Online Sports Coach Coming To A Computer Next To You Soon
Sportlyzer is an Estonian sports software start-up that is developing an application that tracks workouts of amateur athletes and provides automatic consulting advice on top of that. Back in September we wrote about them closing a seed investment and now their product is almost ready for launch. No official date is announced but one of the founders, Tõnis Saag, shared some curious details of the progress the company has made so far. The team has been spending all this time developing the online coach - a character called Mike Lyzer. 'We have been doing a huge amount of work on the training management algorithms, the user interface and making those two meet. By now we have put them all together into a dirty prototype and just started interviewing target customers to embody the application for private beta', states Tõnis.
Providing advice to improve one's sports performance is the key factor in Sportlyzer: the company employs a sports psychologist (Aave Hannus) and a sports researcher (Jarek Mäestu) to help develop that side of the product. On the business side, Sportlyzer's co-founders Tõnis Saag and Jüri Kaljundi have extensive experience creating and running a start-up. Tõnis is the founder and CEO of a sports medicine center Vomax and Jüri has been involved in many projects including Emp.ly, Tatentag and Nagi. Thus, Sportlyzer's team combines sports academics and practitioners with business and computer science experts. A good combination to build a sports software start-up.
The path has not been exactly easy so far. When asked about the greates lesson they've learned by now, Tõnis commented that combining the work of scientists working on algorithms and designers and developers working on easy-to-use UI produced a huge amount of extra work. In addition, the team has spent a considerable amount of time on internal seminars. 'We honestly did not foresee that portion of delays coming', shared Tõnis.
Facing unexpected challenges when developing your product is definitely something any entrepreneur can identify with. The key is to learn from the pitfalls, move on and do better the next time. Kind of what Mike Lyzer will soon start teaching you to do in sports.
so what will be the fee structure for this?