A Weightlifting Coach In Your Pocket: Calibrex

Show Notes

Nick from Calibrex talks about combining his passion for fitness and hardware into this pocket-sized coach.

Get your own at ⁠calibrex.com⁠

My 3 Takeaways

• A crowdsourced feature board to gather ideas from users and prioritize development
• Offload heavy computation to the phone app so the device can be lean, mean, and efficient
• Take care of your first customers. Handwritten notes, special features, and access to exclusive perks. They'll do the marketing for you.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background

02:01 Creating a Fitness Tracker for Weightlifters

08:16 The Importance of Personalization and Customer Engagement

11:46 Challenges in Building the First Version

13:32 Power Management and Hardware Design

21:13 Improvements in Calibrex 2 and User Feedback

24:21 Crowdsourced Feature Board and User Engagement

29:32 Raising Capital and Scaling the Business

31:42 Advice for Entrepreneurs in Hardware

Full Transcript

Vigs (00:01) All right, we're live. I've got Nick here from Calibrex. Nick, thanks for coming on the pod. NJ (00:06) Absolutely, been excited for this one. Vigs (00:08) Yeah, I found you through an Instagram ad, like I was saying, and super cool product. I'll let you explain it, but really wanted to just have you come on here as a hardware maker and share your story. NJ (00:21) Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, I appreciate that. I like I was telling you before this, I would have guessed that that's how you found us was Instagram. Yeah, it's going well. Vigs (00:29) Yup. So you guys are obviously doing an ad campaign right now. Tell us a little bit about, you know, what the company is, what the background is. NJ (00:36) Sure. Yeah. So I am the co-founder and I suppose CTO, we're not really doing titles all that much, but of Calibrex. And we make a fitness tracker for weightlifting and we've gotten better at pitching this, but basically we're Strava for weightlifters. If you're a runner, And if you're not, then we're whoop for weightlifting. So we measure anything that you would want to measure in a gym, like we count your reps, we count your rest times, all that stuff that a personal trainer would be hanging over your shoulder to like write down on a piece of paper. We're gonna capture that so that either A, you can go get a personal trainer and they can look over all your data. Like that's what all runners do right now. They use apps where their watches collect everything and they get a run coach. Or we take it a step further and we are the coach. Like we can look at your data and use a lot of different models or even, you know, use our own personal trainers to kind of just guide you through the best way to get fit, which right now is personal training. So we're taking a run at them. Vigs (01:31) Yeah, that's awesome. Um, love the mission. I think you guys got a patent to it, right? Something really unique in the space. NJ (01:38) Yeah, we were awarded a utility patent for V1 and then design patent for version 2. Because to be honest with you, man, not much you can patent around an accelerometer these days. Like anything that Fitbit didn't crush us on 10 years ago. Vigs (01:49) Hahaha. No, but I am seeing a lot more of these kind of niche down, like the FitBit is supposed to be more general public use, whereas not a lot of people are focusing on these niches like weightlifters, Olympian lifters, things like that. So that's cool that you guys are doing that. And I think it's not just the hardware that you're building, it's actually the community that you're building around it, the workouts, the training programs. Is that right? NJ (02:16) Yeah, yeah. I think it, you know, without derailing, I can, it's a good time to tell the story maybe. It kind of, this whole thing started with Philip, my co-founder, really sharp guy. He was a Olympic badminton player in Cyprus. He's from Cyprus. He grew up doing that and he had the whole team behind him. You know, he had trainers, he had dieticians, all that stuff. And... Then he moved to the United States when that was kind of hitting an end his career there and was like, how do I do this now on my own? And his initial idea was when he just, you know, got into the jam, fell in love with lifting, all that stuff, he had to have just an imbalance because like he's a rotational athlete that tends to happen, you know, you get one arm stronger than the other. And he's like, oh, I'm just going to go buy one of those things that beeps in my ear when it's out of balance. And he went online. Vigs (03:01) Mm-hmm. NJ (03:09) saw that didn't exist and figured, oh, you know, it's going to be easy, right? What everybody says with hardware I'll go call somebody in China, they'll deliver it to my door in a week and I'll start selling it. Didn't quite go that way, but he