So Eduardo, tell me about your vision.
So essentially my vision for Olympus AI was that when I was going to the gyms, I kind
of had realized that gyms are one of the few places left in society where technology hadn't
really touched yet to a really large degree.
Like essentially people have been working out in the gym for the same way for decades,
if not more.
And I thought that was an issue that could be solved.
So what I thought would be the most reasonable way to help address this issue of maybe modifying
how gyms interact with their clients was, well, what if we found a way to make all of
the machines in the gym smart and automatically track what it is that you're doing?
And this was my long-term goal with Olympus.
And the way that I thought best to accomplish that was either you could redesign all the
machines and buy new machines or on a solution that had backwards compatibility with the
existing equipment.
So I realized that that second option was far more feasible, especially if you wanted
to form a business around it.
So my idea and the product that I eventually built was something called the Olympus pod.
And the idea behind the Olympus pod is that it's a small magnetic device that you attach
to gym equipment, Bluetooth connects to your phone, and it tracks your reps, sets, calories,
and rest time for you.
That way we have this new robust way of introducing technology to the gym because not only does
the pod let you essentially have all these metrics, but having technology built into
all of the gym equipment allows for further iterations of innovation.
So that was a long-term goal of Olympus.
At present, because essentially this is more tied to my story as an entrepreneur, it was
super difficult actually to get into touch with gym owners as just a solo founder bootstrapping
his startup.
So I kind of had to pivot the company at first, and this is kind of where I'm at now, where
originally it was a B2B business where I would rent a fleet of these pods to gyms and they
would pay a subscription and then their clients could go use the pods as they wish, just having
it live on the gym equipment.
But because it was super difficult to get into contact with gym owners, I've actually
pivoted the company to become more of a B2C company.
And the reason that I did that was essentially when I was building the first few prototypes
of the pod and I was handing it out to people.
One of the things that actually essentially everybody that had gotten a pod from me said
the same sentence, maybe minor differences here and there, but it all amounted to the
same thing, which was that this looks like so much fun, maybe this will get me back into
the gym.
And this essentially pivoted what I viewed my product's value as.
I originally viewed it as your ultimate workout tracker that you could track everything in
the gym, but it turned out that having this kind of product selling to a consumer kind
of almost act as like a sunk cost into starting your fitness journey and it made it seem fun
and cool.
So the idea now behind Olympus is less about the IOT and installing all these things in
the gym, even though that is the long term vision.
But at present, right now it's about making fitness fun.
And the main way that I did that was like, I kind of took a page out of Duolingo's book.
Duolingo was able to essentially make learning languages, something everybody hated in high
school, a lot of fun.
And the reason, the way they did that was they were giving you rewards along the way.
And fitness has this problem where millions of people join the gym every year, but more
than half of them are quitting within the first three months because they're simply
not having fun.
They're not seeing the progress that they want and they lose motivation.
So the idea behind the Olympus pod and then the gamification in the app as a whole is
essentially to digitize a real world experience.
You can learn a language on an app, no problem, because that's already a digitized experience.
But when you're doing things in the gym manually, and then you have to go back into an app and
tediously write down everything you do, it's super annoying and it's error prone and it's
going to completely detract from the fun of the experience.
But with the pod, you can now automatically track what you're doing so you can automatically
get rewards along the way.
So the idea here is that we can make fitness fun for these individuals.
And then once I had a certain user bit, like level of user base, I can then pivot back
to the gyms and say, look, the technology works, it's proven, it's tried, now I'd like
to implement this in your gym at scale.
So that's kind of like the entrepreneurial journey of Olympus.
Yeah, thank you for sharing that.
I'm very, very intrigued by your idea what you want to achieve with Olympus.
But I want to go into what's your why of what you do.
I think that would be more beneficial to the audience to discover.
So I know that there is issues and you see it every New Year's, right?
Hey, there's a bunch of people who sign up to go to gym and then for the first few weeks,
it's packed.
You can't do anything about it.
And then within a few weeks after that, it starts to slow down and then the quitters
quit and then the people who are consistent stay or who are able to stay consistent stay
or who are able to see benefits.
Or their mental block is not there or whatever.
I think there's hundreds of different reasons why people don't continue with gym.
Most of them are controllable by the person though.
I believe that.
So why did you choose to start a fitness app?
Why that category?
So I decided to start a fitness app for two reasons.
One fitness is a huge passion of mine.
I'm super into the gym.
And two, it was the medium by which I thought I could help the most people in a field where
people truly do need help.
