The question we figured out we need to answer is: what type of outfit ideas are people looking for, and how do they describe their needs? And then, how can we match those needs with relevant content.
So what we did (what we do) is look at people's queries, and also at how people describe their clothes, their outfits or albums (combinations of outfits, like pinterest boards). There is a lot of data here, millions of keywords, but many of them are similar (pants and trousers, or pantalones in Spanish). So we’ve extracted the main concepts (pants) and built a system of equivalences. Basically, now, we know “all” the needs people have when it comes to deciding what to wear, and have a pretty complete view of different ways of describing those needs, and how good the system is at responding to those needs (database of outfits).
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.
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.
> 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
Needs a little asterisk, you're changing your lifestyle to one that you probably can not yet afford, be careful with that, these 'little things' really add up over time.
i completely disagree - he has a small but successful real estate business and has presumably close to or over $1M in assets. he definitely can afford a tax ride, an extra appetizer, or a flight somewhere without thinking about the implications of the cost. if not this guy, then who? do you have to be a billionaire before you can order an appetizer without guilt?
i'll describe the lifestyle you probably can't afford - $20k vacations, $500 dinners, $100k cars, and $1M houses. not appetizers and taxi rides. appetizers and taxi rides are normal things that normal people buy. even normal people who don't have a successful exit under their belt and don't have a successful new business as an investor.
this irrational overemphasis on frugality i always see on hn just seems like a different form of elitism / pedantry to me. since most of us have money, it's just a covert way of signaling an extra level of self-control and discipline (which are usually required to make money, but since so many of us make money, we've got to find novel ways to signal that extra status).
OTOH, I agree that it is very easy to double your discretionary spending if you stop caring about "little things". And that can really add up over time. You spend $50 each day, that's $1500 a month, $18,000 a year. A decent salary can certainly support that level of spending, but not so much if you double it.
>"this irrational overemphasis on frugality i always see on hn just seems like a different form of elitism / pedantry to me. since most of us have money, it's just a covert way of signaling an extra level of self-control and discipline (which are usually required to make money, but since so many of us make money, we've got to find novel ways to signal that extra status)."
I get this sense as well and think the signaling theory is a solid one.
I'm thinking this is a part what frequently turns me off of topic specific forums - people have a tendency to want to sort and differentiate themselves. The higher the baseline - whether it's income or knowledge - the more pedantic the self-sorting.
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.
Leverage. The Bay Area is an especially bad area to compare with. The single family home I own (and rent out) where I lived before I moved to SV could be purchased 5 times for the same amount it would sell for once here. I guarantee I could not rent it out for five times the rent I charge my tenants.
FWIW, about 5 months ago, my family started sweating the small things. It's changed our burn rate by ~25%, from disturbingly over income to comfortably under income.
Looking back now, our happiness level is pretty much at the same point. We can't really tell what we we're missing, although I know there are things.
I wish I could vote this up more. So many folks I've talked to who have been 'losing ground' even though their family income was comfortably over $150K (in the bay area) and then done a walk through the 'little things' only to discover $30 - $40K of expenses in there.
Most often it seems that this came about where they reached a point where their income meant they didn't really need to 'save up' for things, which lead to a 'don't care' attitude which lead to spending money on things and experiences that were not expensive but not valuable.
Money can increase your effective lifespan. A typical billionair has a staff of about 100 people who take care of all the small things that otherwise sip away time from whatever is left over for normal people after work day. They do not have to worry about doing laundry or tidy up the house or even shopping their own cloths (they have concierge who monitors trends and knows your preferences and sends you whole bunch of cloths to try out on demand). They don't typically waste time in booking a travel or wait for a flight or taxi or waiting for coffee at Starbucks. All these "chores" and "waits" out of the way, they can focus on pure experiences and living it up to do exactly what they want. A typical billionair has capability to have 20X more life experiences than a regular guy. So in effect they can live equivalent of 20 lifetimes in same amount of lifespan.
Of course, in reality things don't pan out exactly like that. Many superrich would eventually be too stressed, constantly keeping scope of their wealth, spend 18 hours a day in work that likely won't be relevant in just a decade, end up in divorce or become substance abusive. But what is interesting to me is that money can actually expand your effective lifespan.
I have often thought about how much happier I would be if I had enough money to not really balk paying for a mid-level sushi restaurant every week or so. Though ultimately I'm not sure how much more money I'd have to make before having that comfort. It would be nice though.