caught me at the right time. I, you know, now jump over to my story. I used to make headphones at Bose to just do the acoustical design, electrical design. I was just hungry for to like own the whole product. We talked about this a bit before, but like being able to build the whole idea yourself is just like something I always wanted to do. And so I got a lot of manufacturing experience, went to manufacturing in China and Mexico, USA, and kind of felt like I had the skills and the scope to do the whole thing myself. So I left, went to a startup, turns out I didn't have those skills, there's a lot more business development stuff you need to learn. So cut my chops on a few startups. And by the time I had met Philip, I was kind of freelancing, making products for people, you know, I'm prototypes and helping people get stuff on the Amazon. And I was far enough along in my freelancer agency journey that I was like, I, I want to do something meaningful, like something I actually like, I'm tired of making vapes and phone cases and you know, bullshit. When he came across and was like, oh yeah, I want to do this weightlifting thing. Um, I was like, just, this has been kicking around the back of my head for years. Like I've been powerlifting, bodybuilding, did Muay Thai for eight years. Like I've had a huge background in fitness. And I was like, like where I am in my fitness journey, I know a lot of people get caught at places that I've been through. Cause it took me so much struggle to get through there. It's like, I think that I could take my methodology and all the kind of stuff that science has proven now. and just lay it out and automate it for somebody else. So it's less like, you know, voice in your headphones. And so we got together and I was like, I'll build what you want, but then we got to build what I want. And we kind of came together, became best friends. And now five years later, we're doing it. So. Vigs (04:55) Yeah. I love that. And I love that, you know, every time you go to a gym, it's been me in the past too. You have a notebook, you see people with notebooks that are like taking all these pages of notes. And, you know, for me, when that goes in my backpack, and then my protein shake isn't closed all the way, and it's just like a complete mess. And I love that this idea is just bringing that into the digital world. And, you know, what was your level of conviction when you first met Philip? Like, obviously, you resonated with it on a personal level. But when you first met him, I assume it was like a cold intro. What was your take on this guy? Who is he? How is he gonna be like as a partner? NJ (05:41) Good question. I mean, at this point I had maybe worked with 15 different entrepreneurs trying to make products. And... they bring an idea to me and I would build a first version of it and I would give it back to them and say like, okay, from my experience, this is what you do now, right? It's like you put this out there. Maybe you run some campaigns, you do A-B testing on websites. Here's a bunch of strategies you can use to validate this. Does the market want it? Most of the time people will just be like, okay, yeah, you got me the thing now, fuck off basically. And so he did, he did everything I mentioned that he should do. And he came back and he was like, and here's some other stuff I tried. And he was like, and now it's in a better position. And I actually got some money from here and like, let's keep going. And I was like, okay, that's new. That's, that's, you know, and man, every step of the way, super persistent was like, join me, be my co-founder full time, do it, let's do it. And I was like, yeah, I've got a life to live. You know, I do, I don't know you at this point, but at like over and over again, he'd come back and deliver. Vigs (06:38) Yeah, yeah. NJ (06:43) And one thing that I was really kind of kicking around at that time too was the paid beta. Like it's, you know, you could either do, typically nowadays with hardware, it's like you either front it, like it's gonna cost some money for materials and manufacturing. You do a Kickstarter, which has its own risks and you gotta pay for marketing. I mean, it's so competitive now. Or you do the paid beta, right? Where you can get the small amount of people that you can actually get through, DMs or whatever you can afford from marketing to sign up and pay you. And they're in it now, right? Like you're gonna get way fewer people than you would otherwise in sales, but these people are gonna stick with you because they have some skin in the game, so to speak. And he was very good at finding the right people. Like he found all these power lifters, he found Instagrammers and YouTubers who are really on board and. At that point when he had set that all up and you know when he was like, okay, how do we make a website? I was like, I don't know, just