Meet Marie Filippigh, our new team member!

We had been working with her for a while, but she finally joined us yesterday to work with us full-time in Paris. We are thrilled to have her join our ranks. She kicks ass, she is brilliant, and she is exactly what we were looking for.

Marie is a six-times National Golf Champion, HEC and UC Berkeley graduate and certified training coach. She is passionate about sports and nutrition. She'll be our lead Business Developer and will be in charge of devising Bodywhat's training programs as well.

Here's her LinkedIn profile. You should totally follow her on Instagram. You may contact her at Marie@bodywhat.com!

A quick post to celebrate a victory! Yesterday, we reached the

landmark on our MVP!

Also, we just passed the 400 Likes mark on our Facebook page!

What can we gather from this? Probably that we should work on getting our actual users to like our Facebook page, as one's number of likes is, as we all know, the one most important vanity metric there is.

At the moment, we're getting tremendous amounts of work done at StartUp42, yet we are realising we're just not doing enough.

Our #1 priority is expanding the team, but we are also actively working on redesigning our website, brand personality, logo, UX, UI, mascot (*), value proposition, business model... everything really.

More on that later!

* We shall keep Rob, but we will freshen his looks a bit.

We're thrilled to announce that we've joined the 6th class of Startup42, the Paris Tech accelerator sponsored by EPITA.

We'll be working in their premises for the next four months, in Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, along with our classmates:

• ProcessOut -- a super-easy-to-integrate global payment gateway that takes the pain out of integrating multiple payment solutions at once.

• Ad Scientiam -- an e-health company that improves patients' lives and treatments by analyzing the data gathered from their smartphones and activity trackers.

• Cavacave -- a high-end C2B and C2C wine marketplace where you'll find even the rarest vintage of your favorite wine brand.

• Breazit -- a hardware & software startup developing the world's first smart, connected essential oil diffuser.

• BlackFoot -- a team of domotic hackers currently working on an interactive holographic device with both B2B and B2C applications in mind.

• and SmartSubs -- an ed-tech startup that helps you improve your English while watching your favorite series and reading any English content.

They'll help us speed things up big time, refine our business model, meet and network with lots entrepreneurs and investors, prepare our next funding round, and (hopefully) get ready for takeoff...

Last week, we unexpectedly hit the frontpage of Reddit's Fitness section, got published on Product Hunt by Fitocracy's CEO Brian Wang (thanks!), and were featured in a Business Insider article. All of this happening in the span of 16 hours.

The ensuing traffic brought us more than 10.000 visitors and 3.000 user registrations. Sadly, we would probably have had a lot more of these had we have not to kill our servers.

Basically, everything that could break, did. One after the other. It was an hectic day trying to keep our servers up, but in the end we had to give up and them offline for some heavy-duty maintenance.

The interesting part is that 100% of our growth is organic. As far as we're concerned, we're still in stealthy beta, so we are not actively looking for new users ( but everybody is welcome! ).

So what's the plan now? Still the same as before:

• Develop female and full-body support
• Refine our algorithms
• Develop the fitness & nutrition coach
• Get the mobile apps out

Once all of this is done, in an estimated 6 to 9 months, Bodywhat will officially be out of beta.

Yesterday, Bodywhat gave a 90-minutes seminar about Computer Vision & Machine Learning at the leading French engineering school Telecom ParisTech.

We were invited to intervene as guest speakers as part of Telecom's prestigious Big Data Master degree.

Previous guest speakers included Romain Niccoli, CTO and co-founder of Criteo, and Xavier Casellato, VP of engineering at Liligo.

It was the first time we made an in-depth, technical presentation about the technologies we use here at Bodywhat. It was a thrilling opportunity. Thank you to everyone who attended!

Charles Labroy & Maxime Lonné

Special thanks to our great friend and brilliant data scientist Paul Mochkovitch who made this presentation possible!

We've gathered a lot of stats and feedback from a pool of ~130 beta users and more than 1500 visitors, and they're just great. That's exactly what we were looking for to validate our plans and go ahead.

