Ever wonder if the phase of the moon affects your sleep? How about whether swimming or running is better for your heart?
Those are questions Zenobase wants to answer. The startup, launched by software developer Eric Jain, acts as a catch-all for personal data — everything from fitness tracking to local weather. The platform allows users to store, visualize, and share that data.
“I saw a need for a Twitter-like service, but for structured data,” said Jain. “If instead of just tweeting about how many miles you ran, if a tweet had structured data like a distance, location, duration etc, that would open up a lot of possibilities.”
Although fitness tracking is hardly a new phenomenon, Zenobase aims to stand apart by condensing data from a variety of services and sources in one place.
“There were services for specific activities, but you’d end up with data in different places, and limited to whatever kind of data each service supported,” Jain said. “Zenobase addresses this by providing a simple but flexible data model, integration with many popular services, and a powerful dashboard.”
In this video, Jain provides more detail about Zenobase’s data platform:
We caught up with Jain for our latest installment of Startup Spotlight, a regular GeekWire feature.
Explain what you do so our parents can understand it: “I help people collect and make use of data to answer questions like, ‘Do I need more sleep after getting a lot of exercise?’ or, ‘Does drinking coffee really help me stay focused?'”
Inspiration hit us when: “I’m not sure when inspiration hit, but at one point I sat down and wrote down all the startup ideas that came to mind, and this seemed to
be the most practical one.”
VC, Angel or Bootstrap: “Bootstrap. Despite the hype, the number of people who are motivated to do interesting things with their data is still small, and I don’t want to ruin a perfectly good business with unrealistic growth goals.”
Our ‘secret sauce’ is: “Giving people a data model that is simple yet flexible, and a dashboard that lets them slice and dice their data to see what correlations and changes are significant, and which are not.”
The smartest move we’ve made so far: “Getting involved with the local startup community, and with the local and global ‘quantified self’ community. Mailing lists and forums are great resources for getting quick feedback, and meetups and conferences make for great deadlines.”
The biggest mistake we’ve made so far: “Putting off getting more publicity because there’s always just one more feature that needs to be implemented first. This interview is a good example.”
Would you rather have Gates, Zuckerberg or Bezos in your corner: “Whoever is least likely to interfere too much.”
Our favorite team-building activity is: “Lunch.”
The biggest thing we look for when hiring is: “Does the candidate know what they don’t know?”
What’s the one piece of advice you’d give to other entrepreneurs just starting out: “Don’t listen to free advice.”
