In the next episode of Tech in 26.2 Podcast on Traxamo, I sit down with Tom Fowler, Entrepreneur, Advisory board member and former President of Polar North America. Tom’s impressive track record includes revitalizing endurance sports businesses like Polar North America, Recon Instruments, Cervelo Cycles or Nike European Operations, granting him with unique insights and thought leadership into the wearables sector of the endurance sports industry. As an advisory board member for several endurance tech companies, including Summa Labs, Nix Biosensors, Hanu Health, Stryd, and Form, Tom offers invaluable perspectives for founders navigating resource constraints, particularly financial limitations. His extensive experience in the sports technology sector, coupled with his background as a former professional triathlete, provides him with a distinctive understanding of both the business and athletic aspects of the industry. Here are some key focus areas of our conversation:

⛳  Turnaround story of Polar North America by focusing on core product strengths, streamlining distribution channels and expanding foot print on DTC (e.g Amazon) channels

⛳  Tom’s take on smart watch industry on how its evolving to be a life coach from sport coach

⛳  Approach & strategies on selecting the right wearable technology products for amateur athletes

⛳  Evolution of health centers/gyms to become life performance management centers

⛳  Handling data privacy in connected world

⛳  Finding minimum viable audience (MVA) to build minimum viable product (MVP) to iterate fast

⛳  Run towards challenges - Tom's reflections on his career journey and advice to those aspiring to follow a similar path

In the next episode of 26.2 Podcast on Traxamo, I sit down with Gary McNamee, Founder & CEO of Outside Interactive and chat about Simulator product which recreates the race day experience of running a race on equipments in your living rooms. Let’s say you are running the 2024 New York City Marathon virtually during November first week and you have a Peloton treadmill at home; using Outside Interactive’s Simulator, NYC Marathon organizers can bring you the race day experience - running the actual race course with it’s electrifying crowd support that pervades the whole city. And we are going to experience exactly the same on Aug 10 & 11th where people from all over the world can participate on a connected race on the actual Paris Olympic 2024 Marathon Course on Kino Maps platform. Here are some key focus areas of our conversation:

In this next episode of Tech in 26.2 podcast - I sat down with Mohammed Iqbal, Founder & CEO of Sweatworks, a product focused health and wellness digital agency based in Virginia with offices in London, Manila, Miami, Montevideo, New York and Shenzhen. With 100 employees, 10+ patents and 1M+ digital lives reached, Sweatworks works with brands like Nike, Strava, Garmin, Bose to name a few. In addition of being an endurance athlete himself, Mohammed is also an investor and advisor to health and fitness startups and the host of the weekly latest trends in fitness and wellness podcast, LIFTS. Here are some of the key focus areas of our conversation:

🧩 How Mohammed’s background in fitness and Sharp electronics paved the way for founding Sweatworks

Podcast Outline

0:05 Introduction

3:44 Founding Story of Sweatworks

10:42 Why building a services company vs a product company?

14:46 - Understanding Customer acquisition cost (CAC)  in B2B vs B2C

17:40 Landing Nike as first customer after 125 No’s

21:24 Achieving Wellness for all mission for Sweatworks

24:20  What is Sweatworks' Digital fitness Lab?

28:24  Do we have a data problem in endurance industry?

33:46 Trends in consumer adoption of endurance tech

37:21 Making sense of collected data

40:04 AI and endurance tech industry

46:47 Parting thoughts

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#endurance #running #runners #eventmanagement

Podcast Outline

In this next episode of Tech in 26.2 podcast - I sat down with Troy Busot, Founder of CEO of Athlinks (a LifeTime Company) : the premier platform for race results and athlete data that holds ~400 million race results and counting. As a triathlete and serial entrepreneur, Troy recently launched iLoomi, an expert biographer for writing a life story. Some of the key focus areas of our conversations were:

🎯 Founding journey of Athlinks and pivots to find product market fit

🎯 Selling Athlinks to LifeTime Fitness and figuring out how to get things done at LifeTime

🎯 Events leading to launch of iLoomi - celebrating magical moments of life

Podcast Outline

0:05 Introduction

3:21 Founding Story and finding product market for Athlinks

12:36 Getting first paying customer through advertising

16:00 Endurance industry trends that helped survive 2008 recession

20:30 Transitioning into being an endurance athlete and building fail fast muscle

25:45 Building Athlinks as cog in a bigger machine and finding potential buyer for exit

31:48 Selling Athlinks to LifeTime Fitness

33:21 Learnings from building Athlinks - Make the experience magical for end users, celebrate their experience, deeply connect with community; half ur assumptions will be wrong,

37:09 How you build a company with exit in mind from day one?

40:07 Figuring out getting s**t done - life at LifeTime Fitness

56:54 Transitioning out of LifeTime Fitness

1:02:02 Launching iLoomi - celebrating magical moments of life

References

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In this episode of Tech in 26.2 podcast - I sat down with Dirk Friel, Co Founder and Chief Evangelist of TrainingPeaks - All in one platform providing coaching, training plans, performance analysis, and data syncs for athletes and coaches. TrainingPeaks solutions are used by Tour de France teams, IRONMAN® World Champions, Olympians, and age group athletes and coaches around the world to track, analyze and plan their training.  Some of key focus areas of our conversations were:

Podcast Outline

0:05 - Introduction

2:40 - Journey as ProCyclist

5:56 - Founding story of TrainingPeaks over a beer with Gear Fisher

14:26 - Getting first paying customer

16:16 -  help people achieve their best through deliberate practice - overview of TrainingPeaks platform

18:48 - Scale of TrainingPeaks - if you care about heart rate, speed or distance, TrainingPeaks the right platform

23:23 - How does TrainingPeaks platform supports coaches to run their Coaching businesses

29:32 -  Enabling accountability through deliberate practice

33:43 - Trends in endurance sports tech industry in the last 25 years

39:34 - TrainingPeaks university

43:19 - AI and personal coaching in endurance sports

46:24 - Can AI coach be as effective as human coach?

References

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- https://www.traxamo.com/tech-in-26-2-dirk-friel

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Welcome to the share the next episode on Tech in 26.2 podcast - A conversation with Kurt Hansen Founder & CEO of Innovative Timing Systems, one of the top 4 (@Mylaps, @Chronotrack, @Raceresults) and privately held race timing companies in the world. During our conversation, we focus on the following areas:

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Tech in 26.2 Podcast Intro