​🎧🍌 Fixing the Health Metric No One Tracks | Miranda Nover, Fort Health

Miranda Nover is the Co-founder and CEO of Fort Health. Fort builds wearables that automatically track strength training for people who care about longevity.

This is a new format of the podcast that I’m experimenting with. It’s the first time I’ve had a Banana portfolio company founder on the show while they’re still at the pre-seed stage. Miranda is still very much working through the idea maze and iterating on the Fort product.

When I surveyed all of you a few weeks ago, you were most interested in more early stage VC-backed founders. I’d love your feedback on what you think of this!

We talk about the megatrends in consumer health, why she’s building a company that helps you get stronger, and everything she’s learned getting a hardware company off the ground.

She’s also in the middle of the current YC batch, and gives an inside look at what YC is like and if she’d recommend it to other founders.

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👉 Stream on Spotify and Apple

Timestamps to jump in:

• 3:37 Importance of strength training

• 6:34 Benefits of being strong

• 10:37 Evolution of Fort’s hardware

• 15:58 Automating workout tracking

• 19:29 Two types of strength trainers

• 25:30 Building the strength company

• 27:26 How healthcare is consumerizing

• 40:43 Lessons building batteries at Tesla

• 44:56 Hardest parts about building a hardware startup

• 51:01 Adventures in vibe coding

• 57:54 How to use Twitter as a founder

• 1:02:09 The launch video industrial complex

• 1:08:03 What it’s like doing YC

• 1:10:19 Selling crayons in 3rd grade, Lemonade stands

• 1:14:41 Miranda’s best vintage finds

• 1:16:44 How Turner evolved as a VC

• 1:22:22 Turner’s early social media PMF

• 1:28:53 Inventing shitposting

Referenced:

• Try Fort

Find Miranda on X / Twitter and LinkedIn

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👉 Stream on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple

Transcript

Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.

Turner Novak:

Miranda, welcome to the show.

Miranda Nover:

Thank you.

Turner Novak:

So I’m excited. We’re going to talk a lot about just consumer health topics and hardware stuff, like building a hardware company. And you’re very in the thick of it still trying to figure it out and get it all to work.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

So can you real quick for people who aren’t familiar with Fort, what is it?

Miranda Nover:

Fort is a wearable device. I actually have one on right now and it automatically tracks strength training and it’s for people who care about longevity.

Turner Novak:

So what’s the importance of that?

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. So we as a society have recently emphasized strength a lot more than we have in the past several decades of wellness. There’s been a lot of great research about how important strength is to maintaining our independence, our metabolism as we age. And then also, I think culturally there’s been a lot of memes and a lot of public interest around people getting jacked, but it’s not in the bodybuilding way that it was in the ‘80s. I feel like a lot of the people that do get jacked, like Mark Zuckerberg is an interesting example of this.

He’s not a bodybuilder, but he certainly cares a lot about fitness and cares a lot more about being muscular than a lot of the public figures, I guess, did in the past.

Turner Novak:

Even Bezos.

Miranda Nover:

Bezos too, yeah.

Turner Novak:

Bezos is that one iconic picture of him at, I think, it’s probably like a Sun Valley Conference where he’s got the vest on and he has the sunglasses and he’s just like, he look jacked. Shoulders look like a box because he’s just so big.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. And obviously influencer culture has played a huge role in this because now there’s all these people who post crazy gym footage and people learn how to work out online and people share not only their physique, but also their this morning routine, wellness routine. I think there’s also… COVID played a big role in the rise of wellness culture and also tangentially the rise of strength. Especially for my generation, I feel like it brought to the surface a lot of distrust in the medical system that was already brewing.

And I think that people who experienced some of that distrust, a lot of them took to more like… Homeopathic is not the right word, but more like DIY ways to stay well. I think there’s also been a lot more of a sharing culture because people are figuring out new ways to keep themselves well and then they talk with others about, “What’s your supplement stack? What’s your sleep score?” And this is something that other wearable companies have brought into the public discourse.

So I think there’s this distrust in the medical system and not so much that it’s very expensive to receive different types of healthcare, especially preventative healthcare in America and people are also just more open to sharing and talking about it.

Turner Novak:

What are the benefits of being strong and muscle strength aside from maybe you do or you don’t, like look jacked? What’s the health benefits of just being stronger?

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. So there’s a lot of them. I think the most obvious ones pertain to your ability to walk, to pick things up, to go up and down the stairs comfortably, to do the basic things like sitting in a chair and standing up. And we take those things for granted, but as you age, those things become a lot more difficult. And it’s a lot harder to start putting on muscle as you age. I think you lose something like 8% of your muscle mass every year after 30. I’m not 100% sure of the numbers, but it certainly declines with age.

Turner Novak:

I’m on the point of no return as an almost 35-year-old. I’m like 8%, 8%. If you compound that, I’m like, really losing it.

Miranda Nover:

Well, I mean, that’s when people might say if you were to hormonally engineer yourselves-

Turner Novak:

Oh, yeah, that’s true.

Miranda Nover:

… then you could certainly build a lot of muscle. But regardless, you still have plenty of time.

Turner Novak:

I got some runway to figure this out. I’m glad Fort is here.

Miranda Nover:

Definitely. I think then outside of being able to perform basic movements, there’s back pain, knee pain, pain reduction in general. It’s a huge deal for Americans. Musculoskeletal disorders are a huge cost burden on our healthcare system. There’s a lot of surgeries and pain medication that are used as treatments for a lot of musculoskeletal disorders that could have been prevented with better posture, stronger muscles that someone could use as a preventative measure. So you never really get to the point where you’re having to deal with severe back and knee pain.

Turner Novak:

Just because your back is stronger, you have less pain?

Miranda Nover:

A lot of times it’s compensatory. So it could be your back being stronger. It could be your core being stronger. It could be that you sit all day and you have weakness in your glutes or your hips in a way that tweaks your back. Everything is so interconnected and physical therapy and rehab is so complicated.

Turner Novak:

And it’s boring.

Miranda Nover:

And it’s boring, yeah. Which is why I think people should strengthen because it’s a lot more fun to do it recreationally and just still think about it in the context of a health practice, like a wellness practice, not like a… I mean, I personally train because it’s fun, and for aesthetics, and for health. And there’s a great way to balance all those things. But once you get to the point of doing physical therapy, it’s really boring. It’s really hard to tell if you’re getting any results.

Turner Novak:

Kind of like a chore.

Miranda Nover:

Very complex.

Turner Novak:

Yeah. Well, complex and then… Because you’d think of when somebody says, “I’m trying to get stronger or I care about my muscle health,” your mind would just go to, “Oh, that person is just trying to look jacked.” And it’s maybe your hypothesis and thesis behind Fort is it’s actually like a health thing also. Maybe there’s an aesthetic thing like, “Oh, looking strong is an aesthetically more attractive thing, but also it’s actually healthier.”

Miranda Nover:

It is, yeah. And I think it’s like… Also, with the rise of GLPs, I think there’s a lot of talk about how to preserve muscle while you lose weight and muscle is metabolically active tissue, which means it helps you burn more calories at rest than fat or other tissues. So somebody could weigh the same as somebody else, but if that person had more lean mass relative to body fat, the person with more lean mass would burn more calories even if they didn’t do anything different.

Turner Novak:

How does that play out?

Miranda Nover:

I’m not a biology expert, but I think that it’s… Yeah, if you build more lean tissue, your body is… Because that tissue is firing and is doing a lot of metabolic processes, you burn more calories.

Turner Novak:

Interesting. Okay. And so you’re building some software products, you’re building some hardware products. There’s already some healthcare hardware things that are sort of out there. Couldn’t somebody just use an Apple Watch to, I don’t know, track strength? Maybe it’s an interesting way to help people understand what are you even doing? What’s even the opportunity in building a strength measuring hardware product?

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. So a platform like Apple Watch, they can do a lot. If you get apps on top of your Apple Watch, they can automatically count reps and they’re pretty good at exercise detection. The real limitation of the Apple Watch is that it lives on your wrist. Our device can be used… So it has like a magnet.

Turner Novak:

You have it on your wrist right now.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah, I have it on my wrist right now. So I envision the device being used like an all day health tracker. We measure heart rate and we measure motion on the wrist the same way Whoop or Apple Watch would do. But when it’s time to train and you want to do something that you can’t track from the wrist, so think of something like a leg press. My wrist doesn’t move when I’m doing leg press, but if I stuck a magnet onto the leg press carriage with this device on it, I could track the reps via a motion tracker in the device.

Turner Novak:

So you’d stick it on the equipment or you’d stick it on your leg?

Miranda Nover:

You could do either. I think I find it easier personally to use the magnet. I like to wear leggings in the gym. So a lot of times using the body strap is more difficult for me, but we do produce body straps. So if our users want to wear it around their leg, we can give them those. And when we originally started building Fort, we had a hypothesis that the reason Whoop, Apple Watch and others couldn’t track strength effectively was because motion tracking is not sufficient to fully understand someone’s muscle fatigue during strength training.

