The discussion about the origins of Lane Vision, its marketing, and the challenges faced in positioning it for the market.

Origins of Lane Vision

Exploring the AR capacity within the app, challenges with data accuracy, and the shift to a more manual solution.

AR Capacity and Data Accuracy

The process of automatic sharing within the app, frustration among coaches and parents, and the solution to keep everyone in the loop.

Automatic Sharing and Parental Involvement

The process of filming races, sharing data, and the need for an easier way to assign multiple swimmers to a heat.

Filming and Data Sharing Process

Discussion about the business relationship with Finis, sales perspective, and subscription plans for different user groups.

Business Relationship and Subscription

The development process, improvements in functionality, and the challenges faced in making the app more user-friendly.

App Development and Functionality

Details about the subscription pricing, market impact, and the need for community support in app development.

Subscription Pricing and Market Impact

The long-term vision for the app, market penetration goals, and the focus on gradual improvement over time.

Long-term Vision and Market Penetration

Demonstration of the video evaluation process, communication between coach and athlete, and the integration of data analysis with swim training.

Video Evaluation and Communication

Collaboration with developers, functionality improvements, and the focus on continuous development and improvement.

Coaching and Development Collaboration

Discussion about market strategy, user engagement, and the need for customer ownership and support.

Market Strategy and User Engagement

The importance of tracking athlete progress and data analysis, and the potential impact on the sport of swimming.

Athlete Progress Tracking and Data Analysis

The emphasis on coach-athlete communication, athlete education, and the shift in responsibility for race evaluation to the athlete.

Coach-Athlete Communication and Education

Introduction to video analytics, data management, and the challenges of handling a large volume of videos.

Video Analytics and Data Management

Explanation of strokes, stroke cycles, tempo, and distance per cycle in swimming.

Understanding Strokes and Patterns

Discussion on turn time, finish time, and swim velocity in swimming.

Calculating Turn Time and Finish Time

Overview of user experience, onboarding process, and involving parents in the coaching process.

User Experience and Onboarding

# GoSwim Newsletter

## The Evolution of GoSwim

### A Brief History
- GoSwim originated as an app called Lane Vision, marketed through Finis.
- It took about 5 years to develop the app to its current state, making it functional and user-friendly for the swimming market.

### App Features and Capabilities
- The app has full AR capacity, but it hasn't been turned on yet due to data accuracy concerns.
- The data accuracy is about 90-95%, making it necessary to switch to a more manual solution.
- The app is now more manual, but it's automatically shareable, making it easier for coaches and swimmers to access and analyze data.

### Business Relationship and Pricing
- GoSwim is now a partnership between Phineas and the developers.
- The app is available on a subscription basis, with special college plans and pricing.

### Real-World Use Scenarios
- The app has been successfully used at Northwestern University, making it easier for coaches and swimmers to access and analyze race data.

### Coach and Athlete Communication
- The app allows for seamless communication between coaches and swimmers, making it easier for athletes to add data and for coaches to analyze and provide feedback.

### Developer Meetings and Future Plans
- The development team meets regularly to improve the app's functionality and add new features.
- The goal is to continue improving the app to make it user-friendly for all levels of swimmers and coaches.

### Market Penetration and Long-Term Goals
- The goal is to have a widespread market penetration, with the app being used by a significant percentage of swim clubs with a hundred or more members.
- The long-term goal is to contribute valuable data and insights to the sport of swimming, especially for young swimmers.

### App Demonstration and Future Features
- The app allows for easy race recording and data analysis, with plans for additional features to improve accuracy and usability.
- The website also offers analytics and data visualization for coaches to track their swimmers' progress.

### New Features and Enhancements
- The app now includes stroke cycle, tempo, distance per cycle, turn time, finish time, and swim velocity data.
- The app is designed to be user-friendly and can be easily used by athletes and parents to capture and analyze race data.