figure it out, man. Like I use WordPress, you can figure it out. He comes back in a week and makes this great website. He's like, I just went on YouTube. I'm like, this is my guy. We're going to keep going. Vigs (07:46) We love that. We learned so much in YouTube. And, you know, I don't want to move over to like the marketing side of it, but I saw some of your pictures, you guys were doing like handwritten notes for each of those initial beta customers, which I think like, that's the way to go. It's like you collect that initial set of people that are willing to take their chance, like put their credit cards on the line. And then you NJ (07:48) Mm. Vigs (08:07) like hyper-focus on them and give them like special attention, you know, handwritten notes, little gifts, perks, whatever. And then they kind of become your most loyal fan base. And once you have that loyal fan base, not only do you get that consistent feedback, but then you do have a little bit of marketing built into that, right? They're going to tell their friends, they're going to tell others in their community. I think I'm a big fan of that approach, especially because the capital upfront is less intensive. NJ (08:35) I totally agree. And they become a customer for life, right? If they stick around. And you set their expectations, ideally, as well as possible at the beginning. And then you deliver something, and it's never going to be as good as what they thought it was going to be. And then you beg them to stick with you. Hey, we're going to take care of you. Don't worry. And then you exceed their expectations with the next thing, and then they're with you forever. And the only thing, because I don't want to get too much into the marketing, if that's not where you want to go. But. What you just mentioned of like they're a customer for life, like write the handwritten notes. I would totally recommend that to anybody listening to this, but I would say the caveat is don't think of it as a manipulation tactic of like if I can write the handwritten thing and kind of fool them into like you actually these people are your life now. You're serving them and they're giving you money and that's what's letting you kind of deliver on this dream that you have. So you have to think that way like you are. notes and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not getting over on anybody. Yeah, right. Vigs (09:33) Yeah, exactly. It's just extra credit. Yeah, it's extra credit. And I think, you know, the way you're describing him, Philip, and you, you guys both seem to be really product obsessed, like getting the feedback continuously, iterating on the feedback. And I think that goes a lot further. Like the handwritten notes are just the icing on the cake, you know. It's really the obsession with the product and making sure that it's fit in the market and stuff like that. NJ (09:56) Totally. I mean, that's by necessity. I don't think there's any other way to win. Um, I've never been the best at fundraising. Uh, I know guys who are really good at that. Um, I'm good at products. So that's what I stick with. That's like, kind of stick to my guns there. Um, but if you can go and find this group of people who you want to serve, and you're like, is this good enough? And they're like, it would be, if you did this, this and this, it gives you a roadmap. You don't have to think anymore. It's kind of nice. Vigs (10:23) Yeah. And plus both you and Philip are in that community that you're trying to sell to like you are your own user. NJ (10:30) Oh yeah, one thing that one tool we use that we pay a tremendous amount of money for, but it's worth it is intercom. You heard of intercom. Vigs (10:39) No, I haven't. NJ (10:40) It's that little chat bubble in the bottom right of most people's websites, and you could just talk directly to somebody. So if anybody goes on our website, it's in our app now too, and they're like, hey, something's up with my device. The AI, we named it Arnold. He goes and he, right, it's fitting. Hope we don't get sued. But it's like, oh, device, and then it will send a bunch of videos, and it's like, does this solve your problem? And it's like, no, then it goes straight to my phone, and I'm talking to people. Philip and I are just, you know, I've probably got a couple messages while we've been talking. Vigs (10:43) Ah, okay. Heh heh heh. Love it. NJ (11:09) So they'll have to wait. Vigs (11:10) Love that. Nothing shows grit like talking to your customers directly one-on-one, so love that. Let's dive into some of the decisions you were making when you were building that first phase. So, you know, Philip came to you, kind of told you his dream, his grand plan, and then you built that into the first version, Calibriks 1. What were some of the initial difficulties or initial challenges that you worked through when he was selling you that dream? NJ (11:16) Yeah. Good