So the original version of Fort utilized a different type of sensor called surface electromyography. And this is a type of sensor that you do need to wear locally to the muscle. So if you flex your bicep and you want to measure the strength of that contraction, you can use this type of sensor, but you have to wear it on your bicep. You can’t detect bicep from wrist or leg from wrist.

So originally we thought that novel sensors were necessary to sufficiently track strength training even in a wellness or recreational context. I think now our working thesis is that motion is sufficient, but motion only at the wrist is not.

Turner Novak:

Okay. So why is that a big deal?

Miranda Nover:

I think that if you’re going to track strength training and you want to do this for a mass market consumer, they don’t want to have to. Like I just said, I like to wear leggings at the gym. Most women do and many people, they don’t want to be wearing a chest strap, wearing an arm strap and moving the device around during strength workouts. So originally the device that we were designing would have had to been moved around to the muscle group you wanted to measure, which we-

Turner Novak:

It was this big clunky thing.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. First it was like this adhesive sensor. It was really big.

Turner Novak:

You’d stick it on and then you’d have to…

Miranda Nover:

Peel it off.

Turner Novak:

… simply rip it off. I mean, it was stuck on my arm when I use it that one time.

Miranda Nover:

Even when I first showed you on Zoom, it was like a raw circuit board with some adhesive stuff on the bottom and you were like, “Is it always going to look like that?”

Turner Novak:

Yeah. I remember thinking, “I don’t think that will work.” I mean, you probably knew it wouldn’t work specifically like that too, but…

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. So there’s definitely two paths for tech in our general niche of health tracking. You can either become more of a medical device and there’s a spectrum of how much FDA clearance, how invasive, how precise, what medical claims you want to make that’s on that med device side. So it’s generally still like you’re selling into healthcare, the go to-market is very different, the regulatory pathways are very different. And then there’s the consumer fitness angle, which is what we’re pursuing, which is going and competing with Whoop, Apple Watch, Garmin, or a Ring.

And it’s a very different… You win on clinical accuracy and supporting patients that have a demand for your product in this healthcare segment. And then in consumer health tracking, you really win on how much people love you and how much you can change their behavior with a product. And we didn’t feel like going with this, certainly not the sticky thing, and then also not the bands that you wear everywhere was really friendly to a consumer, but we still think the core problem of strength tracking being really inaccurate or impossible with the existing consumer health trackers is worth solving.

Turner Novak:

So why is even strength tracking even that important? Because I can just go to the gym and just bench squat and write things in a piece of paper or don’t even have to track it and probably get stronger. What’s the importance of actually like, “I’m tracking this stuff in the first place”?

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. There’s two groups of people that would find value from the device. One group is like, “They are optimizers. They want to build muscle. They want to get stronger and they want to do so in the most efficient way possible.” So with that, it’s like you really want to be able to tell if you are fatiguing your muscles enough to see growth while maintaining good form. So I feel like for a while before I was as busy, I fell into this camp and I worked with a personal trainer, and I was in the gym all the time, and I was super obsessed with my routine.

I would find myself trying to go up in weight to get stronger in my lifts, but then I would be like, “Am I still hitting the same range of motion that I was before or am I cheating a little bit?” And it’s really hard to figure out how much weight… I know I want to lift more weight, but when should I increase the weight? By how much? Is my form still good? Am I unstable? Which are all things that a sensor can help do. Writing in a piece of paper gives you… Logging the data has an inherent value. It’s nice to be able to track different, the graph of how the weight went up over time, but you miss a lot of that context of how someone actually moved and how tired they got objectively rather than subjectively.

Turner Novak:

So that’s a big piece of what you’re measuring is the fatigue level when you’re doing workouts and then layering that with actually tracking what they did and how they went, and then figuring out where to go from there?

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. We use motion. So when we were working with EMG sensors, which were the local ones, we could directly see fatigue due to a frequency shift in the data.

Turner Novak:

So EMG sensor, what’s that?

Miranda Nover:

That is the one that you have to wear locally and it measures muscle activation as an electrical signal.

Turner Novak:

What’s EMG stand for?

Miranda Nover:

Surface electromyography. So EMG is electromyography, but we use… They also have ones with needles. This is for really… If you want to access little muscles in the hand or wrists, or you want to access subsurface muscles anywhere on the body, you put a needle in, and it’s the same type of sensor. It’s literally just measuring the potential difference between two points in the body and then amplifying that electrical difference in a circuit and reporting out the data. So it’s a very simple non-invasive measurement when used at the surface, and it’s still simple, but invasive when it’s used internally.

Turner Novak:

So there are tools or devices out there that stick little needles in and you work out with them?

Miranda Nover:

Not for working out. It’s more for neurological rehabilitation. So maybe like a stroke patient or someone who is looking to regain the use of small muscles or fine motor skills after an accident, or someone who is experiencing pain in their joints, they might go in and get EMG testing done in a lab. They’re certainly not selling those for consumers.

Turner Novak:

So there’s the hardcore optimizing a lot of things, tracking things. There’s a different type of strength interested person?

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. So the optimizers are people who they want to build strength or build muscle as efficiently as possible, and they’re willing to do a lot of training and devote a lot of resources to that. And then there’s this other group that’s like, they want to do as little strength training as possible to still be considered healthy. And I feel like these are people like busy parents, people like busy founders, people who do-

Turner Novak:

I feel a lot of people graduate. I feel like when I was in college, I was in the optimizer working out. There’s this workout that me and my friends in college called the Nebraska Workout.

Miranda Nover:

I remember you telling me about this.

Turner Novak:

I guess it’s the Nebraska championship football team the 1980s did it and we were obsessed with it and it’s like just a program for progressing your bench really fast and works really well. And then now I literally don’t track things when I work on it. I just go to the gym and it’s like bench, squat, trying to get back into deadlifting and just like other workouts and maybe play basketball. And it’s like, “Now, I’m tired feeling I having to workout and that’s the extent of it.” Because there’s so much else going on, I just don’t have time to track it.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. We think that it’s really important that what we build works for people like you and other people in this camp where it’s like… The persona here is like they do a lot of different activities. They probably do go to the gym, but they might not go every single week of the year. They play sports on the side. They often are parents or maybe they have some type of manual aspect to their job. And a lot of the times what people would be concerned with here is if you’re missing some type of foundational movement pattern in your training.

So you might be doing just like bench squat deadlift, but you would also want to add some type of pulling movement in general. And this pulling could be good for like, if you’re doing it like this, it’s for your biceps and if you’re doing it like this, it’s for your back and you can do kind of…

Turner Novak:

Yeah.

Miranda Nover:

So there’s these foundational movement patterns and you want to generally like to maintain your fitness and your health. You generally want to hit most of those on a regular basis, but there’s such a lower bar for what you need to do to maintain versus to build. And I think for someone like me, I don’t really want to think about what I do in the gym now, but I don’t want to lose the gains that I made when I was in this optimizer camp.

So it’s like, “Okay, I know I trained legs two days ago and then Pilates… Or I guess legs two days ago, rested yesterday, Pilates this morning. I want to know what’s left. I don’t really want to keep track of this in my head, but I still want to make sure I’m hitting everything sort of evenly.” I think there’s different times… We were just talking with Danielle about perimenopause.

There’s different transitions in life where we become more aware of our health and we want to do things to prevent decline when things about our bodies change. Either we get an injury or we have pain or we’re going through hormonal changes. And I think those times are also another really good time to keep up with tracking as well.

Turner Novak:

I feel like too, as you get older, there’s like if you’re… I don’t know. Maybe I’ve already hit this. I’m just like, “I don’t even care if I’m the most jacked. It’s just I want to be able to be as healthy as possible. I’ll care more about, am I flexible?” I feel like that’s like a big thing as you get older. Let’s say you’re in your 50s, you might just have accepted like, “I’m not as strong as I was when I was in college,” but there’s just importance of being able to still… I feel like flexibility and joint stability and… Hip strength is like in your 60s person. You can just fall and like break your hip and die.

That’s just a thing that’s a way that… Not super, super common, but the older you get, the weaker you get in different points of the muscle like grouping and whatever. I don’t know how that works. It’s a big problem.

Miranda Nover:

Huge problems. I think flexibility is more tied to strength than a lot of people think. A lot of times, it’s not that you need looser muscles, it’s that you have an imbalance and you need to strengthen something that’s weaker than the other thing, and it’s pulling various parts of your body out of alignment.

So my mom is great about going to the gym, and that’s who got me into the gym. And I think that in turn now, I mean, she doesn’t require a lot of motivation, but I certainly encourage her to do more with fitness or we talk about what’s good form and talk about different ways of training. And I think I noticed this with, this was a really common theme from talking to a lot of our users and potential users is the intergenerational dynamic. It’s like if your parents aren’t strength training, you start seeing them experiencing falls. You start seeing them experiencing limited mobility and needing aids to do everyday activities.