### Conclusion
- GoSwim is continuously evolving to provide the best user experience for coaches and swimmers, with a focus on data accuracy, ease of use, and long-term benefits for the swimming community.

"Revolutionize Your Swimming Experience with GoSwim: The Ultimate App for Coaches and Swimmers"

- The app Lane Vision was originally marketed through Finis but was not positioned correctly for the market
- It took 5 years to improve the app and make it more functional for users
- The app now allows for full AR capacity, but it hasn't been turned on due to accuracy issues
- The app is now more manual but automatically shareable, making it easier for coaches, swimmers, and parents to use
- The subscription price varies, with the standard price being $99 a year
- The app has been on the market for about a year and a half, with recent improvements and positive feedback from users
- The app has been particularly beneficial for coaching and training in swimming techniques and stroke analysis

- The speaker discusses the importance of teaching people to figure things out on their own rather than holding their hand through the process.
- They talk about their experience with developing an app, the challenges they faced, and the need for community support.
- The speaker emphasizes the value of their app for coaches and swimmers, and their goal to contribute to the long-term progression of swimmers.
- They also mention the decline in USA swimming numbers and the need for gradual improvement to keep people engaged in the sport.

- The speaker discusses using a phone to record and analyze swim races
- They demonstrate how to use the annotation tools and record button to analyze a swimmer's performance
- The website allows coaches to access and analyze their swimmers' videos and data
- They also discuss upcoming features for more accurate analysis, such as head or shoulder breakout measurements

- The speaker discusses the importance of tracking swim data using a consumer-level product
- They explain how different metrics such as strokes, stroke cycle, tempo, and distance per cycle are measured
- The speaker emphasizes the simplicity of using the product, including adding data and sharing videos with athletes and coaches
- They highlight the role of parents in the process and the importance of not usurping the coach's message

- Lane Vision app was initially marketed through Finis but had positioning issues
- It took 5 years to improve the app's functionality
- The app now offers full AR capacity but hasn't been activated due to accuracy issues
- It's more manual but automatically shareable, making it easier for coaches, swimmers, and parents to use
- Subscription price varies, with the standard price being $99 a year
- The app has been on the market for about a year and a half, with recent improvements and positive feedback
- It's beneficial for coaching and training in swimming techniques and stroke analysis
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of teaching people to figure things out on their own and discusses the challenges of app development
- They highlight the decline in USA swimming numbers and the need for gradual improvement to keep people engaged
- The app allows for recording and analyzing swim races, with upcoming features for more accurate analysis
- The speaker emphasizes the simplicity of using the product and the importance of not usurping the coach's message.

Basically, where everything started was it originated as an app called Lane Vision, which was something that that John was marketing through Finis.

And I'm not sure it was positioned correctly.

And I wasn't sure if it worked correctly for the market.

And so what we did was we took it over and it's taken about 5 years to get it where it is right now.

So it was a heavy lift, convincing people that The way that it was working back then was not necessarily functional for our market.

Now it's great from a one-on-one standpoint, and we do have that capability.

And what I mean by that is that you can use full AR capacity within the app, but we haven't turned it on.

And the reason we haven't turned it on is because we don't have enough sample size for for the app to recognize backstroke flags and ladders and splashes and different things like that.

So the data is about 90 95% accurate, which means that you spend more your time going back to correct what it missed than just analyzing the data.

So we switched it over to a more manual solution and it actually works really, really well from that standpoint.

Now it's a little bit more work, but the way that we've adjusted for that is that we've made it automatically shareable.

Now the way that Rachel uses it at Northwestern is that 1 of the assistants will film the races, the athletes get it automatically on their devices, The athletes add the data to it.

And then Rachel and the other coaches get the data without doing anything.

And so it's really the process of things.

And when you look at a club team, you got every parent, you know, pretty much is filming their athletes.

So as they film it, the coaches are being frustrated because the coaches are cut out of the loop.

And so they don't really know what's happening with that video.