question. So what? What you get used to, I'm sure you're super familiar with this, but what you get used to when somebody wants this new invention is they like, don't really know what they want. They don't know how to describe it. And drilling down the outcome of like, what are we actually building here? You know? And it's like, I need something that does the balance. And it's like, in what way, what form factor, like what's the user experience look like and trying to figure that out, that stuff. And I was not as invested at the beginning. You know, I don't think I would have gone about it the way that I did. if I had known him, if he was like a friend or something like that, I thought, okay, at the beginning I thought this might just be another, oh, this is cool, it's in my niche, but like I have no say in this, I'm just doing what I'm, you know, I'm getting paid here. So what he wanted was this thing that hung from the barbell on like a swivel, on a magnet. And he had already hired a mechanical engineer who was working on using a, um, a bearing to do, to do it. And he was like, he basically had that guy interview me. And during that time I was like, man, you're doing everything wrong here. Like none of this is designed for manufacturing. Like is that bearing is going to swing all over the place. You actually probably want friction here. And Philip was in the call. And afterwards he was like, you know, kind of kicks that guy out and goes like, can you do the mechanical part too? I was like, yeah, I think so. So he just fired that guy and gave me the whole, Vigs (12:43) Yeah. Hehehe NJ (13:02) the whole thing. And so at that point it was mostly like, how do we do this quickly, cost effectively? You know, we don't have much of a budget here. Like how do we build something that we can get out? And so that for me was like, okay, mechanical, keep it simple. Let's try and stick with one board and as many modules off the shelf things as we can possibly get. Vigs (13:03) Wow. NJ (13:24) So the first prototype was built with one of those like ultrasonic range sensors, like the Arduino ones. We found those pretty cheaply on AliExpress or something like that. So it was like, okay, you know, like if we were to make a hundred of these, here's how much that would cost. And then the ESP32, what was it, the 32 at the time? Yeah, Bluetooth. So ESP32, like one of those room modules and. Yeah, simple circuit board. I think we put the whole thing together from when I met him in like maybe three weeks. Yeah. Vigs (13:55) Wow. Including the custom PCBs and stuff or were you breadboarding at this point? NJ (14:00) Custom PCB. Yeah, that's something that I it's pretty quick now using JLCPCB like you put an order in and you get it in seven days usually and Vigs (14:12) Nice. NJ (14:13) Yeah, I mean, by that time I had ordered, like I've probably ordered thousands of circuit boards from them at this point. So I was pretty confident that they'd be good on the first run, but I always put like on my first design, I'm always putting jumpers and test pads and things that you can configure there just in case. And sometimes I even release with those still on there because it's like, eh, it works, you know, whatever. Vigs (14:29) Absolutely. Yeah. We put a bunch of zero ohms as well. I kind of told you a little bit what I do with my job. So a lot of our customers come to us and they don't really know which path to take. And so we put a whole bunch of zero ohms so that once we get the boards, we can still make changes and figure out, help the customer decide what they want because that's part of our job, even though it shouldn't be. I had a question for you. Oh, sorry. NJ (14:53) Yeah, yeah, right. It's funny that I'm not the only one who thinks of this. Yeah, that's comforting. Vigs (14:59) Yeah, that's why, you know, it's hard to find like-minded people, but that's what I'm hoping to do with this part here. So one thing I wanted to ask you, you said that the ultrasonic sensors, you were looking at quantities of a hundred. So what was that like actual initial prototype quantity and how did you come up with that number? NJ (15:04) Nice. Oh yeah, so man, I always kind of think manufacturing first. I think that's probably one of my most core competencies is because of my manufacturing background. doing like the largest scale stuff in the world with flex Tronics in, you know, you with bows in China and then doing low scale stuff in China and then doing medium in Mexico and stuff. I kind of got this feel for where does shit go wrong when you're trying to scale, you know, like what, what should we design into the beginning so that we don't have to iterate again? You know, like, for example, ultrasonic welding, um, might be something that you'd like shy away from at the beginning. But if you know the manufacturer going into it, would put that