And the impact of that is twofold. You’re obviously worried about them and their health and want them to maintain their independence. And then at the same time, you also start worrying about, is that happening to me? And so I think the product that we are designing, I definitely want it to be, or some version of it that exists in the future, to be the thing that you get your parents when you’re worried about them not being able to be as mobile or as strong as they used to be.

Turner Novak:

So basically your hypothesis or just thesis behind all the things that you’re trying right now to do is just that strength is something that humanity will care more about?

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

A super way to distill it down to the most simple concept. It’s like the strength company.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. Strength is a pillar of health. And I think that nobody really owns the mind share and the market share around being the strength company. I mean, there’s gyms, there’s protein shakes and creatine and stuff. But a lot of that is resembling this gym-bro culture that I think is not really like … Yeah. I really want to reframe the public’s idea of strength as a tool for health and wellness, which I think people are generally coming around to and sympathetic to.

Turner Novak:

So somebody who might, they’re like a 45-year-old mom who’s a teacher. She does not identify with a gym-bro. And I’m trying to think of what’s the opposite of a gym-bro. But that person can still identify with being strong.

Miranda Nover:

Yes. Yeah. I think that that person … I mean, the ideal is that they find fun and pleasure and confidence in strength training, but at minimum, it’s nice to have guidelines for what is enough. And it’s nice to have some type of tool to help take some of the mental load of planning workouts, tracking workouts, thinking about what to do.

Sort of like a personal trainer, like a tech-based personal trainer. But I think that’s not necessarily what we want to be. I think we just see ourselves as passive tracking and a simple way to check in like, “Have I hit all of the foundational movement patterns with sufficient intensity this week?” I think a teacher, anyone could benefit from something like that.

Turner Novak:

So what ways do you think healthcare is changing? I mean, maybe hit on it a little bit earlier. Maybe we talked about before we started recording, I don’t even remember, but I don’t know, I maybe think of, this seems like almost too abstract of an idea that maybe wouldn’t have … If we go back in time a little bit, this seems like a hard thing to make people … So how is healthcare kind of changing to make you think this is going to work?

Miranda Nover:

There’s a lot of layers to it. There’s the points that we touched on before where consumers are fed up with rising costs, a lack of preventative care that is accessible either by price or by location or availability of providers. And then there’s some distrust that COVID really made worse. There’s not always a positive relationship between providers and patients. And it’s unfortunate because I still firmly believe that evidence-based medicine is king, but there’s a lot of convoluted incentives in that system that make it really hard for providers to serve patients in a way that it makes both parties happy, basically.

Turner Novak:

So how so? Explain what evidence-based care is and then what the incentives are messed up.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. So when you’re a physician and when you’re operating in a regulatory environment where you’re FDA controlled, you’re diagnosing and treating actual conditions, you need to perform good science if you’re going to offer a product. And then if you’re somebody who’s diagnosing and treating diseases, it’s on you to be up-to-date with the literature and making sure that you read the good science that other people produce and you make decisions of clinical care based off of that.

But there’s also like the insurance landscape plays a big role in what people have access to and where and when they have access to that care. And then there’s hospital administrators and people who run large networks of clinics and healthcare facilities that are in the loop. There’s a lot of regulation in the space that controls where money goes and the players are so entrenched because everything has to be done by such bureaucratic processes.

And tech has really, this is a bit tangential, but tech has really failed to penetrate the healthcare market in the way that it seems like it could. And I think tech bros, we always think we’ll just do things more efficiently. There’s clearly all these inefficiencies, just pick one, tackle it. And then you try to go down that path and there’s all these entrenched interests and procedures. And it’s like, at the end of the day, the system, the healthcare system as it is right now, it doesn’t seek efficiency, it seeks compliance, which is good, for some people.

It’s good because you’re always doing things by the book and you don’t want to move fast and break things when it comes to people’s health, but at the same time, it’s also to the detriment of a lot of people. Yeah. And there’s like the largest example of this kind of dynamic of tech starting to penetrate healthcare, but failing to really fully materialize, I would say, is the EHR or EMR situation. So electronic medical records were kind of introduced as this thing where you can digitize all of the clinical notes and the lab tests and give providers access to data. And it’s great because it preserves a record of everything, but it’s really created a lot of extra work and burden for clinicians.

Turner Novak:

Oh, really?

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. So the clinicians are struggling to use this system that’s like … I don’t know if you’ve seen those memes. They usually refer to creative tools, but it’ll be like, it’s like the cockpit of an airplane. It’s like, “How it looks when I open After Effects,” or something.

Turner Novak:

Oh, my God.

Miranda Nover:

I think that that applies with Epic, which is the primary electronic medical records software that many hospitals use. It’s really full-featured, it’s really intense. You have to manually record everything and there’s all these startups that are trying to disrupt that, but it’s a system that’s very resistant to disruption. And all that to say, tech hasn’t necessarily helped healthcare find a lot of efficiencies. And I think it’s a very entrenched structural problem. So then there’s all of these more wellness focused products and-

Turner Novak:

So these are just like wellness focused product is like the consumer makes a decision on it based-

Miranda Nover:

Yes.

Turner Novak:

… on how they just feel or want-

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

… versus going through a healthcare order of procedures, order of operations of how a healthcare system is designed to diagnose or prescribe things.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. And those two things are inherently distinct, but I think that they’re increasingly starting to mingle, which I think is a really … If tech can’t or has to date failed to fully penetrate in the actual capital H Healthcare system, and then in the consumer market, you face issues of saturation, lack of trust, because you don’t have to adhere to these medical standards, or you don’t have to adhere to being an evidence-based product, there’s data privacy, there’s so many. And just consumer businesses, like your inventor, I’m a founder, we all have heard there’s a lot of the revenue isn’t stable, the consumers are very difficult to make happy, it’s very difficult to make them change their behavior. And you can’t diagnose or treat diseases with consumer products.

So there’s a lot of limitations there, both about the economics of it and the capabilities of the products, but there’s starting to be more of a consumerization of actual healthcare products, which I think is driven both by the consumer demand and by the access to more flexible spending dollars, like an HSA and FSA accounts, I think is a big driver of consumer spending on wellness products.

And then there’s also bills that they’re trying to pass most recently, like the Choice Act, which gives people access to flexible spending dollars as part of their employer provided insurance plans. And there’s all these services kind of like Noom or Headspace, there’s a lot of mental health, like digital mental health clinics that consumers find and consumers choose, but are still insurance supported. So these insurance supported but consumer, I don’t know, driven marketplaces.

Turner Novak:

Yeah. It’s almost like we had to make up new categories that weren’t touched by the entrenched healthcare. So mental health, if you think of 30 years ago, there was no mental health.

Miranda Nover:

Right.

Turner Novak:

You were just crazy. That’s how they would describe it.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. Yeah.

Turner Novak:

And so it’s probably like Calm and Headspace, they created products that just weren’t being served by existing kind of entrenched categories and weren’t maybe touched by regulations. Honestly, you could possibly make the argument that affecting someone’s brain should be way more regulated than anything else.

Miranda Nover:

Oh, yeah.

Turner Novak:

But the current healthcare system, there’s no way to provide mental health support. And so it kind of was able to evolve in more of a decentralized way. Maybe that’s like the opportunity is like, there needs to be new categories that aren’t under the umbrella of existing infrastructure of providing care and support in healthcare.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. There’s a lot of interesting takes on this where people are inventing new markets. I think that concierge medical service is at the highest end. I know a lot of people who are high net worth relative to the average American, but certainly not ultra-high net worth. People in the tech space, they’ll go see … Solace Health is one example of this. There’s been a lot that have kind of popped up and failed.

So that at the high end, and then there’s these blood testing services, Function Health, one of the fastest growing consumer health tech companies, I believe ever, certainly recently. They offer blood testing, which has always been around, but you used to get it through your doctor and now they just offer it through independent labs and they offer feedback and follow-ups based on that. Wearables.

Turner Novak:

Yeah, because I feel like blood testing was always a background of you’re just at the doctor, “Oh, by the way, we’ll just test your blood and do something.” But it was never like a … Because Quest is the big player, like an infrastructure company in healthcare. And Function Health made it a product that the consumer could interface with maybe, but there was no … You didn’t just go to get your blood tested just to see what it said.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

That’s not something most people did.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. And even though you could theoretically have Googled the results before or ChatGPT’d the results more recently, which is a whole other thing. We should definitely talk about ChatGPT Health, like Anthropic’s new health product, being able to have … You know what’s crazy? I was at a healthcare founder dinner recently, and I don’t know the exact mechanics of how this works, but I’ll paraphrase, and apologies if I get anything wrong. But basically, I am legally … If I want to access my medical records as a consumer, I’m legally entitled to do so, but nobody has to make it easy for me. So you a lot of times have to go chase down different files, like if you’ve got imaging done or blood work done at a different lab, maybe those files are really hard to access. You have to go in person, file some, fax them something, very archaic.