Because a lot of times in a lot of fields, the incremental innovations, they're essentially
marginally improving the way people might do any given action.
But for example, in the gym, there was just absolutely no technologies in gyms whatsoever.
So there was this huge field of opportunity to help improve this environment.
And it was something that I was already super familiar with.
So it got me really excited to work on this project because not only was I feeling like
I was actually going to properly help people because people do need to have fitness in
their life if they want to live a fulfilling life.
And it also tied into my fascination with technology.
Essentially if you want to optimize for a given field, for example, if you wanted to
make a ride hailing app and you wanted to make it marginally better, that's fine.
But it's not the same level of innovation as, well, right now there's no technology
around ride hailing.
So let's build an app.
So Uber and Lyft accomplished this.
And this is the same case with the gym.
Now we're not actually optimizing anything.
This is a completely new field where there is no technology.
So the field is open.
And it's just essentially right now trying to inject yourself into that field because
right now fitness apps right now, they're all pretty much carbon copies of each other.
It's like you write down what you did and then they have a different color scheme for
each app.
And then they're all essentially the same.
And that's a shame because technology has progressed way beyond what it was 70 years
ago when people first started really going to the gym and it's certainly progressed
way past the copy and pasted template apps that we were seeing in the early 2010s.
So the combination of being able to help so many people on something that's so important
plus having a field, and it's really rare to have one, that really has not been touched
by technology, I think those combinations of that combination of factors is what essentially
really pushed me to work into this.
So you mentioned that this field has not really been touched by technology.
I disagree.
This is why I disagree.
And maybe you can correct me on this and I think if I'm wrong.
Apple Watch, Samsung Watch, and all those big companies who have infused tracking capabilities
in their equipment.
They can track.
I have one right now.
I'm wearing it.
And they track a lot of stuff.
So what does it track, for example?
So it tracks your heart rate.
It tracks sometimes steps, mainly your heart rate and your health.
There are a lot of things it does, right?
And you know what it is, what it tracks.
But what my question is, how AI is going so fast and how these companies are on a great
level implementing it.
I see it that they're using AI in their already equipment that almost everyone in fitness
has, right?
Using it and doing the same thing.
So how is your product different than this?
And what would someone benefit using Olympus to be their gym partner?
Totally.
So let me ask you this.
Which metric on the Apple Watch is going to help you improve your strength?
To improve my strength.
That's a great question.
Maybe the number of reps I do, but I think that's on there.
That's on there yet.
Yeah, it doesn't.
Not yet.
Yes.
And it can't ever track it because the idea is that it's on your wrist.
So if you're doing a leg press, it's never going to be able to track your leg press.
There's a lot of essentially the Apple Watch is great for summary statistics.
And that's really great because technology has touched fitness, but technology has not
touched the gym.
And the gym is a massive section of the fitness space.
And there's right now no technology that directly addresses what it is that people are trying
to do in the gym.
They're trying to get stronger.
So yes, your Apple Watch can tell you you've lost 10 pounds, but it can't tell you what
you did to get there, nor can it tell you how to lose another 10.
The way you're going to do that is that you're going to probably either go into the gym or
maybe you're going to start running.
But the idea here is that as far as gym routines go, the Apple Watch or Samsung Watch or any
of these other technologies, whoop included, simply cannot help you in the gym.
And that's the problem at hand is that people need help in their fitness routine.
So summary statistics are super awesome, especially if you're already fit.
But for somebody who has no idea what they're doing in the gym, these Apple Watch summary
statistics is not going to deliver what they're hoping to get, which is the progress that
they want to see.
So that's where I think is the huge problem.
And then to tie that in with AI, now Olympus, because it's Olympus AI, essentially has our
new feature, which is called Zeus.
And Zeus is the AI that runs the entirety of Olympus.
So the way that Zeus works is that when you want to work out for the day, and let's say
you're relatively new or even at any step, whether intermediate or expert, what Zeus
will do is it'll take your entire workout history, which is tracked, and then it'll
ingest that.
And then when you ask Zeus to make you a routine for that day or for the week, it'll look at
your workout history on top of your summary stats, because the app has an integration
with Apple Health.
And then it uses that information, combines it, and then gives you a routine to follow,
and then gives you the medium by which to track that.
And then gamifies the experience so you enjoy it beyond just simply doing a chore of working
out.
And that's what the real value of Olympus is, is that it ties your entire fitness persona
with information that only can be extracted from the pod, and then uses that with Zeus,
which is our AI, to deliver the progress that you want and then make it fun.
