data-driven coaching for founders

We are making an AI Coach that helps busy people to deal with stress and anxiety. We are starting by improving your sleep. The Circles coach is built on top of Apple Health etc. and asks you daily questions to help set goals, reflect and improve.

Swelly is a polling app we've built together. It works on iOS/Android and integrated into messaging apps (Messenger, Viber,...) Swelly reached 9M+ users and 194M votes 18 months after launch. https://www.swelly.ai/
We stopped working on it in 2020 to focus on our personal health and fitness. As a side project, we've built a bot (based on rasa.com) that saved one client 7-figures (€) by partially replacing their call center.

We met in 2014 and we co-founded 2 companies together, raised $ X Million for 'Swelly' (swelly.ai), moved from Austria to California together, grew to 9 million users, and met most top VC firms (Sequoia, Upfront, Lightspeed...) during our fast growth in 2017. We've also built & exited 'Susta' (susta.at) within 6 months in 2020 making antiviral gloves (stocked in Xk retail stores, generating $X-figure revenues: elephantskin.com)

We've built a chatbot for Telegram and a Dashboard that connects with your sleep tracking hardware. The chatbot reads your sleep & activity data from the Oura ring (ouraring.com). It asks you daily questions to track your mental health and gives pointers to improve your sleep and mood. We added a human takeover, so Peter can jump in as a personal coach.

We started as a project in January and went full time early Feb.
2 weeks ago we've changed the idea from building a better Apple Health, to a coach in your inbox.

This week one user started paying $ 55 per month for Circles Pro, which includes 1 monthly coaching session (with Peter). We aim for 3 paying users by next week.

4 strangers have used our bot for 10 consecutive days. (since launch), 46 users were daily active last week. We talked to 132 users about our new idea, 110 of those have an Oura ring. 7 are coaches, 3 are Admins of the biggest Oura ring groups on Facebook (total 20k members).

We signed up our first cohort of 61 users 7 days ago; 61 used the app; 21 have been daily active this week; a handful (4) of them even just hit their 10 day streak (all are strangers).

We talked with about 130 users; 110 of them had oura rings; 7 where coaches and 3 admins of…

This week one user started paying $ 55 per month for Circles Pro, which includes 1 monthly coaching session (with Peter). We aim for 3 paying users by next week.

We identified health & fitness as the main problem space, as it's hard to stay fit while running a company.
At Swelly (swelly.ai) we had 2.5M MAU before product/market fit and we've learned 1. spend more time finding users who use the product daily before scaling to millions 2. focus 3. pivot earlier and more radically.
At Susta (susta.at = elephantskin.com) we've learned 1. to pivot fast, 2. create & sell a physical product to Xk retail stores within 6 months and 3. exit asap when it doesn't feel right.

It's hard to be a founder and stay fit and healthy. Most athletes get their first coach when they are ~12 years old. Founders, managers and busy people often never have one. We believe every human needs a coach. Peter has worked with coaches and therapists for years. He's also always coached friends, co-founders and team members.

we build on top of health data provided by thousands of tools (Apple Health API, etc.); we help you improve not only track.
Currently, people use 1. journaling, takes ~ 10 minutes twice a day and you never look at it again. 2. Coaches & personal trainers, but it takes them months to get good data about you. 3. Apps: Gyroscope, Oura, Whoop, Apple Health, MyFitnessPal 4.platforms: Headsup Health,..

we build on top of health data provided by thousands of tools (Apple Health API, etc.); we help you improve not only track.
Currently, people use 1. journaling, takes ~ 10 minutes twice a day and you never look at it again. 2. Coaches & personal trainers, but it takes them months to get good data about you. 3. Apps: Gyroscope, Oura, Whoop, Apple Health, MyFitnessPal 4.platforms: Headsup Health,..

Humans are emotional beings, so just measuring is not enough, accountability and tips to improve are essential. Mental health is also overlooked.

now: We are experimenting with 3 pricing tiers: $9 a month for the AI coach, $55 monthly to add 1 personal coaching session to check in, review your goals and set new ones. And for non Oura-ring users we aim to charge $100+ a month, buy the ring for the user and include 2 coaching sessions.
later: once the AI coach is good enough we can charge the going rate of 1on1 coaching ($80-$200) per session. Assuming 5% of the Apple Watch users (100Million total) who own more than 1 tracking device (25%) book 1 session per month. = 1/4 of 5 Million = 1.25 million x $80 per session = $100 Million per month.

we start with users who bought an Oura ring and joined one of 3 Oura ring groups on Facebook (20k in total). We spoke to 132 of them about our Coach. We are going to build a product 1000 of them use daily, most promising niches: founders, people with chronic illnesses, retirees, female athletes, and coaches with clients (holding each other accountable and help each other improve). Adding friends or clients to your Circle makes the product better for you (Group coaching). We plan to later integrate with Oura's competitors.

Phil writes code, Pete builds websites, designs chat-flows, app prototypes...
All technical work was done by founders.

1. A market place to book coaches
2. software to enable teachers & coaches to offer cohort-based learning
3. global health insurance for remote teams.
4. a Co2 dashboard for corporates to measure and reduce their carbon footprint
5. [ApplyDeck.com](http://applydeck.com/) - the admission office of online education helping you apply to YC, On Deck, Stanford,...
6. A slack for a-synchronized audio & video team communication.
7. An open source backend allowing companies to enable crypto rewards and payments.
8. a fitness tracker for dogs and their owners to stay fit together.
9. software that magically designs a fashion collection in your companies CI: we've built this: [[https://www.dasmerch.com/konfigurator](https://www.dasmerch.com/konfigurator)]
10. @CryptoKitties for endangered animals donating to conservation.
11. Back and neck therapy for remote workers
11 [Segment.com](http://segment.com/) for health & fitness data (hospitals, doctors, Pharma...)
12. Coffeebreak - 5-minute breaks with co-workers initiated in Slack.

there are 3 kinds of quality: the technical meaning is 'according to specs', so Toyota beats Rolls Royce; Quality also means luxury, so a Rolls Royce to most people has higher quality than a Toyota. The 3rd definition is 'Creative Magic' which Is the one that matters: Hamilton beats West Side Story. (Source: [https://seths.blog/thepractice/](https://seths.blog/thepractice/))