But if I was to make a company, there’s certain hoops you have to jump through. You have to employ a physician and there’s fees involved. But if I was to be a company who wanted to get access to my medical records or your medical records, I could just set up my company in such a way and it exists in a centralized database online. So now I have access to all those things without having to go through the archaic access procedure that a consumer would have to do to access their own medical records.

And it’s just up to the hospital system or the doctor’s office if they want to make it easy for you or make it hard for you. And you certainly don’t get them all in one place unless you go to one of those companies who has the access that you can’t get as an individual. So it seems like that ChatGPT Health and others will probably integrate with some providers like that who go and get people’s medical records and then deliver them to the individual.

Turner Novak:

Yeah. It seems like a lot of stuff that’s happening in consumer health. We’re not like inventing new things, it’s just we’re just doing things that no one’s done before, if that makes sense.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. Yeah. Combining services with a consumer-friendly interface or just making things available at different times in someone’s life when the medical system hasn’t deemed them necessary, but the person wants to know more.

Turner Novak:

Yeah.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. It’s very interesting. I think that it’s a huge market, but I think the products, in order to be durable … It’s very difficult to build a durable brand in that space, I would say. There’s a lot of competition. And a lot of times people will use one of these products once, discover behaviors that they need to change and have a magical moment with the product and really like it. And then once they change the behaviors, it goes out of fashion.

Or with the blood testing companies, you only look at the results of the blood test, realistically, at most, you’re getting your blood tested once a month if you’re maybe on some type of medicine that requires that you get your blood testing once a month. But most people, it’s going to be once or twice a year. So how does that company interact with their users in the meantime? Which is one thing we’re excited about with wearables. Whoop and Aura have started doing labs, blood work through their platforms. I would assume we’ll see more access to medical records in those platforms, integrations with glucose monitors.

But the wearable is something that the user can wear every day and ideally they’re looking at the app every day, but even if it’s once a week, it’s still a product that’s rare in the space because it’s part of the daily ritual of sleep tracking or fitness or calories or steps. Whatever it is, it’s things that we do on a daily basis or we might think about on a daily basis.

Turner Novak:

So you’re actually like, you’re building different devices and testing different things. I don’t know where the appropriate time to start this story or journey of building for, but what made you feel like, “I could make a hardware company,” like you could make something? Because I feel like maybe now we’re at a point where it’s maybe slightly more acceptable or slightly more of a non-insane thing to say like, “I’m building a hardware company.” So what’s gotten you comfortable with saying like, “Oh, we’re going to try building a health hardware product”?

Miranda Nover:

I know. Consumer health hardware, all of those things together, like VCs are running for the hills, I can already tell. No, I think it was a combination of things. I think, so my background is in mechanical engineering. That’s what I studied in college. And then after school, I worked at Tesla doing mechanical design for lithium-ion battery cells. And we were designing … It was the first time Tesla had ever fully designed a cell in house. Previously they were joint ventures, like the big Panasonic factory that Tesla stood up. A lot of the IP didn’t belong to Tesla.

So it was like they were trying to bring all the IP in house and make a bunch of design changes, both on the mechanical side of the cell, so how everything is shaped and the materials that were used, and then also on the chemical side. So it was a really risky, ambitious project. And I interned when things were really early and I came back when we were just prototyping a cell that later went into the Cybertruck and I stayed through the launch of the Cybertruck cell. Even though I wasn’t there for very long, it did give me exposure to this safety, critical, really risky product that had to be manufactured at high volumes without failing.

And I think that that made the prospect of developing my own hardware device that’s like, it still matters immensely to me that this device is extremely accurate and is way more helpful than it is hurtful, but ultimately it’s not going to light a vehicle on fire if … The worst this does is tell you you did 10 reps and you actually did 12. But at Tesla, the cell, it has a lot of safety risks. So I think that was one thing.

But I also think that there’s a real structural advantage now in the market of doing things that have even just a little bit more moat that AI can’t immediately do all of the hardware design and development tasks that we need to do. Whereas with software engineering, I feel like a lot of software products, there’s still relationships, distribution, there’s still a lot of ways to build a moat, but I think some of these less approachable categories are becoming more approachable.

Turner Novak:

AI feel like the thesis on any kind of AI company is figuring out how to capture a workflow, capture data, unique data, and you can argue this is a way to do it in consumer health. I feel like it’s still … You haven’t launched yet, right? I think this will maybe actually come out-

Miranda Nover:

Right after we launch.

Turner Novak:

… right after you launch. So you’re still very earlier in iterating on building all this stuff.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. So we’ve been operational for almost exactly a year to date, and it was a lot of figuring out, building different prototypes, like the ones that we’re attaching to the muscle and it was pursuing a more med device route for the product. And then it was like, okay, we’re pursuing consumer, but the thing that we have is very dorky and the iteration speed in hardware, it’s getting a lot faster and it is faster because we’re building a small consumer device. If not like we have to build a big crazy machine, but it’s amazing.

I’m now writing a lot of our company’s code. My primary role, I would say at Ford is software and product, and I can just change things. I can just tear the app down and rebuild it if I want to. And there’s obviously some time sunk and hassle in doing that, but if I want to tear down the hardware architecture and rebuild it, there’s lead time, there’s supply chain issues, there’s physics that often gets in the way. And it’s just like the process is way more friction filled than it is to design software.

Turner Novak:

So what are the hardest parts about iterating on and shipping and building a hardware product?

Miranda Nover:

I think there’s just a lot of technical surface area is the first thing. So there’s mechanical hardware, right? The case is a hard good that we make out of plastic. These interfaces between the hard good and the fabric strap are made out of metal because they need a tighter tolerance. Then there’s the electronics and the sensors that go inside here, the boards, they’re very difficult to design and manufacture. And then there’s the firmware that runs on the chip in here. And the firmware has to do a lot of heavy lifting because we need to store and process data on the device to avoid sending too much over to the phone.

And then there’s the phone app, and then there’s the backend data processing server and stuff. So there’s all these different things to maintain. Whereas if you’re in a software company, you just don’t have half of those things. And then I think the way you can get around that if you don’t have the skills in house is outsourcing, but then you’re working with people who don’t care as much as you and who don’t … You have to work really hard on communicating your vision effectively to say a Chinese supplier. You have to figure out what parts of the process and product design you want to own versus what they should own. You want to make sure you’re building the right thing before you invest in a manufacturing line.

I think that’s been a big thing for us is it would be so much easier if we could work with a manufacturing partner on a lot of things because they have tons of engineers and tons of expertise, but then it’s like, if we tell them to build something, they’ll do it. If we tell them the wrong thing, they’ll build the wrong thing. So it’s really helpful that our team is like, I’m a mechanical engineer, my co-founder Paul’s an electrical engineer. He worked at Tesla much longer than I did. And then we have another engineer, Zach, and he’s a mechanical engineer. So now I write code and he does most of our hardware design, but we’re capable of, as rapidly as one could, rapidly prototyping stuff and making changes based on feedback that we get from testing and from users.

Turner Novak:

And then so with Paul, what was he working on at Tesla?

Miranda Nover:

He did sensing systems for the Tesla semi and some other programs. So one of the cool ones was cabin radar, which are these radar sensors in the vehicle that they can detect if someone’s having a heart attack.

Turner Novak:

Why is that important for the Tesla vehicle?

Miranda Nover:

I mean, Tesla is just a very safe vehicle, and I think they might have other uses. I’m actually not familiar with the cabin radar system at all. So it might’ve just been a health feature that is interesting to the Tesla consumers, or it might have some other use in autonomy, but yeah, I’m not familiar with how they actually deploy the sensors and use them in the Tesla vehicles.

Turner Novak:

And then I know Zach, are you allowed to say what Zach worked on? Is it a public thing that’s already said?

Miranda Nover:

Zach worked on Cybercab.

Turner Novak:

Okay.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

There’s a lot of different, probably more mission-critical life or death safety types of features and products versus tracking some muscle movement.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s definitely less intimidating from a safety perspective, but there is a… The thing with wearables is I’m someone who cares a lot about design, brand and aesthetics. And I think that at various points in this journey, I’ve thought maybe we should just build a better looking WHOOP. But people will use a wearable that looks bad, but is very accurate. People will not use a wearable. They might buy it, but they’re not going to actually keep using a wearable that looks good, but isn’t accurate. I think accuracy and having some type of differentiated metrics that actually work reliably is more important than having something that’s really aesthetically pleasing in the beginning. I fully imagine that our device will be half the size made of metal, a lot more elegant in its future iterations, but we don’t want to devote so many resources to that.

We want to devote resources to making sure the rep counting exercise identification, form analysis, and the software interface is really accurate and robust first.

