From a Farm in Egypt to Building a YC Computer Vision Startup for Fitness

This looks like a fascinating product; if the founder's around, does it track back angles? Is it useful for dls/squats/cleans? Can it track bar paths? Can it track body angles over time, or does it (as of now) just track final angles?

Selling this at scale to gyms will be very difficult. Personal training is one the largest profit centers for gyms and at many gyms, personal training is the most profitable profit center. Convincing members to sign up can be difficult though (at an average gym typically less than 10% of gym members use personal training services at any given time) so gym owners are going to be skeptical about anything that might deter members from trying personal training.

If this technology is as good as the founders say it is, it will be viewed by most gyms as a problem, not a solution. A gym isn't going to pay $2,500/unit for the privilege of potentially cannibalizing its personal training revenue. On the flip side, if the technology isn't as good as the founders say it is, a gym isn't going to pay $2,500/unit to add a piece of equipment that doesn't offer any benefit.

Another poster mentioned selling to individuals for home gyms. Notwithstanding the fact that this is a non-starter at anywhere near the $2,500 price point, the market for personal fitness equipment is unfathomably competitive. Customer acquisition costs are insane and you could easily spend millions of dollars just to launch a new product.

If there's any value here, it's in the computer vision technology. The question is whether the company and whoever invests will recognize that before it's too late.

But, this is part of the value of personal training. You're not going to miss your work out if you lose a hundred bucks by not going.

Also, there's value in motivation as well. Having someone there to push you to get those extra one or two reps is another big part of the value add of a personal trainer.

This is really cool, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the product evolves going forward. Props to Mr. Eldeeb for his amazing journey and the beginnings of an interesting startup. Sounds like the pressures of running a company might be a cakewalk compared to the rest of his life!

[1] http://liveathos.com

I was excited by Amazon phone's stereo camera as well as Google's project tango. Depth sensing technology is very exciting indeed!

Now, like a few other expats who studied there with me in 2006-2007, I was really upset post-revolution. As expected, people wanted to bootstrap a nation far behind. There were, like in other public sector jobs, numerous protests by education sector staff and instructors about how it was bad, and not improving. Keep in mind in the average university students are paying a few hundred gineh (Egyptian pounds) per year. As a result, even higher education is swampy messy of inadequate staff and resources like our worst inner city middle schools. And this is the top of education chain in Egypt. Of course, as expected even in the most developed nations (I was scarred and disturbed by local politics, jaded from my time over there as I saw more parallels over time), this was put on the back burner when it is crucial to improving the general state of affairs. Not that many will address that, because it is not politically expedient.

No one really focuses on the education problem in Egypt. I know some people running companies there, if you can even believe it pre and post-revolution when internet cuts were common, web development firms. Egypt invested in, for its time, top-rate broadband availability in the region. It is one of the first Arab countries to have Internet backbone as part of the higher education networks in the 90s prior to the Zaki information economy push around the millenium. When I studied at the time, with everything else faulting, the Internet infrastructure, even for average consumer use, was surprisingly not bad. They even had cool joint degrees. If I had money to spare, I would have considered one.

http://www.africabuild.eu/consortium/iti-mcit

So there is great infrastructure and potential for the Eldeebs I know and knew, pre-revolution at least. The sad reality is that stories like this are so common in Egypt, it is crazy. No kid, even the most motivated, cannot be expected to fight for enterpreneurship when he cannot eat and must work side jobs so his whole family can survive. Education, even when kids can get access, is terrible, in spite of great telecom infrastructure that was part of a perceived information economy bump in the future.

I generally think Ahmed Zuweil, a famous Egyptian technocrat and Nobel Chemistry Prize winner, is somewhat an asshole. But he used to run ads during Ramadan on Egyptian television the last few years underlining education is THE priority to make Egypt return even to a fraction of its true greatness.

If anyone thinks Eldeeb's story is moving, please look into orgs like this and many other Egyptian NGOs invested in education. Lord knows I do.

http://www.zewailcity.edu.eg