Well, if they're in the platform, when the parents film it, the coaches get it, the swimmers add the data and the coach can look at it.

It also goes along with the evaluations or any annotations that take place on the app, the big part of it is automatic sharing from 1 to the other.

And so the coaches don't have to do anything.

Everything takes place in the background.

And so we've kind of built tech to take tech out of the way of people, you know, and put it in front of who wants it the most.

And obviously that's mostly the swimmers and the coaches.

But you know, there's enough parents out there that are fairly tech savvy at this point.

And it's actually very simple once you once you learn how to do it.

Yeah, I think that means that you're going to push on the button.

And, And so and that's sort of a new thing that you put in.

And then the other thing is 1 of my questions I think you addressed it is if there are 3 kids in the same heat, yo, your coach or somebody could film the whole race.

But then it's going to automatically get dispersed each of the 3 people that are swimming, and then they could go back and touch on their entries.

So basically what you have to do is you have to assign multiple swimmers to a heat and we're working on an easier way to do that.

But obviously that's something that we have to do for the colleges because you know, Rachel has a dual meet.

And so you need different data sets for everybody.

And so you're going to, you're going to film the, you know, as much of the pool as possible keeping everybody in the in the frame as possible.

And then you go into the data screen and you create a new data set that data set is then shared with the athlete.

But we're working on the system that'll make it that'll make it smoother.

So Phineas is going to market it, you're going to market it has people download it off the App Store?

Well, we took it over from Phineas, but it is definitely a very, very slight partnership, but it's our app.

Finis will be helping from a sales perspective.

And so we're harnessing some of their sales people to push this out and then they'll get a percentage of that.

And we have special college plans because we don't have to worry as much about, it's not that we don't have to worry as much about the privacy, but the laws are set in such a way that athletes over 18, they're treated different than athletes under 18.

So athletes under 18, they all have to own their own account.

And so the parents have to buy it, but then the parents have all the rights to the videos and the data.

And so if they want to delete it, they click 1 button, everything's gone.

And so, you know, that's GDPR, that's the privacy laws over in Europe.

And then we've got COPA, MAP, Safe Sport, California, Colorado Privacy Protection.

So we cover all of those things for coaches and for athletes and for parents.

It all depends on where they come in from.

Okay, if they come in through us, it would actually be a little bit less if they come in just through the general public, it's $99 a year.

Top end is 99 a year, coach account is 124.99 and then you can create your groups and do all that stuff.

Well, It's been on the market for about a year and a half, but very glitchy.

I haven't, you know, really put it out there until maybe about 5 weeks ago.

And a lot of it was really the, the real world use scenario with Northwestern, you know, being able to go in, have, have 50 athletes and 5 coaches.

And what are the things that needed to work automatically?

And then there's a lot of meetings with the developers and saying, okay, this isn't functional, or this isn't as smooth as it can be.

And So it was really the last few months where we really started getting into how do you use it at scale and how does it work?

And so it's been just fantastic to the point that I'll show you that If I teach a lesson at Northwestern and the parent is, well, all the lessons that I teach now, everyone has to be a member because it is so much easier for me as well as they get a better service.

But I'll show you, there's a parent sitting at the end of the pool.

And by the time I walked over to show the kid, the video, the parent had the data and the video on their phone.

And so they knew what I was going to tell the kid before I even got there, because they could tell whether or not that swimmer had accomplished what I asked them to accomplish.

So it's actually changed the way that I teach.

Because I do believe a lot in, in statics and that's because I've been in the endless pool for the last 5 years and, and in my house in Scottsdale.

And so I love to be able to say, okay, we're going to go this water speed, but we're going to vary the tempo and see what happens and how do you control it and all that sort of thing.

So in here, we use actual data on the swimmer and say, okay, you have to go this many strokes or you have to do this, but you can't go any slower.

And so we get the athlete to start to figure out the real world solution to, you know, how do I adapt?

How do I make things better without going slower?