Turner Novak:

How’s it evolved over time? I think you mentioned, it sounds like it just has gotten smaller over time.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah, it’s gotten smaller and we’ve reduced the amount of sensors that we use. Well, so this device actually does have the EMG sensors that we talked about that can do local sensing that we’re investigating as a primary sensing methodology. So we haven’t actually fully removed them yet despite we generally think we want to focus more on motion tracking as a proxy for exercise fatigue and exercise form versus the local stuff. This also has near infrared spectroscopy, which is a optical sensor. So it’s a light-based sensor similar to the heart rate sensors. It’s again though, you have to wear it locally. So this actually is still pretty beefy in terms of what it has on board. It has a lot more sensors than WHOOP and Oura and Apple Watch do. If we get demand from our beta testers to use those sensors more, they really want to wear it locally and get more data, more accurate data, more localized data.

We can still do it with this hardware. But if not, our hypothesis is that motion is generally sufficient as long as you’re not bound to the wrist. And so we should just make the device smaller and cut some of this extra sensors.

Turner Novak:

Yeah, that’s fair. One thing you mentioned was you’re doing a lot of the software and product stuff yourself. I remember, I feel like you’ve been a ground zero case study of what vibe coding can do or whatever. I remember there’s one night in the four office where it was one of the earlier versions of Cursor where you’re learning to use Cursor to make a product. What has that been like? I feel like you’ve been at grounds, you’re capitalizing on what you can do with vibe coding.

Miranda Nover:

I actually feel like I am somewhat… So non-technical people I feel like now could get a lot out of vibe coding and will be able to get a lot more out of vibe coding in the future. Highly technical people obviously can get a lot out of vibe coding and they can do more complex agent orchestration and have these interesting development workflows. I, as someone who’s semi-technical, I would say, I did some AI research in college, but that’s mostly Python in notebooks and Python deployed on servers. It’s not the same as full stack. It’s certainly not writing a mobile app. And I did some data analysis work at Tesla. Again, it’s Python based. It’s not software engineering in the way that I do now. I feel like I’m an absolute weapon because I had some context for how computers work, how programming languages work. I’ve been in VS Code.

I’d made a Twitter bot before. I’d made my personal website before. What I can do, I feel like it’s just insane. I feel like I’m at the perfect… I didn’t really have to actually learn to be a software engineer, but I still get so much more out of it than if I was fully non-technical. And yeah, it’s evolved a lot. I remember first using ChatGPT when I was at Tesla, I would ask it little Python questions and I could do that. And then we got Cursor. And Cursor was good at first, but I remember it would just lead me down paths that weren’t actually going to work. I think when you came to the Afore office, I was trying to set up some streaming service for our data to get from the device through Bluetooth into cloud storage.

And the architecture was awful. It was so horrible. It was never going to work. And I kept being like, “Oh, we’re 95% of the way there. Just one more bug fix, just one more prompt.” And neither I nor the coding agent was smart enough to figure it out. But now I feel like I’m certainly, especially with Opus 4.5 and with Claude Code’s recent updates, I feel like at least my community of founders has generally converged on Claude Code as a primary tool. And it’s interesting to see how as the models evolve, different clusters of people go to different things. They use different models for different things. There’s all this sharing of different workflows. But yeah, vibe coding is incredible. It’s amazing. Have you been vibe coding at all?

Turner Novak:

Not enough. Maybe a little bit, but I just don’t have anything I need to build.

Miranda Nover:

You know what you could do.

Turner Novak:

What could I do?

Miranda Nover:

You should do some Valentine’s Day thing. I feel like holiday or a podcast thing, Shweta, one of my friends, she did a tarot deck that was a vibe coded project that was which tech bro tarot readings. But I’m curious because I’m certain someone’s going to do a Valentine’s Day themed one that will be really viral. And I haven’t come up with any ideas that I feel like are viral enough to actually go do it myself, but maybe you could.

Turner Novak:

That’s a good idea.

Miranda Nover:

Or you could do something with your kids. Your kids are into music production. We were just talking about that. Maybe you could make them an interesting synth interface or something.

Turner Novak:

Yeah. My daughter does love coding. So there’s this program that the school does, it’s called PLTW, Project Lead The Way. And for whatever reason, they do a lot of coding and learning to code. And it’s a lot of, it’s some kids program. I forget what the program’s called, but it’s not like cursor or anything anyone’s probably heard of, but it’s some kind of like you learn to make the computer do actions and stuff like that. And she calls it coding. I don’t think anyone listening to this would call it coding, but that’s how they describe to the kids where you make things. So I’ve been thinking about one of these weekends we should spend a couple hours of make a game together in Claude or something like that, which would probably work.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah, I think it would be super feasible. I think it helps the more… Well, this is the great thing about doing it with your kids too, is it’s like the more strong of an idea of the creative vision you have for the project, the easier it is for Claude to just handle the boring stuff. So she can really let her imagination run wild. And I feel like then you can maybe translate that into more executive instructions, in what order to do things and what are the success criteria, because I feel like that’s really important as well. I think we’re quickly approaching the time when prompt engineering doesn’t really matter. You can give some abstract idea to some of the models and the inference will be able to tell what you really mean. But I still feel like now I get a lot more out of it if I’m specific about order success criteria, how it’s supposed to evaluate the success criteria. But yeah, the creative stuff, it’s so cool to be able to see people’s visions come to life.

Turner Novak:

Yeah. One thing you mentioned, you said you made a Twitter bot. What was the Twitter bot?

Miranda Nover:

Okay. So this was pre me having any type of Twitter. I didn’t tweet or anything. I guess it was right after college, but it was when crypto was really popular and I felt like I, as a mechanical engineering student and just freshly moving to San Francisco right in the heyday of crypto, I didn’t know a lot of the words that people would say on crypto Twitter. I didn’t understand what they meant. So I made a bot that I could tag into comments and it would parse the tweet for any finance or crypto related words and define them for me. I didn’t know what a DCF was either. So it was like finance, like a cashflow model. I didn’t know any of the finance words and I didn’t know any of the crypto words. So if it was a ticker symbol, it would tell me what company it was.

If it was an acronym that they use in finance, it would tell me what that was. And if it was a coin or a crypto term, it would tell me what that was.

Turner Novak:

Okay.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

Nice. So you would reply to the tweet, you were one of those people?

Miranda Nover:

I would go on the bots account and I would just have it tag itself. And it was like, this is very an overstatement of its capabilities, but you know how people now are at Grok explain this. It was like an early primitive version of that. Yeah, basically invented Grok.

Turner Novak:

Yeah, no big deal. And so we actually met on Twitter. You use Twitter a decent amount in how you think about Fort and being a founder, I guess.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

So what’s your relationship with it?

Miranda Nover:

Yeah, I think it’s evolved somewhat. I mean, maybe externally, it probably doesn’t look like it’s evolved a lot, but I feel like now I’m worse at Tweeting, unfortunately.

Turner Novak:

So how do you approach Twitter as a founder?

Miranda Nover:

I think it’s really important to be authentic. This is cliche. I’ll explain what I mean. I think that the mistake I see a lot of people who want to engage with social media and use it to grow their platform. The mistake that they make is they try to tweet LinkedIn slop on Twitter and it doesn’t work.

Turner Novak:

Why not? It’s just all social media, isn’t it the same?

Miranda Nover:

Twitter is similar to founding a company where if you’re in a bad market, even if your product is good, it’s going to flop. And what I mean by that is the topic that you’re discussing has to be either the current thing or one of these evergreen topics. And even then, if your take is kind of lukewarm, but it’s worded well, I feel like your tweet does well. But if you talk about something that nobody cares about, it’s never going to do well, even if it’s funny or interesting. So I think you have to figure out what the intersection of things that you authentically care about because what I meant when I said people tweet a lot of LinkedIn slop is it’s very generic. It’ll be like, oh… Yeah, I don’t know. They’ll be like, “I’m working so hard trying to meet customers or something.” I don’t know, it’s kind of boring.

It’s kind of vague. And maybe the hot topic would be 996. So even if you’re thinking about that, you have to figure out a way to slot it into the current discourse. Or my co-founder, he was trying to get into Twitter at one point and he tweeted something about red pandas. And I was like, first of all, you don’t really care about red pandas. And second of all, nobody else is really talking about red pandas right now.

It probably doesn’t have a good chance of success. But yeah, so something that you know about and then also something that you notice other people talking about a lot on there is generally what’s going to do well.

Turner Novak:

Is that annoying though that you have to talk about the current thing?

Miranda Nover:

I think you hit escape velocity at a certain point, as in if you have a following and people generally start to know who you are from talking about the current thing, you can start talking about other things and it’ll still get traction because you have a core group of people that are now interested in you. So for me, the way that I first had a few viral tweets was talking about San Francisco culture, specifically dating culture at first, because I was single at the time and I was dating and I’d observed all of these interesting things that happened.