in the design at the beginning if you want something to be waterproof. And that's going to, you know, now you don't have to design a lid or something like that all over again. And so when we were deciding this, it's like, okay, if this is going to be a viable product, like, can we make it this way and still turn a profit on it? So right from the get-go, when we decide what components we want, and I've filled out my bill of materials, like at my best guess, I always look at what the scale cost would be like, okay, if we order a hundred of these, what can we make them for so we can know what we could sell them for and is that viable? Right. Like, will the market pay that price? Vigs (16:34) Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think it's always hard because that initial batch, you don't know how many customers you're going to get. You don't know how well it's going to resonate. And, you know, it's always better to be sold out than to have a whole bunch of inventory. And so I agree with that. Like there's a balance between that law of large numbers, like the scale and the price going down versus how much inventory do I really want to keep on hand before I iterate on the next version. NJ (16:35) So, save you some headaches, you know? Yeah, yeah Mm-hmm. Yeah, I don't think we necessarily ordered that many, but it was just good to know, right? Like, do that exercise, yeah. Vigs (17:09) Yeah, absolutely. And then we briefly touched on this earlier, but the ESP32, as we all know, it's quite a power hungry device. And you said you had an interesting solution to work around that. You want to talk about that. NJ (17:22) Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the first part is why I choose ESP32 is Arduino and platform IO specifically, right? Like that you can write code in VS code with all the code completion and IntelliSense and all that stuff. It's just so nice. Like I'll never go back to the Arduino IDE. Like I just couldn't do it. That's great. And then, also having all those libraries that somebody else wrote. Recently, now moving to a new platform, I had to write my own drivers for these sensors, which was painstaking. There's already ones all over the place. And then, so the low complexity in the cost is pretty cheap and accessible. But like you said, it's power hungry. So once we decided on that, we didn't really know how much somebody would use this for, like how long someone would use this for. Vigs (17:59) Mm. Yeah. NJ (18:15) But because it's used during a gym session, that's like maybe an hour. Like for a super advanced user, it'd be like two hours. So because they were turning it off in between each one, normally you'd go into some kind of low power sleep mode, but I just put the whole entire thing on a power rail with a single button. And so... When, so the whole thing's off, it's unpowered. You press that button, it hits the gate of that MOSFET, turns the ESP32 on, and then the GPIO feeds back into where the button started and keeps itself on. So it's like keeping itself plugged in, and then when you hit the button and hold for a couple seconds, it pulls the plug. So it's totally disconnected from power when it's not being used. So the only time you're draining the battery is when you're using it. Vigs (19:00) Yeah, that's nice. So because you have that, you can't be doing all your storage in RAM. So jumping into firmware for a second here. I know the ESP has a bunch of NBS libraries. So how are you storing data offline? How are you accounting for not shutting down the device while you're writing to that external memory, or sorry, internal memory? NJ (19:18) Hmm. Yeah, I think all we store right now is like the number of sessions. Like, wait, it's not really all that important stuff. Uh, cause it. Kind of by design, we wanted to do all the heavy computation on the app side, just so we're just throwing data over. We're just, we're doing a little smoothing on that side and stuff. We used to store wifi creds so that we could use that for OTA. Cause the, like it's, if you're going to use this power hungry trip, you might as well use the wifi on it to do OTA a little faster. We've since moved over to BLE OTA. So not storing much, but I think I, what is being stored uses spiffs at spiffs library. And again, like even if it does get corrupted or lost, it's not super important. Vigs (20:02) Yeah, that makes sense. That's, I think a very often overlooked design principle in hardware is like, yes, you're building a smart device, but if you do it right, that smart device is as dumb as possible because you want to all the hard computational work, the power hungry stuff, the stuff that you might need to update on the goal, like an algorithm or something, you want to put all that in like the phone or the backend, right? That way you're not stuck with the limitations of, you know, an ESP 32 or