Show HN: Steddy – Robinhood for Exercise | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Steddy – Robinhood for Exercise

steddy.health

6 pointsraffichill4 comments

After talking to a lot of people about their exercise habits, we realized that one of the most popular apps for tracking workouts is actually the Notes app.

Because most people’s interests and hobbies change, it’s very hard for a single type of exercise app (running, lifting, CrossFit, etc.) to remain useful to people over the long run.

So we built Steddy: an exercise app with no videos, fitness models, or made up weight loss projections.

Instead, planning and check-in is as simple as a well-designed todo app. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to “deposit” your exercise each time you get active and watch your fitness compound over time.

Would love any suggestions, feedback, or advice; and happy to answer any questions!

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> Robinhood for Exercise

This is unclear to the point of being nonsensical. What most people know about Robinhood is that it offers free trades. More tech-savvy people might know that they became household names because they encourage retail investors to treat investing like gambling.

I have no idea how that maps onto exercise. The only hint in your pitch is toward the end:

> Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to “deposit” your exercise each time you get active and watch your fitness compound over time.

OK, now I can maybe see why you brought up Robinhood, although I don't think of Robinhood as a place where people watch things compound. Mostly they just ride the day-trading rollercoaster.

But set that aside: what does it mean to deposit exercise? How can it compound over time? Isn't the whole point of exercising regularly that the effects fade?

I think you might have something here, but you probably need to market more the way Noom does. They talk about science-based behavioral modification that helps people succeed at dieting, even if they had always failed before. And they make a case that only a mobile app can really succeed at this behavioral change.

I think you're right on about a lot here... I'll try to explain why I used the Robinhood analogy:

(1) What I feel is missing in the exercise app landscape is a product that is highly-usable to people and spans all types of activity. So my objective is to let people check in with only two clicks regardless of whether they lifted, did a yoga class, went for a walk, or played in a softball game, and ultimately to compile all of that information into a single chart which represents your exercise life. I was really inspired by the simplicity of the Robinhood and Cash App UIs and always wanted to get that "single chart" to work for exercise (it's still very much in the works as I'll mention in #4 below).

(2) There is a lot of high-risk activity on Robinhood, but those use-cases don't negate the fact that it also allows anyone to make recurring deposits into a wide range of asset classes. Maybe we can think of a highly-leveraged trade like someone maxing out their back squat on their first day in the gym and severely injuring themselves. A recurring deposit into an ETF would be more like making sure you do a light jog every day. There will always be various use cases when you make a generic product.

(3) You absolutely fade/atrophy when you don't exercise regularly (in fact, you do so frighteningly quickly)... but the benefits of regular exercise also do compound over time when you are consistent. I don't think we need to dive into whether that compounding maps directly to the S&Ps average annual return or not to agree that if you are able to get yourself to do some push ups every day for 50 days straight, you'll be in a lot better shape than you were to begin with :)

(4) Regarding the science-based approach. I couldn't agree more. We're trying to develop estimates from experts on how effective each exercise is for different adaptations, and we're starting here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10f_PoTkQ0T5wDmrokRh-...

For now, our goal is to see how people enjoy our planning and check in flow / UI. Would love it if you gave the app a shot and continued to share feedback as we build! :)

> What I feel is missing in the exercise app landscape is a product that is highly-usable to people and spans all types of activity.

I have seen these features in exercise apps for nearly 10 years now. Fitbit's help page specifically mentions all of them except softball[1].

I don't really understand how this could go into a single chart. A chart of... what? A chart would make sense if the data is hours, heart rate, etc., but it's not really possible to know things like how many calories the person burned. Someone playing third base in softball is going to burn far fewer calories than, say, the pitcher.

If the chart is just hours, then there are an endless number of apps that help you log exercise, including differentiating based no time and intensity.

I'm not saying this is doomed to fail because of competition, but I think the competition is going to make it hard to break through the noise that consumers hear all the time.

> Maybe we can think of a highly-leveraged trade like someone maxing out their back squat on their first day in the gym and severely injuring themselves.

I genuinely get what you're saying, but I majored in finance, worked in finance, and have founded fintechs. This is emphatically not a "middle of the road," average-consumer messaging strategy.

Robinhood's innovation wasn't removing barriers to investing. You could get free trades and access to varied asset classes with a lot of companies, starting all the way back in the early 2000s.

Robinhood is notable because they harnessed the boredom, restlessness, and cash excesses of the pandemic. There's a reason WallStreetBets always had screenshots from Robinhood: it was catering specifically to risk-agnostic amateur investors, and it encouraged them to do risky and stupid things.

That's not a model for an exercise app. I think you should just drop the Robinhood/finance comparison entirely, because it's going to confuse people. I'm still a little confused by it.

I do like the idea of gamifying exercise, but again, there has been a glut of exercise apps (using all different approaches) and nothing has really stuck except Strava and some of the ones that are tied to fitness trackers.

1. https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/1935.htm

There may be a better comparison/way to describe this product, but when I first started using Robinhood in 2017 the key difference between the app the my TD Ameritrade account was the ease of use and low-barrier onboarding. I'm not saying there weren't other ways to execute free trades, but the world we live in today requires exceptionally simple and good-looking UIs to keep people engaged, and I was one of those lazy people.

Maybe when money is involved ease of use leads to gambling, but I'll hope that when it's about tracking your exercise ease of use leads to exercise staying top of mind more often for people.

As for Steddy's chart, everything is based on RPE (rating of perceived exertion), which will probably bring you to tears of laughter, but a fair share of our users have found it useful.

This 1 minute demo I made might clarify whatever else is missing: https://t.co/rf0hBTptCV

But nothing replaces using it for yourself ;D

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