Introducing Gyroscope
A dashboard for everything about your life
Last summer, I released a new version of my site, April Zero. I tweeted a link and expected a few hundred people to check it out. The next morning, I woke up and there were over a hundred thousand people on the site!
My inbox was filling up with requests from people asking how it worked or when they could get their own. Many even wanted to pay for it. Though it was designed to just be my own personal site, the constant stream of messages made me realize perhaps there was a bigger opportunity.
In just a few months, the site had made a huge impact in my life and health. I realized how much good it could do in the hands of everyone. New announcements were coming out every day — the Apple Watch, sleep trackers, revolutionary blood tests. Each new release was a data stream that would make the site even more interesting and useful.
I started working on a new prototype that anyone could easily sign up for, combining existing data into an easily shareable website. Building the system for all my data had been pretty straightforward, but scaling to many people would require much more infrastructure and planning.
I messaged some of my smartest friends for advice on the best way to build it, including Eric Florenzano, who had just left Twitter & was getting ready to start on his next project. He was really excited to use it himself, and a few days later we were hacking away together on a new import system.
That was 6 months ago, and we’ve made tremendous progress since then.
I’m excited to announce that Gyroscope is now live and you can now sign up to start using it. More importantly, we’re a real company now — with a strong team, great investors, and even some revenue.
Eric has joined full-time as CTO and built an amazing system that has already scaled past a billion data points. We’ve gone through dozens of iterations and solved lots of technical challenges.
We’re currently inviting new users every day and been receiving loads of great feedback. Last year we added a page for people to request features and vote for which features they are most excited about.
In addition to our new homepage and about page, we’ve already shipped some of the most requested features: weekly email reports, Fitbit/Jawbone integrations, and productivity tracking. We’ve also added Gyroscope Pro, which adds some powerful features like using your own domain name.
Funding
We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised a round of funding from some amazing investors, including True Ventures and prominent angels such as Jyri Engeström, Hiten Shah, Fresh VC, Siqi Chen, Roger Dickey and others. Semil Shah wrote our first check and also helped syndicate the deal on Angel List.
What’s next?
We’ve been getting many requests for new features, and are working on shipping improvements as fast as we can. Our iOS app is coming soon and will integrate with data from the Apple Watch. Follow us on Twitter to get the latest previews of what we’re building.
We’re also hiring experienced mobile and web engineers (our stack is Python/Go) to help us take Gyroscope to the next level.
Our app is now available in the App Store!