Now we all know we can look pretty and go slow, but unfortunately that's not our goal, especially with young swimmers.

Well, it's hard to do stroke content in an endless pool, right?

So, as a coach, how do you get, how do you change the vocabulary?

I've never used an end, I've seen them, I know of them, but I would love to own an endless pool, but never have used it.

When you can start to see someone swimming knowledge in an endless pool and when I say swimming knowledge it's the feel, it's the ability to adapt.

Okay, so I'll give you an example and this isn't for every triathlete but for most triathletes that don't have a swimming background.

If I have a set water speed, okay, and I swim, you know, get an idea of where they are and I get a tempo of where they feel comfortable at that water speed.

If I change that tempo, you'll watch 1 or 2 things happen.

And if I increase the tempo, they will swim into the motor at the front.

They have the same force production on every stroke, no matter what their tempo is.

And so what happens is if they try to go faster, or if they try to increase the tempo, they go faster, but then they die sooner.

And so the idea for an open water swimmer would be that they have this rhythm in their stroke where they almost don't feel, they're just kind of helping themselves along.

There's not a lot of power involved in it.

So you want to increase the tempo, but maintain the speed, which means decreasing the power force on each stroke.

So you're rolling from 1 stroke into the next.

If you do that to a swimmer, they start to figure it out.

They're like, okay, I'll shorten up my release a little bit.

You know, you kind of work on different parts of the stroke.

Whereas to teach a swimmer, what you do is you maintain the velocity or the water speed, you minimize the rate or you slow the rate down, which means that each stroke has to get longer.

They have to figure out how to rotate better, extend, how to connect.

And, you know, so there's different things for different people that you can do in there.

And I love it because it's, you, you know, you tell them, you know, you let them figure it out on their own.

And, you know, so the challenge is to stress them and strain them to a point where they have to figure it out.

And then you can kind of guide them in certain ways.

But it really is, I'm 1 of those people that, you know, if, if I ask somebody to do something, they'll say, how do I do it?

I think that's a better teaching, you know, perspective than me just holding their hand and saying, you know, then after they try something, we'll talk about it.

But I want someone to discover these things on their own, rather than me saying, okay, put your hand at a 30 degree angle.

And then as you move forward, get the elbow to for, you know, all that stuff.

There's a team that we get together 2 to 3 nights a week, usually very late at night because they're not, the headquarters is in San Francisco, but the workers are in India.

So the development meetings are at 10 p.m.

But we're getting to, we're almost getting to the point where there's all kinds of features that I want in it that aren't in it yet, that we can start to look at and we can start to clean things up because from a functionality standpoint, we, it is, it is fantastic.

And, and I've had meetings with people that said, I downloaded a year ago.

And I said, well, it's the same app, but it's fixed.

And so I want you to delete the app, reinstall it, open it up, and they do it and they go, oh, wait, oh my gosh, this works great.

And so it's been a lot of that sort of thing that's been going on lately.

And I said, this is why I didn't talk to you a year ago, because I would have just spent all my time on customer service trying to help you figure out how to use it.

I imagine investment has been pretty steep.

It's I mean, that's the thing I have a lot of people say that, you know, they talk about coaches I from the annotation standpoint and things like that.

And when coaches I went out of business, it was really incentive for us to say, okay, we have to add that component to it, because I was a huge coaches I user.

And so I would have people say, what are you using after coaches?

And I said, coaches, I and they said, well, it shut down.

And I said, well, they gave you a year runway when they shut down.

I said, were you using the free version or the paid version?

And a lot of people say, well, I'm just using the free version.

And so we're asking that the community support the development that we put in.

Because like I said, if you added up the number of hours that we put into this and the man hours and the team in India and my partner and myself, It's thousands and thousands of hours.

And if I'm teaching that from a swim lesson, it's 150 bucks an hour.

Okay, so I mean, it's been it's been a labor.

