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

With your constant encouragement and support, we’ve been working very hard these past few months, and I wanted to share the results of our efforts with you.

Summary of this update:

1. CardioTrainer 1.0.1 and the “Race Against Yourself” Premium Feature for $2.99. Please try it out, it’s refundable within 24 hrs.

2. The first CardioTrainer User Survey. Take it here.

3. Future developments

Just a few weeks ago, we released a new version of CardioTrainer with many many new features. We also launched our first premium feature “Race Against Yourself” — it makes exercising a lot more fun by allowing you to race against your previously recorded tracks. Not only does it simulate a full virtual race, it also speaks to you and tells you exactly how far behind or ahead you are throughout the race. We’ve been running and biking with this feature for the past 2 months, and we have all improved our times a lot. It’s incredibly motivating — sometimes almost too much so, so please use it wisely!

To get the feature, you start CardioTrainer (version 1.0 or above), and then click on Start > Race Against Yourself. You will then see a screen that tells you about the feature and allows you to buy it for $2.99 (see the screenshots above). Once you click on the “Buy” button below, it will forward you to the Android Market, where you pay for it. Once you install the feature, you can go back to CardioTrainer and Race, Race, Race!

We would really appreciate it if you can try it out for $2.99 and then tell us if everything works for you, and how you like it. All purchases have a 24-hour refund policy, so feel free to refund it if you don’t like it — our main goal is always to have happy users and to experiment with this business model early on, before we commit to it. So we would appreciate any feedback. Is it too annoying or confusing to buy separate features? Would you prefer a single premium version instead? Or would you prefer some other business model entirely? Does it feel strange to spend the $2.99 for a feature inside the program? Any other feedback? Please write us and tell us (or tells us in the user survey below). And tell your friends to do the same. It will help make CardioTrainer even better.

Besides racing, we’ve also added:

• Calorie counting (based on weight  & activity type you can choose in the settings)
• Pace voice output
• Improved climb calculations
• Tons of other small fixes
• CardioTrainer website updates: elevation graph and information about your total mileage.

2. CardioTrainer User Survey

We receive many e-mails from users every day asking for new features, reporting bugs, or just simply telling us they love CardioTrainer. We absolutely love it, so keep it coming! As you can imagine, our to-do list is now full of hundreds of great ideas, and it’s getting a bit hard to prioritize them all. That’s why we have decided to do the first CardioTrainer user survey. Please help us by completing it — this is your chance to give us detailed feedback, and it will certainly determine the future direction of the product. In addition, if you have any friends who are current (or potential exercisers!), but don’t use CardioTrainer, please ask them to take this survey as well.

Take the survey!

3. Future Developments

We’re already hard at work on the next version of CardioTrainer (Yes, we do sleep. Sometimes.). In this version, we’re focusing on improving the tracking experience. As many of you have reported, the G1 GPS is really buggy,  and CardioTrainer is unfortunately at the mercy of the GPS signals and hardware. Google has acknowledged the problem, so we know we are not alone. But we don’t give up easily. We are taking some very innovative steps to best cope with these hardware glitches, as well as improve the tracking accuracy. We’re also working on adding new website features, so keep your eyes open for these.

We finally have a real corporate website! Don’t worry, we’re still the same friendly
family, but now you can learn a little bit about our team & vision.

Check it out and tell us what you think: contact@worksmartlabs.com