whatever 32 bit processor. NJ (20:15) Mm-hmm. Exactly. And like, who likes running firmware updates? Like on anything. It's just not a good user experience. That's been established, so yeah. Vigs (20:39) Yeah. Yeah. Talk a little bit about, you know, now that you're on the second version of Calibrex. Calibrex 2 is released, right? NJ (20:53) Yeah, yeah, it's out. We've, I think we've sold maybe 1200 of them or so now. Yeah. Vigs (20:59) Nice. So with Calibrics 2 going from that initial prototype, what were some of the user learnings and then what were the changes that you made on the engineering side? NJ (21:08) Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's a good question. So it's a dump. Like you said, it's kind of a dump sensor. We're just collecting data from an accelerometer, smoothing it in various ways, and sending it to the phone. And so it's pretty straightforward. A lot of it was power management. And it's the same scheme we use for one. It shuts itself off when it's not being used. I do have some little sleep modes and wake up and reconnect. So I had to negotiate with the developers to do that kind of stuff just to make sure we could eke out all the savings that we could. But I think most of the design decisions were driven around the feedback from version one. So after we did that ultrasonic sound one, we moved to a LIDAR sensor. sensor the STMicro makes. It's like the time of flight sensor everybody uses in their drones. And that thing's super accurate, man. It's like, you know, one millimeter accuracy. That's really cool. But so yeah, we released that and because it would hang on a side of barbells and use gravity to kind of like stay facing down, if you did too violent of movements, I mean it was just pointing all over the place, you couldn't really get accurate data. So... we did very well with certain movements like bench, squat, overhead press, like the core powerlifting movement. So we got a lot of powerlifters to buy the product and they loved it because we were just, you know, a 2X from anything else in that world. Everything else like needed a string or was big and you couldn't fit it in your gym bag and this you could at least throw in your pocket. And so from that, a lot of people bought it who weren't as dedicated to those core lifts. They weren't training to do powerlifting competitions. And they were like, ah, man, this can't do this. This can't do this. Vigs (22:43) Absolutely. NJ (22:59) We set up a Discord group and they were just dumping in it, right? Like just complaining about whatever and we just saw those all as opportunities. And so the biggest things they wanted fixed were make it even more portable, make it even smaller, make it so that we can measure any exercise like, you know, dumbbells and all this stuff. And so we started ideating and we would just be like, hey, what if we just put magnets on it and you could stick it to the bar? And they're like, yeah, but what about dumbbells? And we're like, okay, I guess we gotta make a strap. And it's like, well, what about, there's always somebody coming along trying to stump you. Oh, what if I'm doing, if you put it on your wrist, what if I wanna do a pull-up, right? My arms are, so what are you gonna do then? And so it's like, oh shit, we'll make a belt clip. And so we started doing all that stuff until people ran out of. Vigs (23:29) Yep. Hahaha. NJ (23:45) ways to stump us and we were like, that's a good place to start. So we just got the building, yeah. Vigs (23:51) Yeah. Let me play devil's advocate. What was the other side of it? Like the things that were too outlandish that you had to say no to. NJ (23:59) Uh, people were very insistent that we automate, uh, the w like putting the weight into the app, right? They were like, there, there has to be a way for you to know how much weights on the bar is in my hand. And I'm just like, just from like my, I feel like I know a good bit about sensors and I've done a lot of good different shit. I'm like, I cannot conceive of a way. I mean, I, I thought of a few things. I even tried some experiences experiments, but like Vigs (24:11) Uh-huh. NJ (24:24) I'd come back and I'd be like, I can't be done. And they would just Steve Jobs me. They would be like, get it done. I'd be like, Oh my God. So that was one that, I mean, still to this day, people come, you know, they'd be like, I have to put the weight in myself. I'm like, what, what alternative do you have? I get that there's camera systems or whatever, but you know, we're not magicians. Vigs (24:28) Ha ha Yeah. Yeah, seriously. Plus to pack all that into a tiny sensor like that. I mean, have you, I mean, you probably thought about this, but you could put like a photo option in the phone app and then it could like figure out some sort of image processing, right? NJ (24:57) Oh, totally. Yeah. And if you want to go down that