It’s time. BodyWise is closing ️😔

The post I never wanted to have to write.

We’re about to finish running our last race. On June 30 the BodyWise servers will switch off and our humble app will disappear from the app store after nearly four years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwJkqJC9zKY

We built BodyWise ourselves to track the things about our health & fitness that you couldn’t at the time. I was trying to lose weight after a stint enjoying myself too much overseas. I was running and wanted to track that against my body measurements and see the effect of various things I was doing.

That vision grew into an app that would make it easier to form better habits, develop a better relationship with food and generally get healthier and happier, all based off all of the data that our minds and devices were collecting.

It was ambitious (too much so as it turned out) but Dave and I got stuck into it. Apple featured the app within our first fortnight and we were on top of the world. Our vision grew and we brought a great developer into the team. Life happened and unfortunately he left, but he made the right call for his family.

It tripped us up and we were never able to recover. Thats on me, not him. We persisted and poured our own cash into it for years — somewhat foolishly but hey, passion does that right? I read about the sunken cost fallacy constantly, but the ‘fuck it, just keep going’ urges were too strong to listen.

Ultimately the opportunity passed us by as we moved too slowly without much money nor a developer within the team. The developer bills piled up and even though users were using it for longer and starting to love it the way that we did, it wasn’t enough to get any meaningful investment or enough to demand that we give more years of our life to pursuing it. Maybe if people were still downloading new apps by the time we’d gotten ours right, but times had changed since 2013.

BodyWise failed, but we remain proud. Something like 90,000 humans (I stopped checking for the longest time — I couldn’t bear the failure) trusted us and used BodyWise over the journey to become healthier, fitter and happier.

Startups are hard. We failed. I let people down. I let investors down. I let users down. There have been a lot of dark days over the past eighteen months as I came to terms with the inevitable and sought a buyer that would be able to realise the potential and give it the chance it deserved.

Still, lessons learned. I got a lot healthier as I used and built BodyWise, and many of our users did too. We may have lost a ton of money on it, but at least we can walk away knowing that there are happier and healthier people around the world because of what we spent our lives working on. It was fucking hard, but money well spent if you ask me!

On June 30 we’ll securely wipe all users data forever, including our own. If you have any questions or just want to share a thought, free free to email me at mike@bodywiseapp.com.

In time I’ll write a post on what our ultimate vision for BodyWise was. I think someone could still do it but the app you see was just a stepping stone — we just missed a few steps.

Thank you to my co-founder Dave, Simon, Jerrold, Scott, Jordy, Niall, Dan, Mel, Jamil, Fi and everyone else that supported us over the years — we couldn’t have helped as many people without you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you and I’m sorry if we let you down.

We’ve run our last race. We lost, but it was a good one.