Turner Novak:

Backpack at a bar.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

I think that was the first big tweet you had. Something about… What was the-

Miranda Nover:

It was like guys in San Francisco will say it’s hard to find a girlfriend and then wear a backpack to the bar. And I had another one that was like, guys in SF say it’s harder to find a girlfriend than it is to raise $10 million or something like that. And this was something that people had actually… I didn’t know that it was discourse on Twitter around dating, to be honest. I didn’t see other people talking about it and then start talking about it because other people were talking about it. But in hindsight, people were definitely talking about it. And I had a novel take, I guess, because I’m a woman and because I phrased it in a way that was engaging. And I feel like that format worked really well for me in the beginning. But now a lot of the stuff that goes viral, just random wholesome posts. My mom sent me a cute picture and I posted it and it went super viral and I replied a bunch of times to my own tweet.

Turner Novak:

Yeah. You have a series of your mom’s pictures that she-

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. Yeah. My mom, she knows what she’s doing. There’s actually another one that I didn’t tweet, but I probably should. She sent me a really funny picture.

Turner Novak:

So then what about if you’re a founder and you’re thinking about doing a launch video? You didn’t do a launch, but you just an announcement video.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah, announcement.

Turner Novak:

You’re just sitting in your webcam talking. And I think that was pretty successful. I mean, it wasn’t like the most viral video ever on Twitter, but I feel like it went pretty well. What’s the keys to doing a good announcement or launch on Twitter?

Miranda Nover:

I think last year there was all this cluely stuff. And before that, even Avi Schiffmann’s Friend video was super viral, but I think there wasn’t this launch video industry until last year with the Cluely stuff.

Turner Novak:

It was industry. It was industrial complex.

Miranda Nover:

It’s still an industrial complex.

Turner Novak:

It was still like, “Hey, we’re doing our series A launch video.”

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. And I think that that’s fine. You can think about it as an expression of your creative vision for the company or whatever, but I personally think there’s a lot of ways you can express your creative vision for the company more simplistically. So when I did my simple sitting at a table launch videos, I wore a particular shirt, I sat in front of a particular background, the lighting was a particular way. I thought about those things. And maybe you could intentionally not think about those things. Maybe you want to signal we are just cracked degenerate engineers and we do not care about any type of aesthetics and we are just grinding all the time and we want the video to look like that. But I think there’s a lot of ways you can do that without spending 10, 20, 50, 100 grand on a high production video.

I think that the production, growth in your business should fuel spending on these types of stunts, not the other way around, in my opinion. I think you should really challenge yourself to have some type of customers or traction before you go and splurge on this stuff. I think a lot of people see it as a ticket to getting a lot of inbound, which it is, but I think you can keep it simple, still get the same level of inbound or approximately the same level of inbound and not spend 20 grand on a launch video.

Turner Novak:

Yeah. I remember one interesting one would be Paul Klein at Browserbase. His first video he did was just in front of his computer, recording the video, he had a whiteboard behind him. His particular thing was like, I made sure I had an American flag because he knew that the Gundo community would support the flag. So he was like, “That’s an extra thing I could do to just get a little bit more of attention to my experience having an American flag in the background,” which is kind of smart thing.

Miranda Nover:

It’s smart. Yeah. Those tricks are so good. One of my friends and batch mates just went pretty viral on Twitter and it was like his co-founder posted, they were trying to sell hospitality software and the co-founder was like, “I dressed up in a suit and tie to go talk to the general manager at local hotels to try to sell them software.” He was wearing jeans and a backpack and it was not a suit and tie, but he was wearing a jacket. So it was like a SF take on a suit and tie. Everyone at the company was like, “That’s not a suit and tie.” But there’s so many little visual tricks you could do either to rage bait or to just engagement bait more subtly.

Turner Novak:

Do you want to rage bait an engagement bait though because somebody might say like, “Oh, these guys are clowns.” Would I really trust the product if they’re rage baiting? I feel like we’ve seen the upsides and the downsides of those over the past year if you’ve been kind of observing. Should you do that or?

Miranda Nover:

I don’t think I should do that, no. I think there’s a certain amount of… Well, there’s a little bit of engagement baiting that I think is fair. I think for us, it’s really important that we demonstrate commitment and people who maybe we don’t have 10 years of engineering expertise at this company and millions of dollars under our belts, but we want to seem like we could get there.

We want to seem like we are working tirelessly for our customers, which is what we are doing. And I think we don’t want to… Selling this as a tool to get jacked is absolutely not how I want to market it. I think naturally people that want to get jacked will use Fort. I like those people. I am one of those people, but I think we need to build a lot of trust in our ability to accurately measure strength and then deliver the information in a way that helps people change their behaviors. And I don’t think any of that really revolves around a crazy viral moment. Plus it’s just the purchase price of one of these apps. If you’re trying to sell Cluely, you need someone to pay you whatever, like 10, 20 bucks a month. I don’t know what exactly it costs, but it’s relatively low fee and they can cancel whenever and they’re not buying a hardware product and it doesn’t measure any of their sensitive health metrics.

So maybe it’s better to just get a lot of top of funnel. Whereas for something like what I’m doing, I need someone to spend, call it $300 on my device plus software subscription for a year. I need them to trust me to take their heart rate and to know certain things about their health before maybe even they do. And if I want somebody to do that, we need to establish a different kind of relationship than just selling it a viral app.

Turner Novak:

Yeah. And you mentioned something that your friend who had the post of the backpack, suit and tie, was a batch made. So you’re in YC right now.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

When did it start?

Miranda Nover:

It started, I think we’re in the third week now.

Turner Novak:

Okay. So you’re pretty early.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

What’s it been like doing YC?

Miranda Nover:

I mean, I honestly love it. I think that I don’t know what the sentiment about YC is in the actual general population, but in San Francisco, certainly there’s mixed feelings from people. There’s generally, I would say it’s generally a positive thing, but then there’s also some founders are like, oh, because of all the launch videos and because they’re funding a lot of kooky ideas, what was it? Fusion reactors on ships or something or there’s a-

Turner Novak:

CHAD IDE.

Miranda Nover:

CHAD IDE, there was Pair IDE, which was a fork of Cursor before and there’s a Moon hotel in our current batch. Because they fund companies like this and people have these crazy viral moments, I think a lot of people…

Turner Novak:

They assume every single thing in the YC batch is just some ridiculous Moon hotel thing.

Miranda Nover:

I think what I really like about YC is it kills a lot of the fear and hesitation that people have around launching and talking to users. And I think it’s like, I wish I could say that I never had… I’m not really afraid of putting myself out there, but it’s different putting something that you make out there and also being an engineer and knowing all of how the sauce is just made and all the things I want to fix and all the features I want to add. But they really encourage you to sell while you’re still uncomfortable, which I think you have to do to have a successful business. I think there’s always going to be a point in everyone’s business when they want to add more features or polish something or change the way something works, but you need to make money and you need to… Also, a lot of the times you don’t know what the right thing to build is your customers do.

They’re the one who is going to pay for it and use the product. So a lot of the times, I mean, if you know your customers well, you can make an educated guess, but a lot of the times they’re going to tell you something that’s unexpected or valuable. So YC, I think it’s also just so much fun for me to go be around other founders all the time because it’s something that I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I didn’t know that that’s what I wanted, but now I can identify a lot of patterns of thinking and behavior in myself growing up that I can identify as wanting to be an entrepreneur now.

Turner Novak:

Like what?

Miranda Nover:

I was like, well, I mean, this is pretty straightforward, but when I was even in elementary school, I had various entrepreneurial ventures of questionable morality, the less questionable… Well, I guess they were all kind of questionable, but at that age, nothing is really regulated. So what I mean is I would make paper cranes and I would sell them to other kids on the playground, but the money that the kids were giving me, we were in third grade. So the money that they were giving me was maybe lunch money or money that their parents had given them and I got in a lot of trouble for doing that and then…

Turner Novak:

Because kids couldn’t buy lunch?

Miranda Nover:

I don’t think it was that they… I hope that they weren’t giving me their actual lunch money. I don’t know. I was really way too young to realize that that might have been a consequence of the action, but certainly they just didn’t want commerce being done on the playground. So they sat our whole class down and they were like-

Turner Novak:

Regulated market.

Miranda Nover:

-no more playground commerce. So at that point I was sore out of luck with the selling paper cranes and I changed my business model because in our class there was this be called a lottery, it’s like a drawing that you would get tickets for doing good things in class. And then at the end, the teacher would draw one of the tickets out of the bowl and that person would get a prize. And so I would take toys that me and my sister didn’t want anymore, and I would bring them to school and I would sell them for tickets because I couldn’t sell things for real money anymore. So I decided the next best currency was tickets. And so by the end of it, I had so many more tickets, probably 10, 20X, the tickets of anyone else in my class. So I feel like that was… Yeah, there was a million other examples of things I did when I was a kid that I feel like were what I would now consider entrepreneurial.

Turner Novak:

Yeah. I feel like maybe one interesting one I had was I had a lemonade stand in third grade and my brother helped me. And so I think I made, my mom also helped me and made all the products.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

I didn’t pay my mom for any of the materials. She made it all for free.

