David Mehlman, Founder & CEO of Ommyx
In this Q&A, you’ll hear from David Mehlman, founder & CEO of Ommyx, a data-enabled health optimization platform. David shares how frustration with a fragmented health and wellness industry led to an app that uses wearables data and machine learning to make personalized recommendations for sleep, exercise, nutrition, and more.
Can you tell us about what you’re working on at Ommyx?
David Mehlman: Ommyx exists to bridge the gap between wearables, which tell us what’s happening inside our bodies, and software products, which aggregate and consolidate biometric data.
A clear disconnect, we’re given a wealth of information but little guidance on what we can do to improve upon different health variables, or how to do so in the context of our busy lives.
Ommyx is the first app of its kind to house all of your health and performance data in a single place and provide personalized, actionable insights.
Rather than navigating several different apps and making assumptions about how your different metrics may be related, Ommyx offers you one big-picture snapshot and shows you the individual and collective impacts on your health and performance.
We do this in three steps:
- We collect data about factors that affect your health and performance from you and a variety of wearable and testing technologies.
- We use machine learning to construct hypotheses about your current physiological condition and generate recommendations for optimizing that condition.
- We integrate with your calendar to help you implement these recommendations and create new, long-lasting habits.
How did you come up with the idea? What key insight led you to pursue this opportunity?
DM: When I hit my mid-30s, I was tired all the time, sleeping poorly, and having random aches and pains. I knew I had to take steps to improve my health, but I had no idea where to start.
The wellness industry was this vast and overwhelming world of information (and misinformation), confusing and conflicting claims about what to eat and how to exercise, and products that were frustrating to use.
I read tons of articles and talked to friends and “experts,” but the advice was very generic and overly broad — what worked for one person didn’t work for others, and it was hard to know how to apply it to my life specifically.
As a result, I was wasting time trying things that didn’t work for me and not spending enough time on things that did.
I hired a trainer and a nutritionist, and they gave me a bunch of suggestions and recommendations; some were helpful, and some weren’t.
I thought, why was it so hard to find the right way to live a longer, healthier life? Why wasn’t there a resource to help people like us find information that was relevant to our wellness journeys? Why wasn’t there a tool that would take data about our health, lifestyles, personalities, and daily routines to determine what would work best for each one of us?
I was frustrated, like so many others. That’s when Ommyx was born.
We believe health and performance are personal and that optimizing them shouldn’t be a burden. We are working to decode personal data and democratize health and performance insights so every individual can build a lifestyle that works for them.
How did you turn your idea into a company?
DM: The one thing I knew for certain when we started Ommyx was that there was much more that I didn’t know about this world than what I did. I partnered with three co-founders, all of whom have expertise in different areas, and we set out to tackle what we knew was a massive problem.
Our first goal was to improve the experience of food tracking by automating the process of finding the food you need to complete your daily nutrition goals, a practice that plagues almost every tracker.
The result is the world’s fastest and most intuitive food tracker. But nutrition is only one piece of optimizing the health puzzle, so that was just the beginning.
With the advancement of apps, wearables, and at-home testing kits, access to health data is greater than ever before. However, the data is siloed, and there is no simple way to analyze or learn from it.
There needed to be a tool to connect the dots. So, we shifted our focus to building integrations to collect this data and machine learning models to analyze it, producing actionable recommendations that users can employ to improve their health and performance.
We have been extremely lucky to have the help of some brilliant consultants and advisors along the way and are supported by a group of extraordinary friends, family, and strategic investors.
We launched the product publicly in March 2023 and are already seeing encouraging early traction and getting inbound requests for some corporate relationships!
How big can this get? What’s the addressable market and how do you go about capturing it?
DM: While there are various subsets and levels of interest, the addressable market for people who want to live longer, healthier, higher-performing lives is essentially endless.
From professional and Olympic athletes trying to eke out tiny improvements in performance to the working parent who wants to have a little more energy and live longer without ailment or disease, Ommyx will be able to help a wide variety of people achieve their health and performance goals over time.
The key to our success will be continuing to build a product that can address this variety of users by meeting people where they are while providing them insights that work for their specific goals.
Who is the core customer? How are you acquiring customers? And how will you grow the customer base?
DM: As discussed above, we believe there are a number of different customers, and we are hyper-focused on defining that initial core customer.
Because of that, we intentionally did not rush the build of our product. We spent six months running a beta to test and used the insights to improve the product before launching publicly.
Our initial target group is what we call the “executive athlete” — someone who takes their health, wellness, and performance seriously but is not a professional athlete and leads a busy life. We are acquiring these customers via content we produce, direct marketing campaigns, and partnerships with like-minded companies in the space.
As we grow, we will target customers both above and below the “executive athlete,” like “elite athletes” through leagues and associations and “everyday athletes” through doctors and employers.
Looking at your road map, what are some of the milestones you’re targeting over the next 3-6 months?
DM: Our product roadmap is both long and forever changing!
There are so many things we want to build that we know will improve and expand the recommendations we provide our users and also make the experience better.
We are targeting more integrations, more health and performance markers that users can select to optimize, and some very exciting new technology implementations. We’re also hoping to finalize some of our first B2B relationships while we continue to grow our B2C user base.
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