Coming Back to the Grid
Hi all! It has been quite a while since I provided a professional update of any kind. There are a few reasons for that, but now is the right time to give an update for anyone curious as to what I have been up to for the past eight months, and what is to come.
After leaving Curiosity Media I’ve been incredibly fortunate to team up with another APT alumni, Kai Fei, whom I worked closely with at APT. Late in 2017, we explored a few ideas we had for various businesses we could start knowing that there are opportunities out there but not having a clear bias on where to start. That search led us to what is now WeAchieve, which we started building in January. How exactly we got there and how we’ve gone about it is a story for another time. For now, I’d love to introduce you to our product and what we hope to achieve.
What is WeAchieve?
In a sentence, WeAchieve is a platform (web and iOS app to start, with Android soon to follow) with a singular focus on helping people achieve more of the things they care about. To be a bit more specific, that involves the following:
To make that more tangible though: let’s take an example of a runner. WeAchieve connects with Strava and Apple Health to pull in all your running data. We provide the most flexible engine for you to set a goal based on that data individually or in a small group social challenge. We can do a bunch of fun things beyond mileage, but let’s say you want to work with five friends and you each have your own mileage goal for the month and want to divide into two teams — we can do that. From there, you can obviously encourage each other, but WeAchieve also has a bunch of visualizations to encourage you (e.g. a trend of you vs. your friends or toward your goal) and tools to plan out your path to hitting your goal (daily planning, views across goals to help prioritize, etc), especially if you prefer to set goals alone. Ultimately, we store your goal history and give you a good way to go back and review your hits and misses and figure out what to do better when you do it all again!
Why Build This?
It was and is a confluence of personal interests, market opportunities, and macro trends. To say a bit about each:
- Personal interest — I am a huge fan of goal setting for personal targets, and having tried many different techniques and software out there, current platforms fall short on this by not providing enough flexibility for the user and by siloing “goal planning” away from the rest of productivity (and from other people). But setting goals and tracking them is a simple process that I’ve used across many things, particularly running, and it has enabled me to accomplish things I never thought that I would. I can say more on this subject, but I am incredibly passionate about WeAchieve as a platform that can empower people to reach new heights.
- Market Opportunity — We believe personal productivity has been under-invested as money has jumped toward “monetized distractive technology” like Netflix, Facebook, etc. We know that it is not the sexiest thing to be building now, but we also know that there is innovation to be done here and feel confident that we can provide a measurable step up from what the market currently offers.
- Macro Trends — because of the huge investment in distractive tech, we believe it is reaching it’s apex. People everywhere are starting to look critically at their use and fight back against addiction-optimized feeds. WeAchieve fits well into a world focused on that: integrating in with data collection devices and aggregators and providing a goal-setting and limited social layer on top of that in order to make the data useful and provide users a critical focus on their goals.
Who is it for?
While anyone seeking motivation can find a way to use WeAchieve, we are targeting:
- endurance athletes (triathletes, runners, bikers)
- self-driven learners
- entrepreneurs
These are all areas where long-term success (and happiness) requires maintaining a discipline that is tougher and tougher in a distraction-filled world. Helping people navigate the trade-offs of the short-term and the long-term is central to WeAchieve. We believe this capability will help acquire long-term loyal users within those segments and continue to grow and support other communities.
The Short Term
After being heads down in development mode for the past seven months, Kai and I are very excited to be doing an initial launch of WeAchieve in early September. To start it off, we have modern web and iOS apps ready to go with the core features of a product that we still intend to build on top of in a substantial way. But what we have now is a minimum viable product: it’s enough to make a measurable difference for our users over the status quo, and so we are excited to launch what we have and start to build a product and enable a culture of productivity and achievement.
The Long Term
We are even more excited about where WeAchieve could go within a few years. While we know the hurdles that any startup face, we have a vision for WeAchieve to become an essential part of daily life for tens of millions of people. We will seamlessly be a collector for all of your data. We will integrate with platforms across the web to allow you to setup fun challenges and interesting goals no matter what you are hoping to achieve. We will make it really freaking fun to set goals and create or enhance small communities of achievers everywhere. We’ll provide you with an AI assistant who can help you make tough decisions by merging your calendar with your goals and proactively figuring out what you need to focus on.
Ultimately we believe strongly that the data set and capabilities of WeAchieve will be essential to the true AI personal assistants of 10 years from now. Alexa, Siri, and other tools are okay at task-based work now (e.g. I need to do X), but the future iterations will need ways to help people with long-term targets. We want to be a core part of that.
For You
Hopefully you are interested in WeAchieve, and we’d love to have you give it a try as soon as we launch. For more updates on WeAchieve, please follow our blog and stay tuned for more updates as we build toward our initial launch!
Originally published at A Moment with Mumma.
