Two-Week Check-in #9: Sometimes life hits you when...

What's good everyone,

Life update first.

I've picked up a decent injury list since I started running. All fair, mostly ego driven 😅. Two Fridays ago I got the worst one in about three years. Pulled my back, sciatic nerve went off, could not stand up straight.

Not from running. Not from lifting. Not from any training of any kind.

From getting up too fast off the pooper 💩.

What. Can. You. Do.

Was out of commission for a week. Functioning is basically back to normal now, so see you on Strava soon.

The actual update on our product and progress

We applied to Creative Destruction Lab with decent hope of getting in. Rejected.

It's always interesting dealing with rejections: you need a balance between keeping the confidence up and actually learning what you could do better. Mindset = "no problem, we'll come back better" 🫡. On to the next one.

On the product side, we're on the 4th iteration of our board now (kinda dope to see the journey ngl)

The latest one has the proper sizing and hardware, it's functional, and step counting is holding at ~96% accuracy across our test group. But there's one more condition we need to pass before we hand these to y'all and start alpha: understanding mechanical failure.

Two boards (v2) died earlier this year. We think it's fatigue from running, basically the sensor taking a hard hit every time your foot lands, thousands of times per run, until something cracks. We've upgraded the design to compensate. What we don't know yet is whether the new design survives the full life of a shoe.

So two things are running in parallel right now:

→ Failure analysis. The two dead boards are with an engineering firm in Markham. They're running a bunch of tests with a bunch of fancy machines to see where and why these chips failed... money well spent?

→ Field testing. Since I currently can't run, and don't log that many miles anyway, Sangeet and our two insane runner friends Andy 🐐 and Wendy 🐐 (thank you, thank you, thank you) are wearing tags on real runs. The bar is 200km+ per unit with everything still working at the end. Shoes are a genuinely terrible place to put electronics, but I'm about that hard-life.

Both take about two to three weeks. Which means next time I write, we should be putting in the order for the alpha batch. 👀

Stay active, stay healthy, keep logging mylz.

Brian ✌️