Miranda Nover:

Nice.

Turner Novak:

I made $47 and I paid my brother a dollar for helping and he did-

Miranda Nover:

That’s so funny.

Turner Novak:

… the same amount of work as me.

Miranda Nover:

That’s so funny.

Turner Novak:

I think I bought Pokemon Yellow Version with the money-

Miranda Nover:

Oh, nice.

Turner Novak:

… that I got from the lemonade stand-

Miranda Nover:

Yeah, you were rich.

Turner Novak:

… that we had. Yeah. And it was pretty high margins when you don’t have to pay anyone.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

But as a kid, it’s like, I don’t know. I was like, “Hey, Peyton, I’ll give you a dollar if you help me.” He’s like, “Yeah, okay.” And then my mom, she was a willing participant in just making cookies.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

And then I think they probably bought all the materials too. And I just kept all the money.

Miranda Nover:

Nice.

Turner Novak:

Pretty good margins as a kid. We did the same thing with my daughter. We had a garage sale and she sold hand squeezed orange juice, cookies that we made from scratch, lemonade. We had coffee. And again, it was like we just did all the work for her and then she had to keep all the money.

Miranda Nover:

So fun. It’s so rewarding as a kid. I did one where we donated all the money to charity and we made way more money than we would have otherwise.

Turner Novak:

Just by saying you’re donating it to charity.

Miranda Nover:

No, we did. We weren’t lying, but we did donate it to charity. But yeah, we said… It was actually the premise was, free lemonade, all tips go to charity. So sure, some people would get it for free, but most people, they would come and just give us a 20.

Turner Novak:

Yeah, $20.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. And we donated it to, I think it was called St. Francis, some charity in Portland, Oregon where I lived at the time. And they were really impressed because I think we raised, I don’t know, close to 500 bucks, something like that. Something pretty significant for a day’s lemonade stand.

Turner Novak:

This was in school, at the side of the road at your house?

Miranda Nover:

I think was, it may have just been on the… So it was at my friend’s house. It may have been on a day when a lot of people in the neighborhood did garage sales all at once. That might’ve been how we were able to get so much money. I don’t remember if it was just a normal day or if it was that specific day.

Turner Novak:

Interesting. Okay. What’s your best garage sale find or vintage searching find?

Miranda Nover:

Oh, I have so many. Yeah. Well, the most recent one that was exciting, which you’ll see later, it’s this crazy mirror that’s wider than this table is, I guess. We got it for 25 bucks, but it’s shaped like a flower on the outside and then the mirror is a circular part inside the flower. It’s just a really good deal for 20 bucks for a giant crazy thing.

Turner Novak:

And it’s this furniture vintage store down the street from the office or?

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

Okay.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah, it’s almost like a warehouse because where we’re at in the Mission, which is a common neighborhood for robotics startups or they have a lot of things that are zoned where you can manufacture things in the units and you might also live in the units, is an interest. Paul stayed in our office for a couple months.

Turner Novak:

Does he still live there?

Miranda Nover:

No, he doesn’t live there anymore.

Turner Novak:

So do you have to whole the upstairs areas?

Miranda Nover:

The upstairs is manufacturing now. You’ll see. We have two 3D printers. We have a workbench up there. We’re trying to turn it into the shop because I got really tired of having so much mess downstairs in the office area and-

Turner Novak:

Yeah, because you walk in, there’s just a squat rack to the left.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

And there’s a lot of tools and stuff-

Miranda Nover:

Yeah, yeah.

Turner Novak:

… just sitting out there.

Miranda Nover:

We still want it… So the squat rack is still there. Also, we got the squat rack for free because Zach’s family already owned it, but they weren’t using it. So we were able to just get that for free. A lot of our office stuff we got for really cheap, but our office is pretty nice. But yeah, so we’ll keep the squat rack there. And then we have a desk set up to do sensor testing basically there and then hardware in the loop testing. We don’t have all the infrastructure set up, but we ideally want to be able to push code and then have it tested on real hardware automatically. So we’ll do that, lab stuff downstairs, but all the actual tools, like soldering, mechanical work will get done upstairs.

Turner Novak:

I know we’re doing a board game night in 52 minutes from now, so we’re going to start winding down. But I was wondering if you have any questions for me at all and anything.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. So Turner is so different than other VCs. I think I want you to share… I know a lot about your investing thesis and how you run your business, but I think that the people, it would be really interesting for other people who might be thinking about starting companies, to hear about how you run your fund.

Turner Novak:

Yeah. I mean, I’m still figuring it out, honestly. I think the most interesting thing is I kind of accidentally also am a media company and I accidentally became an influencer. I was just trying to get a job in VC eight, nine years ago, and I kind of just became an influencer. And with people following you on the internet, it makes it a little bit easier to do something sometimes. And then it’s kind of reached a point where I just realized, “Okay, that’s my advantage.” I guess I have people that follow me on the internet and a lot of investors don’t.

And then you can think about it as like, “Well, how can I lend my distribution to portfolio companies?” And then it got to the point where, especially after starting the podcast, I had friends who were heads of growth at Numeral who was sponsoring this episode and Nate was like, “I’ve listened to every episode of the podcast. It’s so good. Can I sponsor the podcast?” And I was like, “I don’t know. Yeah, it might be kind of cool, but it seems like a hassle. It can’t be that much money. I don’t know if it’s even worth it.” And then it was kind of evolved to the point where it’s like, “Oh, I kind of accidentally… I also have a media business also.”

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

So it’s kind of like this two-pronged and a lot of things that I am investing and I think it’s not the only part of the thesis, but I think about, if I invest, how can I help out? Can I lend my distribution? So I guess with Fort, it’s like, I don’t know, you’re maybe selling to my audience, but it’s like, can I help? Or also, do you understand the psyche of the customer, maybe that drives the decision making of would you invest or not? I mean, I used to work out four or five times a week in college and get married, have kids, just once a week now to consistently actually do a good workout.

And it’s just you play floor hockey also instead of even doing a gym workout. But you identify with the product and you realize, “Oh, man. That is some…” You realize what the customer might want. So I don’t know. It’s kind of, a lot of investing is stuff that you feel like you could help or you understand would people actually use this and pay for it. And I don’t know, do you think you’ll be able to make money? I feel like that’s a big thing that people don’t think about, is you have to make money.

Miranda Nover:

They don’t think about making money in a business. It’s crazy.

Turner Novak:

Well, and it’s not even just, can you charge customers for it, but is this a valuable company?

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

Because there’s a lot of things where you can sell a dollar for 80 cents and you can generate infinite revenue losing money, but you need to be able to think of like, “Okay, if I put a dollar into this company, will I get a billion dollars back in a week? That’s probably the ultimate is invest a super small amount and you just make a shit ton of money really quickly and then there’s a spectrum of it might take a lot longer, you need to put in more money, et cetera. But ultimately, I think it was just, can you make money?

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

I feel like as a founder, you maybe don’t think about that as much. It’s all about the TAM or the product, like me as the team and people are looking at it and thinking about a lot of that stuff, but also it’s just, can I make money?

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

That’s what the investors are thinking about. I think there’s also a dynamic of, depending on who you talk to of, will I get promoted if I invest in this company? Because a lot of the tenure’s pretty short. So the way that might play out in practice is, okay, I invest in Miranda and her seed round. And then in three years later or maybe honestly three months later, you raise a Series A, two months later you raise a Series B. It looks like really quick progress on the surface. And me as the investor who did that, my career prospects look good. And I can go from being an associate at a fund to a principal or maybe I can leave and start my own firm.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

And it might not actually matter, like was Fort successful. Maybe you are and it becomes a public company or maybe things like crash and burn, but it doesn’t matter because I got my promotion. So I feel like those are some of the different angles that investors might be thinking about that’s, it’s not the same framing as, how good is the product, what’s the market like, what’s the TAM?

Miranda Nover:

Sure.

Turner Novak:

The way I think maybe is the most helpful for founders is just, you come to the investors and you’re like, “Here’s how we’re going to make a bunch of money.” Because that’s also what people are kind of trying to answer.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

It’s like the investors are going to make a bunch of money and it’s going to help their career because that’s ultimately when you’re selling a product to someone. You’re selling like B2B SaaS. It’s like you’re saving them time, you’re saving them money, or it’s like they brought this new AI product into the organization and that person gets promoted and becomes like a VP because they brought in this great software that helped the company. So I feel it’s an angle to maybe think about fundraising that’s a little bit different.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. They talk a lot about inflection points. And I think obviously, the reason for that is the slope is steeper. So the time delta between now and when we’re either in theory or in practice going to make some unfathomable sum of money is just so little. It’s like the classic power law dynamics. I also want to know, what were the first things that sort of did well on social media for you? When did you find social media PMF and how did you think about that?

Turner Novak:

So probably the first things I started tweeting about… Did you use Snapchat or do you use it?

