Fitness
Very interested in what the coming era of highly bespoke software might look like. Example from this morning - I've become a bit loosy goosy with my cardio recently so I decided to do a more srs, regimented experiment to try to lower my Resting Heart Rate from 50 -> 45, over experiment duration of 8 weeks. The primary way to do this is to aspire to a certain sum total minute goals in Zone 2 cardio and 1 HIIT/week. 1 hour later I vibe coded this super custom dashboard for this very specific experiment that shows me how I'm tracking. Claude had to reverse engineer the Woodway treadmill cloud API to pull raw data, process, filter, debug it and create a web UI frontend to track the experiment. It wasn't a fully smooth experience and I had to notice and ask to fix bugs e.g. it screwed up metric vs. imperial system units and it screwed up on the calendar matching up days to dates etc. But I still feel like the overall direction is clear: 1) There will never be (and shouldn't be) a specific app on the app store for this kind of thing. I shouldn't have to look for, download and use some kind of a "Cardio experiment tracker", when this thing is ~300 lines of code that an LLM agent will give you in seconds. The idea of an "app store" of a long tail of discrete set of apps you choose from feels somehow wrong and outdated when LLM agents can improvise the app on the spot and just for you. 2) Second, the industry has to reconfigure into a set of services of sensors and actuators with agent native ergonomics. My Woodway treadmill is a sensor - it turns physical state into digital knowledge. It shouldn't maintain some human-readable frontend and my LLM agent shouldn't have to reverse engineer it, it should be an API/CLI easily usable by my agent. I'm a little bit disappointed (and my timelines are correspondingly slower) with how slowly this progression is happening in the industry overall. 99% of products/services still don't have an AI-native CLI yet. 99% of products/services maintain .html/.css docs like I won't immediately look for how to copy paste the whole thing to my agent to get something done. They give you a list of instructions on a webpage to open this or that url and click here or there to do a thing. In 2026. What am I a computer? You do it. Or have my agent do it. So anyway today I am impressed that this random thing took 1 hour (it would have been ~10 hours 2 years ago). But what excites me more is thinking through how this really should have been 1 minute tops. What has to be in place so that it would be 1 minute? So that I could simply say "Hi can you help me track my cardio over the next 8 weeks", and after a very brief Q&A the app would be up. The AI would already have a lot personal context, it would gather the extra needed data, it would reference and search related skill libraries, and maintain all my little apps/automations. TLDR the "app store" of a set of discrete apps that you choose from is an increasingly outdated concept all by itself. The future are services of AI-native sensors & actuators orchestrated via LLM glue into highly custom, ephemeral apps. It's just not here yet.
2025 as a solopreneur: - $2.834M+ in revenue - Operated at ~91% margins - Sunset my 2 top products - 134K new followers on LinkedIn - 45K new followers on ๐ - Traveled domestically 12x - Traveled internationally 8x - Threw 7 small masterminds - Exercised 348 days - Walked 2,460 miles & 6.15M steps - Lost 8 pounds - Took my wife to lunch 60x - Visited 10+ breweries - Lived abroad for 60 days - Flew our parents on vacation first class Life came first, business supported it.
so you are telling me you need to - sleep 8 hours - cook at home - hit protein goals - do a daily workout and still find time to do marketing i call it scam
Skate spot is swarmed by Super Bowl stuff and an anti circumcision protest lol. Will still be here an hour or two at least
The bad news is people canโt commit to things long term. The good news is that itโs February and my gym is already empty.
.@joinladder was my first angel investment, made entirely on trust in @ThomasDigan when I had no idea what I was doing in venture. What followed is one of the most unlikely and dramatic business stories I've been part of. Today, Ladder is the number one strength training app approaching $100M in ARR with over 300K members. But it should have died several times and survived through sheer force of will from Tom and CEO @GregoryFStewart. Tom left a lucrative hedge fund career and moved his family to Austin. He raised money from me, my family and his friends. Tom talks about how when you take money from people that close to you, you have to know deep down that you're willing to do whatever it takes. During the early years, they were in constantly in debt with no customers and no sign of PMF. They celebrated raising $10k checks at night while negotiating with creditors and rebuilding the product during the day. Greg describes copying thousands of App Store reviews into Word documents and color-coding them by theme to know exactly what feature to build next. He talks about going into what he calls a "cave process," disappearing to study a single problem until he masters it. He spent months cracking TikTok with no background, dissecting every minute detail -- the hook in the first three seconds, what the coach was wearing, the gym setting -- to grow from $3M to nearly $100M in ARR in four years. Ladder is becoming the operating system for health and fitness, but this conversation is about how hard it really is to build something valuable, told by two people who were willing to do absolutely anything to make it work. Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:07 The Genesis of Ladder 3:04 Engineering DNA vs. Content Libraries 4:31 Scaling to 300,000 Paying Members 5:36 Leaving the Safety Net 9:00 Restructuring 13:58 Survival Mode 25:48 Ruthless Prioritization 27:15 Integrating Nutrition and Listening to Members 33:53 Cracking the TikTok Growth Loop 44:25 Expanding the Brand Beyond Short-Form Video 46:54 Financing Growth 51:10 Leveraging AI 58:10 Long-Term Vision 1:05:32 Kindest Thing
Happy Dad's @John says that young people are still drinking, but "they're just drinking differently." "They're not going heavy. They're not drinking beers. They don't want to wake up hungover, so they're not drinking vodkas and whiskies." "If you look at most beer companies, if they haven't gotten into the seltzers or the no-bubble space, they're struggling." "People are on their health kick more than ever these days. That's why you're looking at all these supplement brands, fitness brands, and GLP-1 peptide companies. They're all through the roof." "And also, I have this theory that people want to look good on social media too. There's only two ways to look good on social media, either be in shape or add 15 filters to your picture." Jordi: "Or grab a hammer."
