10 Mar 2014
Belle
Frequently asked questions and commonly thrown criticisms
We were lucky enough to get some surprise attention around Exist in the past month. It was fun to see so many people looking at Exist and to discuss our plans and why we’re so excited about building it. Of course, not everyone was convinced immediately that we’re onto a good thing, or that Exist is worth paying for.
As a useful exercise for ourselves, but also to share what we’ve been discussing about Exist, I thought I’d collect some of the more common questions and criticisms about the product and our current backer campaign and share our responses.
How is Exist better/different to what Fitbit and Jawbone already offer?
For starters, when you use the Fitbit dashboard or the mobile app for your fitness tracker, you only have access to the data you collect with that device. Even if you import your weight or food data into your Jawbone or Fitbit account, you’re limited to the services they’ve integrated with (you’ll have the same issue with Exist, but only due to time constraints—we do want to integrate everything we can, eventually). Plus, these services are mostly focused on active data: stuff that you track on purpose like workouts or diet. Exist includes all of the data you make without thinking about it, like the music you listen to, or the weather.
Even more importantly: you don’t get any extra insights from having that data imported to your Fitbit or Jawbone account. Exist not only connects all of that data together from different services, but it finds connections in the data and shows you insights and suggestions to help you live better.
Isn’t this just a service to encourage navel-gazing?
It could be, sure. We’re not encouraging navel-gazing but if that’s how you want to use it, we’re not going to stop you.
Having said that, our aim is really to make this data useful and to help people who want to change their lives. If you’re trying to work out what’s triggering your bad sleep or grumpy moods, or you’re experimenting with a new morning routine to see how it affects you, Exist can help.
Our plan is to find connections in your data, and then turn those into actionable insights you can use. So, a correlation between your sleep and your mood might turn into a recommended bed time or a suggested album to listen to, to help you wind down for sleep.
Isn’t it a lot of effort to track everything about your life?
Yep. Way too much for me. There are people who track pretty much everything about their lives, and for them we hope Exist will make it a whole lot easier and less time-consuming.
For most of us, though, Exist will be helpful just by using a few different data sources. If you have a fitness tracker, you’re already gathering some different types of data that we can use: steps, floors, sleep, calories burned. Add in a few services you use every day like a music app, Twitter, and the weather where you are, and we suddenly have a bigger picture of your life than just your fitness tracker would.
As we add more services we’re trying to focus on passive data: that is, the data you create without meaning to. When you listen to music based on your mood, you’re not doing it to track your habits, you’re just living. We want you to keep on living the way you want to and let Exist collect all that data and find the insights hiding in there.
Lastly, I think Exist can be really useful for people who are trying short-term experiments. I do this quite often, where I try a new habit or lifestyle change for a month to see how it affects me. Exist helps me to see the differences in my data over time and look for causes behind the changes.
Why does it matter how many tweets I sent or songs I listened to last week?
It doesn’t, really. Unless you have context. The reason we’re interested in this type of data is because we know that the music you listen to and the places you visit and how much time you spend tweeting can give us clues into your lifestyle in general.
Here’s a good example: Exist has told me that there’s a correlation between my worst days (based on my mood score) and high numbers of tweets sent and tracks listened to.
Armed with this context, knowing how many tweets I sent or tracks I played today is actually useful, because high numbers point to too much time spent at home alone in front of the computer, and a higher likelihood that my mood score will be low.
Wouldn’t I be better off using generic research data to improve my activity levels/sleep?
Generic data from research studies is really interesting and can be useful. For instance, that’s how we know that your bedroom should be cool to help you sleep more soundly.
The problem with data like this is that it comes from an average or a majority—it doesn’t include context about your life specifically, and it will have a different degree of relevance to each person. It might point you in the right direction, but there’s no way to find out exactly what suits you apart from experimenting with your own habits.
We definitely want to include scientific research in Exist, because we can never offer completely one-on-one feedback to you. With a combination of research data and our relevant insights, our hope is that you’ll be able to find what works for you, specifically.
How can you really collect all the data about my life?
Okay, you got us. We don’t have all the data about your life, and we never will. We collect lots of data from different sources that represent different parts of your life. But “all the data” is much shorter and sweeter.
There are always going to be things affecting your life for which we have no data points, or it’s just not feasible to track. But our thinking is that the more data we can and do track, the more we can infer about the stuff we’re not able to record directly.
Why don’t you support x service or device?
It depends what you’re asking for, since there are a few different answers to this one. If it’s the Withings Pulse or MyFitnessPal you’re after, we’re working on those and should have them integrated by May.
For a lot of others, the answer is that they’re on our to do list. The list is huge, and we only have one developer so it will take us time to get to everything. In addition, since we now have a handful of data sources connected, we’re focusing on proving the core value of Exist, which is to find insights in your data and turn those into actionable suggestions. Aggregation is a means to an end, so more services will have to wait for now.
Lastly, there are some popular services we’d really like to integrate which don’t have APIs. That means they haven’t opened up the data for us to use, so we can’t integrate them. User demand is a good way to keep the pressure on your favourite service to release an API, so feel free to get in touch with us to check if that’s what’s holding your chosen service back from Exist integration.
Oh, and also: if it’s a music service you’re after, we probably have it on the list. In the meantime, however, we already have last.fm integrated and most major music services let you set up last.fm scrobbling in your settings.
Is this “vapourware”? (i.e. are you pretending you’ve built it to get our money?)
Nope. We really made this. It has a long way to go yet, but everything you see in those screenshots is a real shot of the product. Plus, we even have a handful of close friends using it already to help us test it out. You can’t do that with mockups.
As tough as it is, I’m starting to think gritting our teeth and being willing to be wrong or fail in public could actually be the best initiation for us as startup founders. Hopefully this is another step along that path.
If you have a question or criticism, feel free to email us or hit us up on Twitter.