road, I mean, and, um, software, just in general and deciding what to build when, because now we're getting so much feedback. It's like prioritizing comes down to the business needs and you know, what user groups do we really want to cater to and who are our best customers? It's like, that's a whole nother can of worms. Vigs (25:21) Yeah, yeah. And then now you are planning on releasing a Gen 3, switching to Nordic? Or is that just kind of in the talks right now? NJ (25:30) I would, you know, we might even still sell it as two, because we're in beta right now, part of the beta program. You know, I mentioned it before, but selling something in beta, these guys are taking a risk for you and you have to hook them up in return. Like they're your lifeline. And so one part of beta was like, if you join our beta program and you buy it now, you'll never pay subscriptions, because we're moving to subscriptions. It's the only way a business can survive nowadays, especially in hardware. Vigs (25:34) Okay. NJ (25:58) and now I'm forgetting what your question was. I think I'm just rambling. What am I addressing here? Vigs (26:05) talking about switching to Nordic but keeping it as Gen 2. NJ (26:07) Oh, switching to Nordic, yeah. So I think we're gonna slip Nordic in because it's gonna be the same form factor. I'll probably squeeze it into the same footprint and then just release it back out into the wild. And I'm sure a lot of people are gonna be happy with what they have now, but as part of that beta program, we're gonna replace their devices if they want. So whenever we make upgrades, one thing I did recently was the buttons, there's like a cutout underneath this. Vigs (26:15) Okay. NJ (26:35) You see how there's these two lines here that was to make the lever go this way instead of that way because it could get too stiff. And so we wanted the button feel to be the same for everybody. So we're like, Hey everybody, the buttons knew who wants it. And people are like, I'm fine with the button right now, but good five, 10 people are like, yeah, give me the new button. So we'll ship these things out as we get them. Vigs (26:55) Nice. And I love that you're kind of staying very closely in touch with the customers. And you know, some things may hit and some things may not hit. Like when you get to the Nordic, you might be like X amount of battery life improvement, right? And that might be appealing to a lot of people. And then boom, you just learn something new about your customers. NJ (27:13) Yeah, that's true. Yeah. It's, it's, some people don't seem to care right now, which is funny. We're just doing it because we think it's the right thing to do. It's the same. It's probably a little bit cheaper, honestly. So yeah. Vigs (27:18) Hmm. Yeah. And then there's the perspective of you guys coming up with new ideas, figuring out what to improve. But I know you guys also have a crowdsourced feature board. Talk a little bit about putting that together. NJ (27:37) Yeah, that was a big part of version one. We were just getting people coming into Discord and putting ideas down. And it was just too much to manage. It was like, OK, we were using Notion at the time for project management. So we were like, should we share a Notion board? Do we force our customers to now learn Notion? Is there a tool? And so we found a couple tools. I don't even know which one we're using right now, to be honest. We've used so many. But it's basically what you describe. It's almost like Reddit. Somebody puts the post up, and then everybody else upvotes. And you can comment on it and all that stuff. And it's just a good way to keep track of what features are there. And we always make sure to make that prominent on the home page of the app. So if you come in, first thing that happens is it opens up, and it's like, hey, here's a place to click if you want to talk directly to me about something. Vigs (28:23) Hmm. NJ (28:26) Here's a place to click if you want to put your ideas out for new features. And we generally, you know, practice what we preach. So like we'll tell everybody whatever is voted to the top is what we're working on. And we've made some exceptions here and there that we need to like please potential investors or you know, partners or something like that. But most of the time that's what we deliver. And then when people see that, it makes them go in there and engage more. So it's a good, good system. Vigs (28:52) Yeah, love that. And then you mentioned investing, right? So what kind of prompted, I think you guys have been bootstrapped up until now, but now you're looking to raise money. Is that right? NJ (29:02) That's true, yeah, that's correct. Vigs (29:05) and what kind of prompted that decision. NJ (29:09) My initial response was to say fear, but no, I think it's strategy. We've proven that we have a market and that we're scalable and that people