Hey CardioTrainees,

Welcome to 2010! If you’ve been using CardioTrainer for the past two weeks, you will have noticed that we recently rolled out our first social feature, High Scores. High Scores lets you see how the rest of the world is working out, be it running, biking, horseback riding, or whatever else! Everyone gets to register with an optional nickname and comment, and then see their rank by both total distance and distance in the last 7 days. This gives you a glimpse of the amazing international diversity of CardioTrainer users. Please check it out by clicking on the “See High Scores” button on the first page.

Hey CardioTrainees!

You’re probably wondering why you haven’t heard from us in a while, but it’s been a really busy few months and we’ve been hard at work. Since our last post, we’ve rolled out five new versions of the CardioTrainer app, and we’re happy to share a few more exciting pieces of news.

Official CardioTrainer User Group
We’ve created an official user group for all of your CardioTraining needs. You can get help, discuss ideas, and share your workout experiences with other users. We really encourage everyone to get involved as ask for help if you need it. Check it out here: CardioTrainer User Group

Updated Frequently Asked Questions
Our support team has been busy assembling a list of the most commonly asked questions and problems that we get from our users on a day-to-day basis. Along with the forum, this is the place to go if you got questions and need answers. Check it out here: CardioTrainer FAQ

Holiday Surprises
Be on the lookout for a little holiday surprise from the WorkSmart Labs family coming very soon!

Happy training!

The WorkSmart Labs family

We’ve built an excellent foundation for a fitness technology start-up, and now we are looking for amazing and driven engineers to help us grow faster and share the rewards. We are looking for full-time engineers for our New York office. Please e-mail me at jobs@worksmartlabs.com or pass this on to friends who might be interested.

About our start-up

The WorkSmart Labs mission is to use technology to make fitness more fun and effective. Existing fitness companies have dropped the ball on this (ever have a blast on a treadmill?), and technology companies with top talent have largely ignored the area. We are building WorkSmart Labs to fill the gap.

For example, imagine a video version of Google Street View, but on a treadmill and with image analysis that allows you to embed virtual opponents and motivational mileposts. Then instead of watching CNN, users can run through the streets of Paris or the Alps, while we optimize their workout for maximum fat-burn or endurance. Imagine also the gym of the future, where every exercise you do is monitored by a mobile cyber trainer, virtually following and instructing you. And if you don’t do what you should, it can post this fact on your Facebook feed, or even donate money to an organization you dislike. These are the types of ideas that drive us, and we are building and testing many of these and other ideas.

What makes us different

1. We are small and early-stage! We have many helpers and advisers, but we still have just 6 full-time employees. Additionally, we’ve prudently kept costs low and financed our company with our own and angel funds, not taking VC money, which means we’ve kept a lot of equity to share with highly-talented early employees (that’s you!). If you join, I guarantee you will have a big impact and will be generously rewarded for it with equity.
2. We are changing and improving the world! We’re focusing on the largely unexplored area of “fitness and wellness technology”, where improvements can have a big and hugely beneficial impact. Unlike say .com’s, not enough smart people are looking at this problem — and we can change that together. We already get many e-mails from users thanking us for helping them lose weight or exercise. Imagine doing that on a global scale.
3. We make decisions together! Whether its how much to pay an advisor, what features to add, how to negotiate an investment, or even if we should get a new couch. You will be an equal partner in these discussions, and you will learn how to make such decisions (in a data-driven way and beyond!). Instead of working on just one area, we believe that every employee should be able to think like a CEO. The biggest thing I underestimated in joining a start-up is how much I would learn from this process: every day something different comes up, and every time it’s a life-long lesson for business and life.
4. We are building the kind of company we want to work for! We’ve worked for and admire great engineering companies (such as Fog Creek and Google), and are obsessed with creating a great work environment and a rewarding atmosphere. No obstacle is too great on this quest, and you will be able to help us improve it. We’ve had an amazing chef from day one (we love her!) and a fun office with frequent visitors.
5. We build amazing & diverse technologies! At our core, we are a team of great engineers. As such, right from the beginning, we have worked hard to build a great engineering environment — with code reviews, automatic unit tests, bug reports, the works. We take great pride in our tools and our code, and this lets us build cool stuff quickly. We build everything from Android mobile software, to C++ image analysis, to web UI, to pedometer data analysis. Because we are small, you will become skilled in many more technologies, and build more diverse ones.
6. We are multi-disciplinary! We see fitness technology as multi-disciplinary at its core — we need the input of fitness advisors, designers, doctors, psychologists, and researchers. Already, we have trainers and researchers (who’d normally not cross paths!) that advise us on these subjects, and we dream of a day when we have all of these people working together in one place, having fun, and then going down to our own demo gym to use our own products! From the start, we’ve also built this company to attract a great variety of people, so you will get to interact with a much more diverse set of people than in a typical engineering company.
7. We are making great progress! Our business accomplishments so far include releasing the most popular dedicated fitness application on the Android Market (CardioTrainer), securing angel capital from Korea as well as from a senior Google Product Manager, winning a technology development grant from the Korean Ministry of Knowledge, and most importantly, building an amazing foundation for our company and finding an awesome team.

Candidates
We are looking for excellent engineers that are smart and get things done. This means of course great software design skills, a lot of software engineering experience (5 years minimum, and we don’t care if it was at Apple or in your mom’s basement), excellent communication skills, and a driven personality. We will compensate with a base salary combined with generous equity, so you need to be interested in future growth rather than immediate riches. You know who you are.

Contact Information
We have a jobs@worksmartlabs.com e-mail and this goes directly to me (and only to me), so it’s completely confidential. You can use this to ask questions or send your resume. Fancy resumes are not required!

Artem Petakov,
Co-Founder/CTO of WorkSmart Labs