Miranda Nover:

I don’t anymore, although I have noticed it’s coming back.

Turner Novak:

Oh, is it? Okay.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

So this is probably the very early days of it was, I started, I kind of wanted to get a job in venture. I was like, “Oh, I feel like this would be kind of fun. They’re on Twitter. I’ll just tweet about things I feel like I’m smart about and people will follow me and I’ll use it to build a public track record of saying things and I’ll get a job.”

This was probably 2017, 2018. So the first things I started tweeting about was Snapchat did this big redesign. I don’t know if you remember when they added stories to the left side of the app, and they basically turned to the Discover section into a endless feed and Kylie Jenner, Kendall Jenner, I don’t even remember who, one of the Kardashians tweeted that… She said something like, “Does anyone use Snapchat anymore?”

And the stock dropped 20% in a day. And it was pretty interesting where Snapchat is a product that pretty much every kid in the developed world, like US, Europe, et cetera, they use it all day, every day, had about two thirds the size user base is Instagram and Instagram was… There wasn’t a ton of public data around how big Instagram was inside Facebook, but it was probably worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Miranda Nover:

Sure.

Turner Novak:

And Snapchat at one point traded at about $5 billion and it was basically, people were like, “This company’s going bankrupt. No one uses it anymore.” And it’s just because a lot of public negative consensus around it. Now it’s, that’s so not even a fair assumption to have. Literally, every kid in the country uses it all day, every day. Facebook is the best business model of all time and Snapchat is just a worse version of it, but it’s still a pretty good business.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah, yeah.

Turner Novak:

And I think today, Snapchat does six billion in revenue, but at the time back in 2018, it was worth $5 billion-

Miranda Nover:

Wow.

Turner Novak:

Because I was going bankrupt. So I started tweeting a lot of why I thought this was, based on all the data, I was kind of listening to the earnings calls, finding different charts, reports and tweeting things. It’s kind of like having an opinion on something that you feel is a unique view and you’re just kind of putting it out there. And a lot of people are like, “Oh, this is pretty good take. Maybe this guy’s actually right.” It’s probably similar to today when you come across someone and you’re like, “Oh, this is a smart thing this person said.”

Miranda Nover:

Sure.

Turner Novak:

And so, I started tweeting about that specifically. And then also, probably another big thing that worked for me was when Musical.ly rebranded as TikTok, I really had never even really heard of Musical.ly because I was in my 20s and there was a Wall Street Journal article about this TikTok app. And I was like, “Why is there a Wall Street Journal article about some social media app?” I tried and I was like, “Holy shit. This is the best product I’ve ever used. It feels like Vine 2.0.” TikTok, when it first came out, it felt like Vine. And I was like, “Wow.” And the product was really, really good. And so, the thesis with when I was posting a lot about Snap, it was that, “Oh wow, they’re adding a ton of more ad inventory.” They’re basically bringing stories into the messaging section so they can monetize the messaging. So it was always a big issue with Snapchat was all people use it for is messaging and they can’t make any money.

They added stories to that part of the app and then they also made this endless feed that you scroll and they started showing ads in the feed. And it’s like that’s why it’s just such a good business is because it’s just you get people addicted to their phone and the more they scroll, you just keep making money. And the interesting thing with TikTok was back in 2019, when you opened the Instagram app or even still you opened Facebook and you think of your phone as this rectangle and maybe one third of the screen is actually the video and then there’s a white bar and it’s Miranda and your little circle of your profile picture and the name. And there’s like a big section is just the like button and then the comments, but the apps in the screen space wasn’t really optimized. And TikTok was just you open the app and it’s all the video.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

And the other interesting thing was when you looked at what they were doing in China, you could shop right from the app and buy things from the app. And everyone had kind of always said, “Maybe Instagram could do this.” You can shop on Instagram, but TikTok was much more positioned to basically be a video first Amazon or be a more visually optimized version of, when you think of, because I think that the thing that Instagram maybe struggled with at first was when you think of Snapchat maybe started the stories concept and it was you’re sending people video messages or picture messages.

And then the way it evolved was, you have that screen where you can pick who you send the thing to and you can just at the top, click my story and bolt it onto the story. And it’s this kind of thing that accumulated over time that you layered in these different videos or different pieces of media, and it kind of told a story per se. And then when Instagram literally copied it, they literally copied everything about it. And so they just added these circles at the top of the screen and that’s how Instagram added full screen video to the app.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

It was literally a carbon copy of, Snaps had evolved from this messaging feature and Instagram, they almost didn’t think from first principles. They’re just like, “Let’s exactly clone it and do exactly the same thing.” And you’re like, “Why is there this weird circle stream at the top of the app?” And it’s still there. And then there’s kind of reels now, but it’s kind of this Frankenstein thing. And it was just, I always thought it was kind of fascinating that TikTok was like, “If you were to redesign a social media product native to mobile and video, then it would be TikTok.”

So anyways, I started tweeting about this kind of stuff back in 2018, ‘19, ‘20, and it was a lot of serious things and people followed me for that. And then there was one point I had a friend who ran an account. It’s not that active, I won’t say the name, but it was a meme account about VC and tech. And I started, I’d probably come up with 10% of the tweets and they would slap. They’d get a thousand likes, which was pretty good back in six years ago-

Miranda Nover:

I’d still take it though, the likes.

Turner Novak:

… seven years ago. Yeah.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

But even then, it was like inflation adjusted. It was maybe 5,000 likes equivalent today-

Miranda Nover:

Which is great. Yeah.

Turner Novak:

Yeah. And I’d be like, “Man, I spent all this time, like eight hours on a weekend putting out this kind of insightful thing and no one cared.” Relatively, people just didn’t care as much versus, huh? I made this dumb meme making fun of VCs and the founder of a public company retweeted-

Miranda Nover:

Sure.

Turner Novak:

… raised venture funding and probably hated as VCs. So I was like, “Huh.” There was this weird dynamic that’s kind of emerging where you can use humor for marketing and smart founders would identify with it. So I started, instead of helping my friend with memes, I would make them from my own account and I’d start posting memes and it’s called shitposting now, but it almost wasn’t… There wasn’t a word for it and it worked really well because it wasn’t really a thing that people were doing. And back at the time it was a lot of tech Twitter and VC Twitter was earnest cringe posting, like you would get on LinkedIn, is much more prevalent on the feeds. So you’d see, we’ve all kind of seen those really weird congratulatory tweets of VCs bragging. It was so much more prominent. And so, all of a sudden I was like an investor that was just making fun of myself and other VCs.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

And founders just identified with it and liked it and it just worked. I had a hypothesis that if I just kind of lean into this, I bet it will work and it was 10 times more effective than I thought.

Miranda Nover:

You invented shitposting.

Turner Novak:

Yeah. I would not say I invented it, but I probably made it more acceptable because I raised a fund off of it and people are like, “Oh, this is a business strategy.” You can use memes for-

Miranda Nover:

Actual business.

Turner Novak:

… B2B marketing, really. Yeah.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. I think there’s an interesting… I tweeted 5K followers on Instagram gets you a discount code with a drop shipping company, but 5K followers on Twitter gets you a $5 million precede. And it’s crazy because I think that this is inherently this is an interesting concept of having different amounts of leverage for different niches and different platforms. But then I also think there’s just so many… I was actually thinking about writing a Substack post. I’m too focused on business to do this, but as a side project, I’d love to interview a bunch of my friends who are micro influencers in different niches and see how different the lifestyle is because so many people are influencing on the side.

Turner Novak:

And also what’s the business model.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. And what’s the business model?

Turner Novak:

What is the business model?

Miranda Nover:

How durable is it?

Turner Novak:

Yeah. Because in some categories, if you’re selling… It’s basically how big is the ACV of the product?

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

So if you’re selling enterprise SaaS that is infrastructure level, except average customer pays you a million dollars, the content can be extremely effective versus it might be more challenging with a super small ACV like if Apoorva, the founder of Instacart was making TikToks to try to acquire Instacart users, the economics on that kind of just changes and looks different.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah. UGC and all these crazy things. I’m actually very excited to try to run the marketing engine for Fort at scale. I think it’s not time to pull the trigger on that until again, we’re really sure what we’re building and we make our beta users very happy. But I feel like that is something that I’m tremendously excited to do is leverage social media at scale to actually efficiently market a product, which has more challenging economics in terms of just consumer products. And you can’t really have lower ACV and you have to get more customers and the customers are more fickle. So there’s a lot of… Yeah, that’s a very exciting thing. And I’m also really excited to see what happens with AI, both AI consumer products, AI devices, like sharing generative AI, like text-based content or images or whatever. It will be really interesting to see how marketing evolves with that too.

Turner Novak:

Yeah. I feel like it’s going to be crazy.

Miranda Nover:

Yeah.

Turner Novak:

But anyways, this was a lot of fun. Thanks for doing it.

Miranda Nover:

Thanks for having me.

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