can say it's definitely changed things for the better.

In this period of time, I have been able to:

- Quit my founder position at that startup (thus avoiding potentially being tied to vesting or retention clauses, in case of an acquisition)

- Own my house, and invest in a few other apartments, which turned into a little side business with great margins

- Start a new company investing my own money, and not requiring a salary

- Travel and live in a few different cities as I build the new startup

- Completely forget about the price tag when buying small-ticket things: a taxi ride, asking for an extra plate, an occasional flight, paying a round of drinks

It's not as it money made me happy by spending it, but it did remove a lot of the constraints I had before. It's made me feel like the default state would be to be carefree and happy, and as long as you can keep the worries and the stress away, everything will go alright.

As a new worry, I now spend a lot of time thinking about how to reinvest it wisely and continue living like this. It's not overwhelming, and it's not very different than what doing my finances felt like before, but doing it a larger scale adds a new dimension to it.

And you can see that strength training or HIIT are completely left out from the announcement. Strava, Withings, Runtastic, Runkeeper and Noom Coach: all of them tracking apps, with very little emphasis on the prescriptive aspect of fitness.

People need a coach, not a tracker.

That's my main problem with the fitness app industry at large. They are much more focused on steps, running and calories than actual fitness.

And don't get me wrong, cardio works to a good extent. For most of sedentary folks, doing anything will be better than doing nothing, and their fitness level will improve.

But real fitness is about a lot more: strength training, interval training, sports, etc. Bodyweight workouts and HIIT are a much better return for your effort than "just tracking". And so will shifting your diet towards something like paleo or low-carb, instead of just tracking calories.

Part of my frustration with the fitness ecosystem is what made me start up http://8fit.com. It's a mobile app that offers HIIT do-it-at-home workouts and low-carb meal plans.

We don't track your steps. We don't integrate fancy wi-fi scales or wearables. But you know what? If eff-ing works, and our 60k-strong userbase loves the hell out of it for the results they're seeing.

Following the exact same approach helped to lose 20 lbs and motivated me to start a product around it.

Check out http://8fit.com, where we propose simple HIIT workouts you can do at home and low-carb meal plans (40/40/20 ratios).

I'd love your feedback, if you'd like to take a look! So far we have about 50k users and 500 customers with great feedback.

I use mediahint.com for it, which is now a paid service, but has worked great for me

This is especially useful for iOS repos, where a lot of auto-generated stuff creeps into the pull request

As a second-time founder, I found Mixpanel to be the most expensive piece of SaaS we were using in our stack: at barely 30k users, it was already far more expensive than our whole hosting bill combined!

Then I switched solutions for a while, looking for a good combination that'd give me Facebook attribution data plus user behavior. So far, I haven't found my ideas combination and in a way, Amazon doesn't change that.

I find that solutions like segment.io are great in the way that you can install their SDK just once, and have that proxy the events to all other SDKs. For now that's what I chose to do, to avoid week-long delays for approval publishing our apps in the app store.

I wish Google would take a second to try their own iOS dialer in real-life scenarios:

1) Paste an international number like +34 911 111 111 from the web to Hangouts: it gets pasted as 34911111111, losing the +

2) They don't follow the standard text input element, so it's not possible to go to the beginning of the line and add a +

3) ... now you're stuck with app switching and TYPING NUMBERS IN, NUMBER BY NUMBER

There's that and then there's the horrible Hangouts video chat experience. I can't count how many hours I've wasted trying to explain other people how to join a call or share their screen before giving up and doing a voice call or skype.

From my experience with my previous startup, we'd be able to comfortably support 50k actives without exceeding $10k a month in infrastructure.

I posted ads on craiglist advertising free coaching

Fitocracy's great as well! But they're more centered in tracking and gamifying.

We take a different "just tell me what to do" approach. Users sign up, enter their stats and choose a goal: strength, weight loss, etc. With that, we generate workouts and plans to help them get there.

We also offer meal plans and personal coaching, because the human aspect matters a lot. That's why I believe most "fitness tracking" startups will fail... people are looking for a plan, not for a pretty dashboard.

We simple used Google Docs and pretended the product existed. Here's the original survey:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/18Se8QtvIKrGPWd8HEN4ILZz3Yyp...

We are a three people team of founders. Two of us live cheaply while traveling, so we keep it very lean, and one of us is living off his savings.

Here's the breakdown of expenses:

- $5.000/mo for paychecks - $2.000/mo for marketing - $800/mo for freelancers - $500/mo for software and hosting - $500/mo for operational expenses - A 10-20% margin for things that come up

At a $10k/mo burn rate currently, and being on track to make $1k on our first month, we only plan to go as low as $100k in our bank's balance.

We are being extremely cautious and saving money for future projects, because we want to avoid raising funds in a need.

Glad you found it useful! I think it's working because the market is huge (everybody has a "fitness" problem) and it's such a simple product.

Our expenses are at $10k with a 3 people team, some freelancers and a $2k/mo marketing budget. We plan to break even in half a year, if things go right.

My goal so far has been to keep us profitable, as in +revenue and -expenses.

Haha, I left it out on purpose! It's the number of signups :)

My story with fitness echoes this post closely. Gyms have long had the motivation to push the latest machines or fitness fads, because that's how they retain customers with the promise of a new program that'll change everything.

After a ton of research, the only thing that worked for me was bodyweight workouts and barbell training.

To drop my weight I followed bodyweight programs at home. 20 minute short sessions with squats, push ups, etc. Far more challenging than it sounds! You can see pics of how I dropped 20 lbs in this post:

http://micho.biz/post/74209049445/leaving-teambox-back-to-sq...

Then I jumped onto barbell training, complemented with bodyweight sessions.

Starting Strength has been the best resource I've followed so far. For a small time investment a week, I've been progressing in technique and strength steadily over the last months.

The fitness field has been a huge motivation personally for me, which ultimately made me leave my previous startup and found http://8fit.com to help people like me follow that learning path.