And that's the overarching idea behind Olympus.
Yeah.
Thank you for sharing that.
I think it's very, very interesting what you've been able to do.
How many people would you say have actually successfully used Zeus and Olympus and have
seen results?
So we have 25 daily active users, 10 page subscribers, because essentially I've launched
the current iteration of the app three months ago.
And then Zeus is going to be a feature that I am pushing at the end of the month.
I've had five beta testers use it to make sure that it works.
But essentially Zeus has not hit the market just yet.
I've just recently integrated it because of new developments in technology, actually that
happened in December, that allowed for Zeus to take on this role inside the app.
So that's going to be coming at the end of the month.
But outside of that, the users that are using the pod, they have found that it is tracking
everything that they're doing.
But essentially, with just the pod, I was not solving the problem of keeping people
motivated.
So in this big push at the end of the month, it's going to include all of the gamification,
which includes leaderboards, includes streaks, it includes badges.
And essentially you can compete with your friends on it, as well as having Zeus.
And this is going to be the final two components that I think will really help take off the
app before I start really diving into the marketing and pushing it out there.
I had to prove that a LibisPod works before I could build all these other cool features
on top of it.
And that's kind of generally the entrepreneurial journey.
Because I come back, my background is an engineer.
So the problem is that when you're an engineer starting a company, is that your company doesn't
necessarily need an engineer, it needs a CEO, and you have to act like one.
And the problem with engineers is that we get feature crazy, where we're like, I can
build this, therefore I should.
And that's not how you operate a company that you want to succeed.
Because if you're using your company as a medium to essentially prove how smart you
are to yourself by saying, I can build this and I can build that, and then putting it
in the app, that's not a way to properly grow or scale.
Because it's at the end of the day, what your customers want, not what your ego needs.
And that's how you have to feed a company.
So that is something that I've essentially learned on this entrepreneurial journey.
And building this ultimate workout tracker and building the pod was super cool.
It was a great exercise in my engineering, but it wasn't delivering on what was the real
problem in fitness is that millions of people are quitting the gym, and nobody could tell
why, and no one seems to be able to stop it.
But with this new revelations in technology, especially on the AI side, I found that out
and then I'm going to push them into the app because that's what the market is telling
me it needs.
So thank you for sharing that.
I think your insights on that is to a point correct.
I want to share my thoughts on that though.
I think there is a need for the app, but there's also how many people want to be in the gym
and do it.
And I don't think it has not been correct.
I think people know, like big companies know what you need to do to have people come and
be part of their gyms regularly.
There is business models based on the opposite of it too.
Like Planet Fitness, I go to Planet Fitness.
Their business model is hyping up their advertisements and things right around November, December.
So more and more people sign up in their contract.
And their business model is they're expecting 95% of their, I think 95 or 90%, I can't remember
the exact stat, but they're expecting quite a bit of their population to come to the gym
to stop coming to the gym, but they're on the hook of the contract.
And they make it hard for people to come and cancel their membership until the next year.
So business models are based on that.
They're focusing on, hey, we want more and more people to come in because their gym can't
sustain the amount of people that sign up for the gym.
It's not designed to.
So two main factors with that.
One, the statistic where it's around 50% of people are quitting the gym means that they're
canceling their membership.
To account for that other portion of it, there's a new law that has just passed that essentially
says that gyms need to have a one click cancel for the memberships.
So with the combination of this law, which was passed three months ago, and the fact
that still you're missing out on millions of people, which is millions of revenue, I
don't think the code's really been cracked because now more than ever, it's going to
be easier to quit.
And even at that, despite how difficult it was before, you were still having millions
of people still quit and cancel their contracts.
So I don't think that they cracked the code as far as maintaining gym memberships because
maybe they were lucky that they were able to essentially finesse people into these long
contracts.
But that's not a sustainable business model because first of all, as people become more
tech savvy with Gen Z coming up and going into the gyms, they're going to get better
at being able to cancel, even if that law was not passed, they're going to get better
at being able to cancel that contract.
That's essentially a product of the environment of the people that were going to the gym.
So yes, as you have the older generation going to the gym, they might not have been able
to navigate the portals and all the things and the loopholes that you needed to do essentially
to cancel your contract.
But that's shifting.
And it's shifting in a way between both legal and the mind frame of society is that it's
making it easier to quit the gym.
So what we want to do is stop people from doing that because ultimately at the end of
the day, if this code was cracked, you wouldn't have millions of people quitting.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
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I hope you're having an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro
yourself.