Looking back at 2017
A year of building Gyroscope
In 2017, Gyroscope turned three years old, we passed 200,000 signups and expanded to new platforms — including a native Android app and a hardcover annual report book. By the end of the year, Gyroscope users had…
- 📸 saved 64,194 cards from the app
- 😂 added 724,335 mood ratings
- 💕 synced 2,848,509,770 heart rates
- 📉 weighed themselves 11,685,566 times
- 🍃 meditated 604,304 times (152,159 in headspace, 39,716 from calm)
- 🏃 logged 2,405,946 runs
- 🎯 set 31,439 weekly goals
We also passed 4,000 Pro subscribers, letting us continue to grow the team and invest in more infrastructure.
Here’s a quick summary of the year…
January 2017
When we first built Gyroscope, the signup process used Facebook login to integrating as streamlined as possible. Last January, we added a new email option as part of V1.9.
February
We raised a round of funding from some great investors like Matrix Partners and True Ventures, as well as a few longtime Gyroscope members who contributed with angel investments.
This lets us continue with our roadmap to build the OS for the human body, and grow the team to tackle more ambitious projects.
In February, we also released a major update for the Gyroscope Chrome Extension, which reminds you of your latest stats when opening a new tab.
We added three new theme options: Balance, Workouts & Productivity. We also added the option to blur sensitive stats like weight so everyone won’t see it on your computer. If you’re not using the Chrome extension yet, get it here!
March
Continuing our quest to be the OS for the human body, we started to fill in the gaps of important biometrics that weren’t yet on Gyroscope — blood sugar, blood pressure and many more integrations from HealthKit.
Not everyone tracks things like their blood sugar or blood pressure yet, and many of our users still may not have this info, but they are starting to become much easier to obtain.
We believe within the next few years new devices and technologies will come on the market giving people easy access to these metrics, and Gyroscope will be an invaluable part of making sense of it all.
April
In April, we started working with Software Mansion to start development of the highly requested Gyroscope Android app. The app had built and tested only on iOS, so though we were using React Native and could reuse a lot of the tech bringing it to Android still required a fair amount of work.
We got it running pretty quickly on the phone, but then it took many more months to make improvements and have it feel truly native—following design details like material design and using different platform conventions.
May
Mental health is just as important as physical fitness, and with Gyroscope our goal is to help people keep both in balance. In addition to tracking sleep and meditation, in V1.9.3 we added a new mood tracking feature to create a better historical record of your feelings—something that has never existed before.
Better than just a basic 1–5 rating, we built a simpler and more comprehensive mood tracker that lets you swipe cards left and right to generate a comprehensive mood score, capturing the ups and downs of various facets like energy levels or tension.
The scoring is based on an old technique called “profile of mood states” to add up all the subdimensions (like anxiety, anger, energy, etc.) into one number at the end, and also let us do long term analysis of important metrics like perceived productivity, stress levels, and more.
We also added a new workout card, showing a Pizza counter as a new calorie analysis option besides donuts and cookies. It is amazing how calorically dense some of these junk foods are, and a good reminder to not undo all that hard work in one or two bites afterwards.
June
By using Gyroscope, we want to eventually be able to prevent people from getting sick. Often this can be caused by preventable factors like lack of sleep, or excessive stress, or other things that weaken the immune response.
The first step here is letting people track their symptoms and correlate these with all the other things going on in their life that we’re tracking. Often these are very minor things, like a slight headache or sore throat that never gets tracked or reported anywhere. Sometimes they can have patterns—like I found I often get sick after a product launch or after traveling.
Many of our users had also been experimenting with ketogenic diets, and we added a way to add those levels to Gyroscope—another metric that isn’t possible to track or easily store with other services. Our goal here is to help people understand whether ketogenic diets are effective for them, and help understand the effects on other parts of their life like weight, productivity and mood.
One more thing… when Apple announced iOS11 at their WWDC conference, we made a brief cameo in the presentation and were featured at the top of the new App Store!
July
To improve our Android app even faster, we released an early access version for people around the world to help us beta test.
We also improved the Sleep AI system, making it the best way to track sleep every night. It uses existing Apple Watch and other data instead of requiring another expensive tracker, but actually provides better results due to the amount and quality of the other information we already get.
Later in July, we released V1.9.9 of the app, which added a new friend feed for easy sharing and commenting within the app. This changed the friends tab from just having a steps leaderboard to letting people share all aspects of their life—productivity, travel, workouts and much more.
This new feed lets people share reports or workouts with friends on Gyroscope, without needing to post it on a social network. You can like or comment on your friends’ posts to show your support and keep everyone motivated!
August
After a few years, we finally updated our website to include all the new features that had been added. Everyone uses Gyroscope in different ways, so we wanted to showcase that and demonstrate the different ways the app could have an impact in your life.
September
We’re a distributed team, with members all around the world, but at the beginning of September we met up in San Diego for some in-person design and brainstorming sessions.
We also started a beta test of a new company dashboard, to help teams (especially ourselves, but also other companies) stay healthy while being in the stressful workplace of a startup.
September also marked the three year anniversary of starting Gyroscope!
October
After months of research, design and test prints, the custom annual report books were delivered! We produced 40 unique editions of the 2016 Report, each with 64 pages, and delivered them to members all around the world.
See how they were designed & printed or order yours for 2017!
November
In November, we released V1.10 on iPhone and Android, our biggest update ever. It added a new way for Pro members to view more data, taking advantage of new form factors like the iPhone X with more vertical space.
To help people have better workouts, we also added heart rate zone analysis for workouts. Depending on your fitness goals, you may want to spend time in different zones.
We also improved the weekly goals functionality to provide daily tips, and increased the total number possible per week to 5.
This version also made Sleep AI easier to use, and available for free to everyone. It is the easiest way to automatically track your sleep every night, so we wanted everyone to have access to it—not just Pro members.
We also passed 4,000 Pro members in November. This is an important milestone since we believe a subscription model is critical to make a service like Gyroscope work. The traditional models of getting a lot of free users and then selling advertising or data don’t work well in this space, and would result in a much worse product with misaligned incentives.
A special thank you to all our original members who have been using Gyroscope since the initial release 3 years ago!
December
After months of beta testing and improvements, the Gyroscope Android app was released in the Google Play Store. We use React Native behind the scenes, so the app is now running the same exact code on both platforms — letting us release new features and products for everyone at once.
The new Gyroscope app was also featured in Google’s “Best of 2017” selections for the year, in the “Hidden Gem” category.
With the help of the Android app release, we also passed 200,000 registered users—more than doubling since the start of the year.
In December, we also released the Gyroscope T-Shirt in our three signature colors. They’re now available on Threadless for $20 each in any men or women’s sizes.
Another physical product, we released the Gyroscope gift cards, a popular gift item this year combined with an Apple Watch or Fitbit. The gift cards let you give anyone a year of Pro membership of Pro.
Finally, at the end the year we released the 2017 annual reports for everyone to review what they accomplished. This year we introduced some new views to go deeper into the data, and show more breakdowns of month to month progress.
Phew, that was quite a year!
What’s next?
We can’t wait to show you what we’ve got in store for 2018. This year we’ll be adding a ton of new integrations (like last.fm, Garmin, and much more), our new location tracking system in the app (currently in early beta), and many new features to help you stay healthy.
We’re hiring experienced software engineers to help us build the OS for the human body. You can work from anywhere around the world on challenging engineering & data problems that directly improve people’s lives. Learn more!