We're now looking to raise an angel funding round (late seed) and to join an accelerator either in Paris or London to speed things up. The plan is to remain in stealth mode until the mobile apps are done and everything is ready for the official launch.

Following the users' feedback, here are the things we implemented this week:

• HTML5 webcam support: users can now use their webcam to directly take their picture.
• An option to send your picture directly from your phone, to smooth the creation process: the picture transfer from phone to PC was a recurring pain point among users.
• A dozen smaller changes here in there, including more detailed instructions for picture taking and a new body metric (the Basal Metabolic Rate, which is an important parameter when it comes to devising your nutrition plan).

We've also done quite a lot of work on the backend!

• Bulletproofed the image & 3D processing server in reaction to the few crashes that occurred. The server is now fail-safe, self-rebootable, self-destructable, and soon to become skynet.
• Did a big upgrade on the 3D engine: it's now lighter and faster, and runs on (some) mobile devices!

Next big piece of work ahead: Female users support. I'll be in my bunk, crunching C++ until it's done.

You may read it at the following address.

We got great technical questions, feedback, and signups! As I'm writing this, out of 174 unique visitors from Reddit, 15 of them signed up for the service.

That seems like a high conversion rate, especially considering /r/startups isn't really Bodywhat's target audience and we that we don't support female users yet. But at the same time, people in this subreddit are mostly tech enthusiasts always willing to try out new apps. Peut-être que ceci explique cela.

I've started posting on our facebook page as well! I feel like this blog will rather act as a launch/technical diary, while we'll be posting fitness-related content on our facebook page and via our mailing list.

Update with final figures 2 days later:

• 1217 unique visitors came from /r/startups. 91% were male.
• 102 visitors registered an account.
• 91 reports were created!
  

It's a soft launch; I'll be posting announcements here and there (Reddit mostly) and looking for users as time progresses. I just need to get over my cold feet...

I've put together a picture to explain how BodyWHAT works:

Happy new year,
Charles

Bodywhat has been in private beta for roughly two weeks, and it's given me just enough time to make sure the server will be able to sustain more than a dozen users at once.

In two weeks:

• The server crashed 4 times.
• A critical coding error in a cleanup function wiped the whole database on the second day (!)
• We've had about fifteen beta testers try out the service. Most of them came from Reddit! Thanks guys :)
• We've added in a few features, most importantly the walk-through-your-results tour and the bodyfat reprocessing option.
• We published a few new celebrities' reports, including Dwayne "THE ROCK" Johnson, "The Muscle from Brussels" Jean Claude Van Damme and "The Stath" Jason Statham

Bodywhat is 100% ready to go public! But I'm delaying it a little bit until after New Year's eve. Releasing when people make their new year's resolutions feels like a good opportunity (isn't the time right after new year's eve when gym subscriptions spike the highest? Google Trends couldn't agree more).

Anyways, until then we need to bulk up a few pages such as the FAQ, come up with a readable TOS and a clear Privacy Policy (Max is working hard on those). I'll prolly be working on the frontpage as well.

Also, I've been thinking about creating a robot mascot for Bodywhat. One that would be there to tell you bluntly how fit, how fat or how sexy you look right in your report's results...

See you in a bit!
Charly

Bodywhat does Body Analysis through pictures.

The app will estimate your bod yfat percentage, tell you how sexy you look, and create a 3D model of your body using just a picture of you.

It's like body-scanning, except you only need your phone, and you can use the service from the privacy of your home.

Bodywhat is aimed at athletes and people who want to know more about their physique in general. If you ever wondered what your bodyfat percentage is, then you're part of the target audience.

Phew! But it's not only that; it's also a database of bodies of all sizes and shapes that is open for browsing.

But that description is still too long. We need something shorter. Maybe:

• Visual Analysis for your Body
• Have a robot check out your body
• Body Analytics for Athletes
• The Online Body Database
• Estimate your Body Fat with Computer vision

But I can't really make up my mind.

The technical side of Bodywhat is something I will be talking about a lot. I should start soon a series of technical blog posts to describe what it's like under the hood.