Description: The WellWave Endure Band is a fitness wearable tailored specifically for professional and amateur endurance athletes – think marathon runners, triathletes, and ironman athletes. The wearable band’s accompanying digital app includes an AI fitness coach that synthesizes your personal metrics and fitness level as well as your goals to provide an optimized, adaptive training program. The band also comes with a social network on the app to connect users with other endurance athletes for motivation and friendly competition. Users will be able to post milestones they reach, workouts they did, and progress they made to share with their friends and peers.
Problem: One problem we found was that users of fitness wearables are often overwhelmed with information about their health, but these numbers are rarely if ever abstracted upon to help users understand what things they can do to improve their routine, and hiring personal coaches tends to be really expensive. Additionally, our research indicates that there is a strong demand for an all-in-one platform for health and social features. Furthermore, the fitness wearables on the market generally target casual users, not highly motivated endurance athletes and enthusiasts. Why: We are a team of builders who happen to also belong to the precise user group we are targeting and solving for, so we are personally and intimately familiar with these pain points. Our team includes a former D1 athlete and also a marathon runner, so we know that this problem is very much tangible and concrete from our own experience and also through the communities we are surrounded by.
Additionally, we’ve further validated these personal experiences with interviews from athletes, ranging from Stanford D1 student athletes to ultra-marathoners and ironmanners in their 20s and 30s, which all fall within our target group.
Finally, the market already has demonstrated willingness to pay (often high numbers) for wearables and training plans, which indicates that users are already searching for a fitness tracking and coaching solution.
Success: We’ve solved the problem when athletes trust our AI guidance enough to change their training behavior based on it.
Key metrics include: 75% daily active use with 60% following our recommendations, users spending under 5 minutes on training decisions, and 70% reporting increased confidence within 30 days. Community success means 40% joining training groups and averaging 3+ weekly social interactions. Business validation requires 25% trial-to-paid conversion, under 15% quarterly churn, NPS above 40, and 50% of users achieving their race goals within six months.
Audience: We’re targeting committed endurance athletes from ages 25-45, with income around $75K-150K training for marathons, Ironman triathlons, and ultra-endurance events. Our primary user trains 5-7 days/week, 8-15 hours total, is highly motivated but lacks professional coaching.. They’re tech-savvy with disposable income but struggle to interpret their data, adapt generic training plans to real life, and need community accountability. Our secondary audience is aspirational athletes such as those who recently signed up for their first marathon or triathlon, but are intimidated by training complexity, or can’t afford personal coaches, and are highly motivated by social proof.
What:
- The AI Coach
- Daily Action Card: The core screen delivers a single, simple, actionable recommendation (like GO HARD/ACTIVE RECOVERY/REST). This card synthesizes complex metrics into a decision that takes little time to process (solving the “overwhelmed” problem)
- Safety Alerts: Based on the vital user feedback that Harm Mitigation is one of the primary values, the app will feature an explicit, non-negotiable RED ALERT system (e.g., “HIGH STRESS FRACTURE RISK. STOP RUNNING NOW.”) that gets prioritized
- Goal-Based Plans: Users define their primary goal (e.g., “Sub-4 Hour Marathon”). The AI then generates an adaptive training calendar that automatically adjusts future sessions based on day to day performance and recovery
- The Social Network (Community)
- Mile Marker Feed: A simplified social feed that focuses exclusively on milestone sharing, race sign-ups, and group encouragement
- Data Sharing/Comparisons: Users can compare key metrics like Weekly Mileage or Training Load with their peers, driving motivation through friendly competition
- Metrics
- Band Focus: Tracks things like HRV, Sleep Stage Tracking, and Core Body Temperature (crucial for overtraining and heat stress prediction). The band’s primary utility is feeding the AI coach with high-fidelity input
- Minimalist Dashboard: The dashboard avoids clutter, dedicating the majority of the space to the Daily Action Card and the immediate next scheduled session, minimizing friction in making the daily training decision
How: Our path to execution centers on validating two critical assumptions before full-scale development. First, we must prove that our AI can generate genuinely actionable insights that endurance athletes will trust and follow. We’ll work closely with experienced endurance coaches and sports scientists to develop our AI training algorithms, then build functional prototypes and test them with a small cohort of target users, measuring whether the AI-generated plans match what credentialed coaches would recommend and whether athletes actually modify their training behavior based on the guidance. Second, we need to prove we can build a brand and community that drives organic growth by partnering with endurance influencers, particularly Ironman athletes, ultra-marathoners, and respected voices in the triathlon community. Primarily, we hope to continue to build the brand by working with these influencers to develop a product that they feel comfortable to support and would buy for themselves. Ideally, these two groups go hand in hand: a high performance product that provides strong insights is marketable itself for this group of athletes. However, it is important to ensure we make design decisions based on their feedback.
When: We aim to ship the first Endure bands mid-2026 to a few, hand-picked beta testers who can help build up hype. They will also be a great source of early feedback on our coaching AI. By late 2026, we are expecting to have v1 of the app ready and will start accepting orders for the band.
- Dec 2025: Design for band and app finalized, start working on app
- Jan 2025: first band prototypes ready, firmware test, basic app communication
- Feb 2026: revisions for hardware submitted, workout tracking functionality built on app
- Apr 2026: Second revision, all hardware working, app basic functionality ready, AI coaching work in progress
- May 2026: AI coaching beta ready, shipping to beta testers. Pre-orders open.
- Sept 2026: third hardware revision if applicable, UX/UI improvements in the app
- Nov 2026: Start shipping pre-orders, accepting general orders
- Feb 2027: Social Features released in beta
- June 2027: Social features GA