It is interesting. 99% of the time you don't even think about it, or write it off with half a thought as you are busy and want to eat healthy, quality food but occasionally it occurs to you "You know, I don't even have to think about this." and remember a time when you did. Progress is a great feeling.
Kind of same here. And if you are not in the US or in Europe you can actually not even look at the price and just think "What do I want to do?", "What do I want to eat?", ... it's so reliving
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.
From your website it doesn't tell me anything about what your app actually does. "A fitness app for people who hate fitness" I don't hate fitness, I don't exactly love it either. I think you're pushing people away from the start.
> 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.
Because that's easy to measure with accelerometers and gyros, and easy to display some numbers. Go do some stuff with your device along for the ride, see a pretty graph when you're done. Did I do more than yesterday? Hurray! Now to post it to Facebook with the handy "Share" button. I think I'm doing something (and I am, even if not optimal for fitness goals), and I don't have to think very hard about it.
The type of user your site is attracting are the people who don't pay attention to all of the step/calories stuff anyway. I'm a pretty hard-core runner (yeah, I should lift more), and step count is a mere novelty for me. There's nothing about Google Fit that attracts me (Garmin Connect keeps track of most of that stuff anyway). But I'm not their market.
There's also the social status aspect of workouts, and given the source and audience for Google's product, it completely makes sense it would track the running, steps, miles, calories, etc.
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.
Well you have Athos clothing trackers coming out soon, which tracks muscle exertion.
Thing is although, it costs $300-$400 dollars. Runkeeper works with the phone you already have, and you can optionally add a couple of $50-$150 accessories. Very different price points.
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.
We effectively went through the same thing - moved off of mixpanel when it got too expensive.
We instead started throwing all of our events into Google big query. You can steam events directly into a table or proxy then through your server to add more metadata. You can even use mixpanels great open source client libraries and point them at your servers.
Initially I was worried that we would miss mixpanels built in analysis and tools but we honestly preferred querying a database with SQL better. The tricky queries are the funnels but once you wrote the query once you can just save the template. The only thing we had to build was a chrome extension that could graph the results of an arbitrary query.
Thanks for sharing! I'm not a developer, but an analyst. I know SQL fairly well and some javascript, but no coding experience apart from writing code for google analytics. How easy/cheap would it be to build a custom analytics solution like that? It's probably beyond my personal skills, but do you think it's possible for someone with my skillset to find a developer and supervise them? Can you point me to some resources or stories of it being done?
We recently launched mobile SDKs for iOS and Android at Snowplow (https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow), so that's probably the easier route to go than a full-blown custom build :-)
Yeah seems good and I will check it in depth. It seems not provided out of the box, but I assume I can use MS SQL/HDInsight as a backend, instead of Redshift? Maybe you should consider including Azure as an infrastructure partner. I'm a consultant in the non-valley space (rest of the world). Lots of folks like me are looking for what you've developed. Most are pretty big MS fanboys. Just saying :)
Sorry I forgot to qualify my comment in that I think its a great solution for startups who are comfortable with SQL and a little bit of coding to glue a system together.
For non technical people, Mixpanel def seems like the best product.
You’re definitely ahead of the game if you’re thinking about using a solution to prevent vendor lock in. The problem though is that running a mobile app is much more than choosing your analytics provider and streaming your data to it. That same stream needs to be used to power marketing activity such as new user acquisition and retargeting to lower acquisition costs and improve engagement.
With mParticle, data portability is a feature within an end to end data platform. So is segmentation with the ability to create any audience you can think of and send it to partners like Facebook, Twitter, Google DFP, AppNexus, ActionX, and many more. Think about seamlessly running an App Install campaign on Facebook to all users that crashed and did not return and then measure it with Kochava or MAT, all with just one client side integration.
Nearly every comment here reflects concerns around cost but cost also includes labor costs, switching and opportunity costs, as well as wasted user acquisition costs. The reality is that you don’t have to send all your data to every third party. You should be able to send a configurable sample of your data to a third party, but also very specifically include or exclude data to reduce costs and protect users privacy.
Segment.io is awesome, would highly recommend. Makes it easy not to be locked into a single platform by lowering the switching cost to almost nothing.
Attribution is a tough problem in itself, most companies either do attribution really well or user behavior really well, but not both. The best analytics setups I've seen are ones where you have a separate attribution platform that feeds data to a user behavior platform.
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.
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.