want what we're offering. I think some evidence of that is we're selling pretty well. We've been kind of managing our sales rate ourselves. We're profitable, which is pretty cool and we're bootstrapped. So. Vigs (29:11) Hehehe NJ (29:39) Now's the time to kind of put some fuel on the fire. Like we've got a lot of stuff that we want to build. Like I said, you know, if we want to be the personal trainer that walks you through the workout, we have to build out audio, right? Like you hook up your headphones and you don't never have to pull your phone out of your pocket. You just do the whole workout. We have to build that. We have a lot of teams reaching out asking, hey, can I buy a hundred things? And it could all funnel back to one coach. And it's like, oh man, that's 300 grand that we're turning down because we don't have that built out. Vigs (29:54) Yeah. Hmm. NJ (30:09) build it in two months. So we really need to accommodate all these things because the business is there. People are starting to recognize us. And then here's the part where it's fear. And maybe that's not the right word, but somebody's gonna come and come for us soon. So yeah, we can't be the only ones who know that this is a good idea. I like to say, I mean, we're not doing anything new. All of the stuff that we're doing right now has been done, but in other industries, like I always mentioned Strava. Vigs (30:10) Yeah. NJ (30:36) Garmin, right, the running world, like it's ubiquitous. Every runner uses that stuff. So we've got to kind of maintain our lead. And I think that needs some capital. Vigs (30:44) Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I think you guys are off to a really good start and the attention to users and everything that you guys have going on, I think it's definitely gonna take you a long way. And, you know, last question just to wrap up. I always like to ask people, what advice would you give for, you know, entrepreneurs that have an idea involving hardware, but, you know, they don't have anywhere to start? What would you kind of suggest as first steps and things to watch out for from your experience? NJ (31:12) Mmm, yeah, that's a good question. If you can't do it yourself... One, you can do it yourself. Like it's just, you know, if it's something that lights you up to like, oh, I wanna put the wires together, I wanna program the thing, go for it because you can teach yourself anything on the internet now. Like I've designed so many products, plastic, metal, all that stuff, like all the, you know, every part of it, I designed the boxes for this, I designed the stickers and all that stuff. I've never learned any of this from school. Like I learned Fusion 360 from some YouTubers. And so you can do it. And if you don't want to do it yourself, get somebody on your team who is just as passionate about the end goal as you are that does know how to do it. Because it's funny, because this is what you do. I'm like dissuading people from coming to your business. But if you're doing a startup, have somebody on your team who can do it. Because you're going to run out of money at some point and just going around. and trying to fund an idea when there's no traction. The longer there's no traction, the harder it gets to fund. You gotta keep making progress. So get somebody on your team who can build something if it's not you. Vigs (32:23) Yeah, I actually agree with you completely. Um, I would say the customers that we have the most success with are those that have some technical chops on staff because otherwise it feels like there's so much explaining that we have to do and there's so much back and forth. But if someone comes in with a clear technical vision, um, that usually ends up being our most, um, loyal and successful customers. So fully agree with you on that. NJ (32:46) Cool, and I actually do have another thing, a piece of advice. If you're starting a hardware company, just use JLCPCB for everything. Like I just feel like I have to, at some point when this is all over, I wanna go and find who made that company and just shake his or her hand. Yeah. Vigs (33:02) Love that. Thanks. Um, not sponsored by the way, but maybe one day. Yeah. Well, cool. Thanks so much, Nick. Um, you've been a pleasure to talk to, and I'm sure our listeners are going to love this episode. NJ (33:04) Not sponsored. Yeah, yeah. Make it happen. Awesome. Thanks for having me. Vigs (33:17) Yeah, sorry, last thing, where should people go to kind of check you guys out, sign up for the beta? NJ (33:24) Check us out on Instagram. If you search Calibrex, it's like underscore Calibrex underscore because somebody stole that from us. Calibrex.com. And then for me, I don't post much but NJ, like Nick Johnson, NJ Near on all socials. Vigs (33:38) Okay, cool. Thanks a lot. Let's wrap it up. NJ (33:41) Yeah.

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