Reflections on 2024 from the Founder
As we wrap up on this year, I’ve been looking to take some advice from those close to me and take a small step back for a day or two to reflect on where we have gone in 2024. If you’re not familiar with our journey, I quit my job at the end of 2021 to pursue this passion full time - where I wanted to utilise technology to make movement health better and more accessible. This was originally my university project and side-hustle while I was working as an engineer, and I knew I wanted to pour all my time and energy into this.
Firstly as a solo founder in 2021, eighteen months working unsalaried, taking on interns, securing first grants, sweating through long days and hard nights. Not to say the hard work isn’t going to continue, but it has taken a totally different shape this year.
Product
Before this year, we had been acutely focused on our validation work - proving the accuracy of our tech and also becoming GDPR (European data regulation) compliant. On a final hard push, we managed to launch a very early Version 1 of our product KinetikIQ. The way our product works is that it’s an app on the App Store, and it was genuinely a frightening moment putting it out there. Yes it meant we could validate ourselves commercially, go from a pre-launch to a launched business, but it really put all our vulnerabilities out there and really start to figure out how we can manage servicing customers in any part of the world.
Live joint angle tracking during a counter movement jump assessment
At launch we had Custom Exercises ready to go. As a team we had a reflection recently on everything new we’ve managed to deploy since then - live joint tracking, end-to-end notes, localisation for metrics, self-record, bulk assessment upload, 3D skeleton view, exercise playlists, brand new user interface along with publishing jumps, mobility and static exercises. Not to mention we have done two further in-depth motion capture laboratory sessions this year - continuing to stand behind the accuracy of our product.
These developments and the reliability of our system is a testament to our incredible engineering team past and present: Adam, Anitha, Deepti, Diarmaid, Diego, Felipe, Harry, Jack, Vaibhav and our summer intern Landon. Most of these team have been part-time this year, and have shown incredible determination and engineering prowess to deliver a rapidly growing product. Thank you.
I want to finish on product stating that where our product is today, is only about 5% of where I am planning to take this. So stay tuned.
Customers & Partnerships
Emma & Seán at MLB Winter Meetings for S&C Coaches 2024
Within one week of launching on the App Store, we had securing our first paying customers. This was an enormous validation point for us, based on a conversation we had at Web Summit the previous November. This was with Luis, a Portugal personal trainer who believes in the product and understands the potential for bringing objectivity to help him deliver a better service for his clients. Thank you Luis for trusting in us!
Since then, we now have customers across three different continents in Europe, US and Asia. We’ve also been working closely with key industry leaders and innovators - trainers, coaches and therapists working across some of the world’s best teams in the Premier League, NFL, NWSL, MLB and MLS. While we can’t make official announcement on partnerships and customers in these elite organisations, we hope you will stay tuned in 2025 until we do!
Investors & Supporters
Emma pitching at XPANSE 2024
As an early-stage tech startup, we can’t survive without financial support from investors, accelerators and national supporting bodies. Oftentimes, these investors are making a reasonably-informed bet on team and an idea - before the product is fully built, before there are dozens of paying customers. Through a lot of grind and hard work over the past three years, we are at an incredible precipice of setting ourselves up for acceleration in 2025. Thank you first of all to our current investors - Enterprise Ireland, RUJ VC, AwakenAngels and the large group of angel investors who have put their hard-earned capital behind us.
Travel & The Grind
As the Founder of the company, 2024 has genuinely been a whirlwind - taking me places I have never been and dealing with challenges I wouldn’t have faced previously. From multiple 1:30am starts to get 6am flights out of Dublin, surviving 9-hour overnight flights with no reclining seats, a 24-hour round trip to Graz, travelling by myself to the UAE and hitting 6 cities across California, Texas and Oklahoma in two weeks, I’ve just had to compartmentalise all of this. While it’s incredible to have the opportunity to travel, the rest of the work doesn’t stop behind the scenes. Whether that’s hoping onto our engineering ‘daily sync-up’ call on a train with dodgy reception, downloading files in advance before the flight so I can work on presentations and documents offline and taking calls any time from 6am to 10pm (thankfully not much later!) across different timezones, it’s certainly been a huge growth opportunity for myself and also figuring out how we can effectively level up the team in 2024. I want to drop a big thank you to the team who have been patient while I’ve been less available, and also to the other members of the team who have tolerated oftentimes damp, dirty Airbnbs and hotel rooms, while we haven’t had the budget for nice hotels, and dealing with running between trams to save money on taxis. It’s truly enriching for me to have people working with me now that can see the true potential in our product and that share the same passion that I have for bringing this to as many people as possible.
Final Note
Social media can be a great outlet for projecting successes in a startup or any organisation, and I hope you have enjoyed some of my posts and others I have been tagged in this year. I will continue to showcase positivity and some of our key public milestones, but anyone who has been working closely with us knows it hasn’t been a smooth ride and we constantly need to adapt and face different challenges week to week. So I want to drop one last thank you to those behind the scenes - in the local startup support hubs, (Portershed, Dogpatch, iHub, Platform94 and more), our service providers, event supporters (Web Summit), all collaborators, partners, supporters and much more. Finally into 2025 I really begin to embrace the fact that there is now an incredible support network around Precision Sports Technology, and I hope you will continue to cheer for us as we reach new heights.
