Byrd

2020 - present

Hypothesis

It is hard to build positive habits around exercise and existing technology reduces the intrinsic rewards a user feels after exercising. We believe we can reinforce the habit loop relating to exercise with recommendations for each day and celebrations for each activity.

Result

Still in progress

Process

I founded Byrd in January 2020 to redesign the experience of running technology. Existing technology puts pressure on people, frames exercise as a winner-takes-all process and doesn’t give any actionable insight from existing user data.

I created an Alpha version of the app based around low-fidelity spreadsheets, wireframes and rudimentary code. From there I did some very early validation work with end-users to allow me to build a small founding team around the product.

In September 2020 we raised a small amount of capital and released the first beta version of the app. That beta allowed us to learn that many of our initial hypotheses were incorrect. Based on those learnings we continued to test and iterate the product experience and underlying AI. Through 2021 we raised more funding and released further beta versions of the app.

What we discovered from all the testing was that people needed to trust the recommendations that Byrd was offering them. The Algorithm Aversion bias was extremely high with everyone using the beta versions of Byrd. The need immediately below that was around experience. People wanted to feel like the app was reflecting back their world and their running. We grew - quite literally - the idea of a virtual world from that testing. It’s a world that moves, changes and progresses to match the users running.

In January 2022 we released the first public version of Byrd. We’re now a post-revenue company with unit economics based around subscriber numbers and growing month-on-month.

Team

Polly Leeman (Designer), Ellis Di Cataldo (UX copywriter), Toby Hammond (Snr. dev), Dave Brealey (Snr. dev), Rohan Menezes (Dev), Jess Wilson (Dev), Nina Davies (Brand director), Adam Baskill (marketing)

Design tools

Pen and paper, Figma, Sketch, Photoshop, After Effects, Miro virtual whiteboard, Google Sheets, Visual Studio IDE, Github

Technology

iOS / Android apps Flutter and Dart for client applications Dart and Javascript for cloud applications Firebase (NoSQL) database for hosting