Munday Curve - Dive #1
Munday Curve - Dive #1
What you see is what you get
There we were. A med school grad and a self-taught tech developer, working on a Bumble-like platform for job seekers with not a lick of recruiting experience between the two of us. With my interest being medical technology and my cofounder Rich's main focus being artificial intelligence, machine learning and app development, we were contemplating a pivot to what we know best. Inspiration hit right after tracking my daily gym workout, when I saw a tweet from @gabygoldberg. She shared this awesome piece by @sorenwrenn talking about storytelling-first design, specifically, guiding the narrative with set constraints in your product, and how the greatest platforms of our time give us things we never realized we wanted. Immediately after reading it, I wrote this:
I was prepared for the fire that would burn from this spark, because the tinder had been laid from years of my own personal battle with obesity. If you know anything about traditional immigrant Indian families, they often don't focus on portion control or being calorie conscious. It's actually quite the opposite. If you aren't offering someone to eat more, and by offering I mean forcing, guilting and sometimes shaming them into seconds and thirds, are you even Indian?
That battle led me to working out everyday for years. Tracking my diet. Copying people's workouts. The frustration of logging a workout is deep-seated. You bury it somewhere between the willingness to torture yourself for the gains and the satisfaction of being able to document your discipline. But it's never convenient. Why?
Because here is Fitness: 🐌🐌🐌🐌 inching along. Refusing to join every other industry in the technological boom.
The most advanced technology in fitness belongs to our good friends in the sensor bands and smart watches game. Do you know when wireless heart rate monitors were invented? 1977. Isn't that mindboggling? That the technology people use to track their fitness was invented close to 50 years ago.
Let's revisit why the frustration to log is so prevalent. I've used 17 apps over the last 8 years to track my diet and workouts.
They all have one of 3 problems:
Typing Intensive
Time-consuming
One-dimensional, i.e. Cannot track progress across multiple fitness categories
Honestly, there's like 700 problems, but I'll spare you from my lists that hint of OCD.
I went around asking friends who are athletes, coaches, trainers, what the best tool is to track fitness progress. Before they could get started one of my friends said, "What you see is what you get." She was honest, all these fitness apps are a gateway for ads, premium bundles, merch, Onlyfans. Ok not that last one. Well maybe that last one, but not on every app, I digress.
What you see is what you get
I agreed. I wanted to see more. Why can't I see how much my food weighs without weighing it? Why can't I see how many calories I ate, without counting them? Why can't I see how many calories I'll burn if I turn left instead of right on my way home? Why can't I see my exercise form is incorrect in real-time? The way we address these and other such queries surrounding fitness and wellness:
Visual Automation
Giving a camera the ability to see all of that, provides the one true thing every beginner and fitness enthusiast craves when trying to make a dent in their physical fitness journey. Convenience.
I hope you'll join us as we open the eyes of an industry that have been shut for far too long.
Sean
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