I just spent 3 days with Brent Rudemiller at NCAAs And Brent and I would go on hikes twice a week for the past 4 or 5 years out in Arizona.

OK, he saw the entire process of my frustration of every 04:30 in the morning.

We go up on a hike and all I talk about is, I can't believe it's not working.

And so he sat next to me at NCAAs and I filmed 1 of the races and I turned the phone to him and all the data and everything was in there.

And he just said, he, he, I mean, it was 1 of the best compliments I got.

He said, I don't know if most people would have stuck this out, you know, that you, you know, and so that was 1 of those things, but, you know, it is who we are, right.

All of us, it's like, we're optimists and we're going to just keep going.

It's why we're in athletics and not, you know, doing something else.

There's always something that we're working toward and we're not going to give up until we get there or go bankrupt, I guess.

So, and fortunately, fortunately, I mean, you know, it wasn't easy, but we've made it.

But you need to get into their pockets too, you know, so people have to chip in, they have to own it.

And that's the thing, we went to the subscription basis for GoSwim in 2011.

We were the first people to go into that.

We added the ability for coaches to share.

We have over 100,000 free people in go swim to the point where we don't allow people to create free accounts on the open market anymore, because the conversion wasn't there.

However, coaches can create an account and invite all of their swimmers in for free and share a video every day to the athletes.

We will support the education of the sport of swimming.

But what we can't support anymore is a hundred thousand people that come in and say, okay, give me a video every day.

I'm not going to pay you a cent Because I've had people say that when we switched over and we took the free link away, they said, I will never pay you.

And so there's, you know, it's on the internet.

And so what we've done is actually, like I said, we've actually gone the other way.

We've added tons of services, and now we're discounting for teams that come in through us so that we can hold their hand, make sure it's working correctly.

And, you know, we want to, we want it to be used for the way that it's supposed to be used.

And that is AAA coach and a swimmer communication tool that makes the coach's job easier, gives the coaches, you know, data to a standpoint where, you know, I'm going to use this data to have this entire set go at this tempo and these breakout points, because that's what they do it to me.

I'm talking, you know, like 2050s where you're trying to hit these marks every time.

You know, So there are times where you're just trying to say, okay, here's the performance that I want you swimming at, because this is what you did when you did your best time.

So let's go there, and then let's see how long we can hold it, or can we get 2 to 3 inches more of distance per cycle out of the same rate.

Because that's going to increase velocity.

So again, you know, we've, we've, we've invested a lot of time and money into this thing And we're hoping, you know, it's all done on faith, but we're hoping that it's going to come through.

And the teams that I've met with so far have been very, very, you know, enthusiastic about what we've done.

Yeah, I figure it's like finding the sweet spot and you can really find it.

So then in the sweet spot in the marketplace, do you, do you figure someday that 25% of all the clubs with a hundred kids or more are going to have this?

What's your market penetration sweet spot?

You know, when I was an athlete, it was like, okay, if that person can do that, why can't I do it?

So it's kind of like if, you know, there's this, you don't want to put limitations on yourself from a human standpoint.

And so I look at someone like team unify, you know, if they got 4,000 teams, why can't I.

But I've got to build it in such a way that it is easy for everybody to use.

And on the lowest common denominator, what is this tool?

So for someone that doesn't want data, you got a 10 year old or an 8 year old out there.

If you look through your photo library in your phone and you try to find a race from 4 months ago, that's a 50 free for an 8 year old and you go through, you can't find it in here.

You go show me all my 50 frees and sort them by date.

And then, and then I think, okay, if we can make an organizational tool for age group parents that would be useful and price it low enough that it's a no brainer for them just to organize their videos.

What if that 8 year old becomes a 10 year old and well, we're hoping they will.

And then a 12 year old, and then they start to swim faster.

And then at 14, they're starting to, you know, move up to the junior level and junior Nats and things like that.

And maybe by the time they're 18, they're at Olympic trials.

And by the time they're 22, they're on the Olympic team.

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