Swim outside.

For those of us who enjoy swimming, both community and residential building pools have been closed to us as the global pandemic continues to carry out its course. The inability to partake in an exercise that is at once calming and energizing had dampened our spirits for a while. Imagine our surprise (and delight) when we discovered that FORM has recently launched its new Open Water features to help track your performance while swimming outside. Swimmers are now able to view real-time GPS performance metrics and heart rate in open water through a free firmware update.

While FORM smart swim goggles were built to meet the needs of serious competitive swimmers, the team also designed them to give all swimmers, no matter what experience level, a better experience in the pool. Triathletes love the FORM goggles, and so do lap swimmers and fitness swimmers.

We had the pleasure of inviting FORM Founder, Dan Eisenhardt, to share more information on the brand and the new Open Water features.

P: Pendulum

D: Dan Eisenhardt, Founder, FORM

P: Can you briefly tell us about your background? What was the driving force behind your decision to launch FORM? 

D: I swam competitively for 14 years. So I’ve really felt the pain of not being able to access my metrics in real-time. I had the idea for swim goggles with a display in my MBA program back in 2006. For a number of reasons, it couldn’t be done at the time. But the idea did give rise to my previous startup, Recon, which delivered the same experience for snow sports. That company was sold to Intel in 2015. Today, the technology is mature enough to deliver the experience I wanted to deliver back then. And FORM is lucky to have a lot of former Recon and Intel people on the team, so we have the experience to make this product really amazing.

P: You have integrated digital smart features into your products that are unique to FORM. Could you elaborate on what those features are?

D: You can boil the features in the FORM Smart Swim Goggles down to three key components:

• The display. We use a waveguide display with freeform optics built right into the goggles lens. It’s see-through, and you don’t have to refocus your eyes to read it, so it’s like the data is floating in front of you.
  

• The onboard computer. It detects what you’re doing as you swim and feeds data to the display. It’s highly miniaturized and very low-power, so we have amazing battery life.
  

• The phone app. The app syncs with the FORM goggles so you can review your workouts, share them with friends, and customize what you see in the goggles.

Building innovative technology into a great design is always a balancing act. One major challenge was miniaturizing the electronics to keep the display side of the goggles as compact as possible. Another challenge was integrating the optics and electronics seamlessly. This required elegant solutions not just in the design of the goggles, but also in the manufacturing assembly process.

In terms of design, our top goal was always to make a really great pair of swim goggles. The FORM goggles look and feel the way you’d expect regular swim goggles to look and feel. But we used premium materials on all aspects of the product to make sure it has excellent fit and durability.

The final step of the process was a long period of testing. We had swimmers in the pool training our machine-learning algorithm since the summer of 2017, two years before we launched.

P: Can you tell us how the integration of the FORM app and smartwatches like Apple Watch work with your product? 

D: The FORM goggles support the Garmin Forerunner 945, Garmin fēnix 6 Pro and fēnix 5 Plus, and Apple Watch Series 5, 4, and 3 for open water swimming. The smartwatches pair with the FORM goggles, where the watch then tracks the precise real-time GPS distance, pace, and more, while also monitoring heart rate. Real-time metrics are then transmitted wirelessly from the watch to the FORM goggles. This enables the swimmer to see their heart rate and GPS distance in their line of sight, alongside other performance metrics. Once the swim is complete, syncing the goggles with the FORM Swim App will allow the swimmer and their coach to review detailed workout stats.

P: What were some of the biggest challenges that you encountered in the initial stage of starting the business? What measures did you implement to overcome them? Did they work? 

The biggest challenges were both technical and financial. It was very hard to develop the optics to work underwater and at an affordable price point. Furthermore, machine learning required a lot of testing and iterations which meant it was unpredictable how long it was going to take to get to market with a viable solution. From a funding perspective, it was difficult to persuade investors that swimming was a big enough market to bet on. For the technical problems, it helped that we had decades of experience from Recon within the team and that we were able to get into the water with an off the shelf sensor pack to collect the data before we were ready with the optics. The market problem was more a perception obstacle rather than a real obstacle because the facts are known. More than 240 million people are actively pool-swimming each year. That's up there with cycling and running, so we quickly managed to convince investors to back us once we presented those facts. 

P: As an entrepreneur who has founded two startups (FORM and previously Recon Instruments), could you share with our readers some tips on how to successfully obtain venture funding?

D: It's never easy. Some companies decide never to go for venture funding. Instead, they stay lean and fund the business through friends and family, angels, and cash flow from early traction. For others who need to grow faster, venture funding is the only viable path. 

