Old joke:
First fish says, “how about all this water!”
Second fish replies, “what’s water?”

I know, not a great joke. But, actually, a pretty good reminder when starting a company.  And one I overlooked in the case of Composite, until Jess made some wise comments a few weeks back that helped get me onto a better, broader track.

I should first note that the startup/fish/water problem already gets a lot of coverage, at least in the San Francisco tech world.  There, 20-year-old tech dudes developing apps apparently gradually forget that there are other people in the world aside from other 20-year-old tech dudes developing apps, leading them to focus their energy solely on startups that solve their own problems.  Hence the spate of companies focused on becoming an Uber for laundry, and the like.

But, in fitness, the same kind of thing tends to happen.  From my observation, I’d estimate that about 5-10% of the US population sees exercise or fitness as a primary hobby, or a core part of their identity.  And I’d guess another 5-10% aspire in that direction, even if they’re not currently fully immersed.  And then there’s everyone else: the other 80-90% of the country who would like to be fit and healthy, but for whom that’s just one priority among hugely many, one obligation they can try to wedge into an already crazy busy schedule and life.

When fitness startups pop up, however, they tend to come from people already entirely surrounded by other people in that deeply fitness-committed 5-10%.  And so they essentially preach to the choir, solving the problem of how you might make that 5-10% even fitter, more deeply engaged.  (On rare occasion, companies do pop up targeting the non-enthusiast majority.  However, they tend to do that through savvy branding and messaging, rather than actually tailoring the underlying product or service.  Consider Planet Fitness, which has been hugely fiscally successful, yet whose members I would guess make even less forward progress as a whole than the already dismal results for gym members overall.)

Anyway, as I’ve been putting together Composite’s algorithm, I’ve too much been a water-ignorant fish, solely wearing my fitness-insider hat.  I pondered questions like: will members want to come in to the physical gym three or four times a week?  And what if they’re avid runners, and want to do some 5k or marathon training on top of that; how many times should they do that each week, too?

All of which is excellent and valuable and will be greatly appreciated by the insider crowd.  But the real question is, what about someone who can only commit to coming one time a week?  With the right guidance, maybe they’d also be willing to do two more 15-minute sessions at home during the balance of the week.  So given those parameters, for that person, can we still make a big impact?

Fortunately, I absolutely think we can.  It just takes a very focused, scaled down approach.  And the big upside of the AI-plus-human-coach model is that we can seamlessly go in either direction, personalizing to individual needs.  In fact, we can even scale up and down over time for the same person: maybe you have a busy stretch at work this winter, and want to pull back, but then in the spring, you’ve always wanted to do a Tough Mudder and you want to look good for a big upcoming beach trip at the start of the summer.  Perfect.  We can do any and all of that.  Or, at least, we should be able to.

And that’s what I’m working on at the moment.  Though the Composite algorithm is getting better and better, this week I went back to the drawing board, to start thinking about the changes and additions we’d have to make to expand it to really work for EVERYBODY, rather than for just the hardcore fitness few.  Sure, we may still start out with a beachhead model, bringing in the fitness-obsessed first and expanding out over time.  But just having that goal in mind gives me all kinds of ideas, things I want to work on, and small tweaks to the setup that I need to bake in from the start.

If I had to come up with a Good to Great-esque Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal for Composite, it would be to eventually make a statistically significant impact on health outcomes for the US as a whole.  And making sure we set out from the beginning asking how we’ll one day move beyond the NYC workout crowd is certainly the only way we even have a chance of getting there.