Startup Spotlight - WurQ

Welcome to The Modern Day Renaissance Man newsletter. I, Trey Layton, write about the things that interest me, often covering topics such as startups, sports, and entertainment. If you'd like to receive these newsletters directly in your email a few times a week, go ahead and subscribe to never miss an email!

Happy Wedensnesday, folks.

If you've been unfortunate enough to have internet for the past week, you've likely had the pleasure of watching your portfolio hurtling towards the jagged rocks and crashing waves at the bottom of the cliff that was the end of summer bull rally. Markets have been doing their best Humpty Dumpty impressions, and I sincerely hope that all the king's horses and all the king's men learned something from the last time they were called upon to do their job.

Even if you're immune to the bear market blues (get me whatever you're having...), we've all experienced stress in our lives. As such, it's important that everyone finds a method of stress relief that works for them.

For some, that's journaling.

For others? They like yoga.

Depending on their state, some like to roll with... gardening🍁.

Personally, I'm a workout guy. I like to lift heavy things and pretend that they're the deck edits that are due at midnight.

I also love tools that help me to live the healthy lifestyle that I aspire for, whether they're nutrition apps, sleep and recovery supplements, and, most recently, wearables that help me track my workouts and tell me whether I should be increasing or decreasing the strain that I am putting on my poor quads.

After weeks of Reddit research, I recently caved and got the Fitbit Charge 5. While I have enjoyed getting customized sleep scores and receiving hourly "walk eight laps around your kitchen" reminders, I have noticed that there is little support for my preferred workout routines, namely lifting weights. The watch tracks walks, runs, and even ellipticals without me having to click a button, but I am forced to manually input the duration and start times of my lifts and cross my fingers that my measured heart rate changes line up to give me some rough estimate of the strain I endured. Though I have survived this inconvenience thus far, I'm not sure how much more of this I can take 😩...

Enter: WurQ

There isn't much information about WurQ as it seems to have been started in the last couple of months, but it claims to provide consumers a combination of "wearable technologies and AI to seamlessly monitor strength training activities for personalized guidance and progress visualization." More simply, it's bringing watch tans to the Dwayne Johnsons of the world.

Not only does it promise an accurate report of strength training sessions, but the wearable even tracks user progress over time and offers guidance based on the measurements it takes.

WurQ emerges from the Harvard Biodesign Lab under the leadership of Conor Walsh, a Professor at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences with years of experience in healthtech design. It's also backed by the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab), thus it has the access to the R&D talent as well as the business resources needed to scale into a viable business.

These sorts of wearables are attractive from a business model perspective:

• First, the devices themselves are generally highly priced. Popular existing wearables range from $120 to $400. Unless you adorn yourself in the most stylish of bubble wrap, chances are that you'll end up needing to replace it at some point, too, as I've had to do with phones, watches, headphones, and a just about every other Xmas gift Santa has sent down the chimney. Even for the more careful among us, existing products are constantly being improved with subsequent models, and consumers tend to upgrade to the latest release every couple of years.

• More promising even than the hardware is the recurring revenue potential of the analytics. Fitbit watches can track the basics like hard rate and steps taken for free, but any metric of potential value requires a monthly fee as part of the Fitbit Premium plan for $10/mo. Consumers have grown accustomed to these fees, and, there is even potential for a higher tier subscription offering the base analytics and the personal fitness guidance, much like everyone's favorite stationary bike.

Unfortunately, though, hardware as an industry is more Call of Duty than Fortnite with a high barrier to entry. I also find it hard to believe that that one of the much better capitalized competitors such as Fitbit, Apple, or Amazon wouldn't roll out their own improved trackers with #gains support should WurQ ever gain traction. Regardless, though, innovative/improved products + lower prices = win for users.

That was a lot of writing. Time to inhale some pre-workie and get pumping.

Cheers to another day,

Trey