When attached to an arm, the WeightUp sensor can measure position and acceleration during various lifts.
Daniel Litvak was working out one day in late 2014 when he noticed some weightlifters doing a ridiculous thing: using paper and pen to document workout data.
“As a computer science major and entrepreneur, that just felt wrong,” he says.
Litvak imagined a device that could capture and stream the data to lifters’ phones. Fourteen months later, a much different device than he initially imagined is gaining traction, not among weightlifters, but football coaches.
“Football coaches have a lot to gain by working out [their players] slightly better,” Litvak explains. “Small improvements can change a coach’s life.”
Inventing a physical gadget was more or less a logical next step in Litvak’s entrepreneurial development.
At 23, he has already formed three businesses. After teaching himself to build websites as a teenager in Los Angeles, he turned his hobby into a revenue stream.
He launched a music blog during his freshman year at UW-Madison, but, says Litvak, “No one wants to pay a 19-year-old blogger.”
In 2013, he co-founded Fetch Rewards, an app that makes grocery shopping more efficient and less expensive.
But inventing a physical tech product is one thing; bringing it to market is another.
After conducting some preliminary research, Litvak, in mid-2015, pivoted away from the idea of affixing WeightUp to lifters’ squat racks and toward a wearable device that would eventually stream more than 1,000 data points to a lifter’s phone or tablet.
Not having the electrical engineering background needed for surmounting the challenges around signal processing and sensor fusion, Litvak brought Pete Chulick aboard as a WeightUp Solutions co-founder.
Chulick, 28, is a computer engineer and a weightlifter, and he thought Litvak’s idea was “fantastic.”
“I have a three-inch-thick binder full of sheets with my workout information,” he says. “The idea of me not having to do that anymore was great.”
They raised $75,000 from family and friends, and the rest was history.
Well, almost.
Turns out, Litvak learned, that manually counting reps wasn’t an important enough problem — or pain point — to justify an expensive, fancy gadget. It wasn’t all that interesting, either.
“Say I did 10 squats,” Litvak says, “that’s really cool and all, but if I tell you the first three I went down three feet; the next three I went down two and a half feet, but came up much slower; and the last three I barely went down and really struggled to get back up....”
Litvak pauses.
“That didn’t come out to 10,” he laughs. “Aside from my simple math knowledge, that data was a lot more interesting.”
With seed money in hand, Chulick and Litvak began fleshing out the numerous challenges between them and the market. As Litvak developed the software underpinning the Weight-Up system, Chulick brought the idea down to the wearable scale, soldering, by hand, tiny components onto circuit boards purchased in China.
The finished boards, each encased in a 3D-printed box, send real-time data, via Bluetooth link, to a lifter’s phone, where downloaded software crunches the numbers. Although it worked, it wasn’t pretty.
“We hired a product designer to turn the 3D-printed box into a really nice thing that when people see it, they like it, and when they hold it, it fits in their hand well,” Litvak says.
The product designer, Chulick says, brought a whole different perspective to the WeightUp. “We only see the performance aspects,” he says. “It’s like trying to sell a car’s horsepower without any of the amenities.”
The final version is a flat, trapezoid-shaped piece of plastic filament affixed to a changeable wristband that they’re aiming to put in consumers’ hands. But among WeightUp’s early adopters are the football coaches at Edgewood High School and UW-Oshkosh.
Football programs at both colleges have begun using WeightUp. Players attached the device to their wrist strap, and as they lift the data is sent to coaches.
“For football coaches, outnumbered in the weight room by 30 to 50, it’s impossible to keep track of everything,” Litvak says. “There’s a lot more money in the football market, too.”
Good thing, because they’re going to need it.
“We’re still building every unit by hand, because we’re not at a point where we can afford to ship it off and have someone do it for us,” Chulick explains.
It will run $5,000 to $10,000 upfront to mass-produce the circuit boards. “That’s not even a per unit price,” Chulick says.
To have the cases injection-molded costs $8,000 on the low end. “Then you have your mold, but if it doesn’t work or you make a change, it’s another $8,000.”
At first, it took them eight hours to make 20 of the devices, but with practice, they can now make a couple hundred each day.
“We’re at a point now where we need to start raising money again,” Litvak says. “The $75,000 in seed money was just to figure out whether it was possible to build.”
Editor's note: This article was corrected to note that Edgewood High School's football team, not Edgewood College's, is using WeightUp.