The best advice I can give is to be prepared. Understand what it takes to be venture-backed. Talk to friends who have gone through the process before. Get your business plan polished and vetted. Develop your financial model and make sure to include assumptions behind each revenue and cost driver. Ask yourself what problem you are solving and for whom and why you are 10 times better than alternatives at the same price (this in my opinion is a must because it will take time to bring your solution to market). Make sure to do your homework on potential investors. Don't make the mistake of "spray and pray" where you send out your pitch deck to everyone hoping someone will bite. You need to create your shortlist and tailor each pitch to them. Make sure to have 3-5 hot leads in the shortlist so you don't end up being the victim of a squeeze where there's only one Venture Capitalist (VC) at the table. That usually doesn't turn out well. 

For series A stage investments I always recommend bringing in a strategic investor alongside the VC. That will make it easier to attract a high-quality VC and maintain good relations even through bad times because a non-financial investor is backing you and can help you gain traction and offset any "bad blood" at the board level when targets aren't achieved. There's also the benefit of an exit, something we benefited from at Recon when Intel purchased the company 2 years after the capital branch had made their investment.  

P: The pandemic has turned the whole world upside down. What would you say about the challenges of running your business during such difficult times? 

In our case, we suffered a great deal on the market side since pools were closed globally and at that time we didn't have an open water solution. Besides, it was too early in the season for open water to compensate for pool closures. The water in the lakes and oceans was simply too cold. 

From a productivity perspective, I think overall we were better off than most other sectors in the economy. Being a tech startup you're already digital, and we had just launched our first product with still lots of development work to do on the product roadmap. Everything is run in the cloud, and we could quite easily switch to remote work without loss of productivity. Over time we do need the face-to-face in the office because we work so multidisciplinary and because we have a hardware component. We're dependent on our labs and our ability to test our product in the pool. To collaborate cross-functionally and brainstorm on the whiteboard in the conference room - some of those things are very hard to do on Zoom or Hangout. So we were very fortunate to be able to gradually return to the office already in June, and then in July, we launched the Open Water feature as a free firmware upgrade, which kicked our sales into high gear again.

P: What was the rationale behind the launch of your new Open Water capabilities for FORM? 

D: Open water has always been part of the next stage of development for FORM, as we have been consciously looking to complete the experience provided by the FORM goggles by giving swimmers the ability to access performance metrics in both the pool and open water. With it being summer, and with many pools still closed due to COVID, the timing just seemed right to bring this experience to our customer base. 

P: What is the size of your current team? How do they impact and support you in the business? What roles do they play on the team? What role do you play on the team?

D: We're just under 60 people working at FORM. About 60% are engineers and scientists and the rest work across Product, Operations and Sales & Marketing. I have had many roles in the company since its inception. The main role from start was Head of Product all the way up until launch in August last year. This was natural given my background in swimming, engineering, and the experience I had from Recon. As a CEO you're always the cheerleader and you're also the fundraiser. So I spent a lot of time with investors and selling the vision and strategy both internally and externally. Now, I have a full executive team and can focus more on corporate development, like making deals with partners that can help us grow faster, preparing the company for later-stage financing, and ensuring our company and the many teams and execs are working towards the same goals so we can deliver on the vision we have sold to investors and to our employees. 

P: What has been the toughest decision you’ve had to make? How did it turn out? 

D: The toughest decision was to stay true to our mandate of delivering a product that satisfied all our stated requirements but still would be able to sell at a $199 mass-market price point. This we knew was necessary for us to get to scale in a Direct to Consumer business model. We really had to be razor-sharp on our assumptions about what our customers wanted and exactly who our customers were. Every feature was a cost driver and we couldn't satisfy everyone. In the end, I believe that an extreme focus on costs and customers’ motivations led us to make better product decisions because we could focus on the core experience that we knew would move the needle for our early adopters. 

P: What is your long-term vision for FORM? 

D: Our vision is to make swimming a source of joy for everyone. Not just the serious swimmers who compete at the college level or do triathlons. We believe everyone is born with the love of water, and we want people to come back to that feeling of wanting to spend time in the pool, using our goggles to help them stay motivated, engaged and to help them fulfill their potential quicker. Showing metrics in real-time speeds up the learning loop and helps improve both fitness and technique while staying committed to personal goals. Accurate real-time tracking is just the beginning of that journey. Our vision is to switch the paradigm from activity tracking to activity leading. Showing swimmers how they can improve based on their individual swim mechanics and development. That's truly the next step in our evolution.

We want to thank Dan for taking the time to share his unique business with us, and how the team has quickly adapted to launch the Open Water features to allow their swimmers to get back to their favorite exercise. The story of FORM shows how important market timing is for an entrepreneur, and also reminds us of how we shouldn’t dismiss past ideas so quickly. As Dan mentioned, his initial idea for FORM was born in 2006 during his MBA class; After 2 years of testing the product, FORM goggles officially launched in 2019, more than a decade after the birth of the idea. As they say, ideas are a dime a dozen, it is the execution of the idea that makes up the bulk of the work.

We eagerly await future innovations from FORM, as we are sure Dan has more ideas to make swimming a joy for all of FORM’s users. If you wish to find out more about the brand, visit their website here.

Photos courtesy of FORM