Catch Up: David Holomakoff of Kinotek
An exclusive Tech Tribune Q&A with David Holomakoff (co-founder and Chief Product Officer) of Kinotek, which was honored in our:
- 2024 Best Tech Startups in Maine
- 2023 Best Tech Startups in Maine
- 2022 Best Tech Startups in Maine
- 2022 Best Tech Startups in Portland (Maine)
- 2021 Best Tech Startups in Maine
- 2020 Best Tech Startups in Portland (Maine)
We last spoke in 2020. What has Kinotek been up to since then?
We’ve come a long way.
In 2020, Kinotek was just an idea – to use technology to measure human movement. We were exploring expensive sensors that attached to your body. COVID changed that! In 2021, we pivoted to a new technology using a LiDAR camera and no sensors. Here’s what followed:
2021: Kinotek was one of six companies (out of 400 globally) chosen for the LEAD Sports & Health Tech incubator in Lake Nona, Florida, and received seed funding.
2022: Restructured our management team and brought in a new CEO, Pat Panaia. She brought 30 years of experience at two billion dollar startups and helped us complete our product beta test, register with the FDA, and finally go to market.
2023: After successful sales into medical, sports and fitness markets, we found the most traction in fitness. Our reports and 3D visualizations provided a whole new way for fitness professionals to communicate, enabling them to more easily upgrade clients to personal training services.
2024: This year, fitness sales are up >100% and we introduced major feature upgrades, including a Movement Quality Report and AI-driven exercise programming based on Kinotek analytics. Fitness professionals love our whole package because of how it enables a hyper-personalized client experience, and is proven to drive new revenues. A few data points on Kinotek’s impact on fitness customers:
- In the first six months of this year, Healthtrax used Kinotek to upsell its new services resulting in 558 new clients and $300,000 in new revenues.
- Raintree Athletic Club’s use of Kinotek to help upsell personal training services resulted in a >3X improvement in conversion rates, from 25% to 80%. In October they set a club revenue record.
- Life Time chose Kinotek over five competitors and was so impressed with its impact on sales that it has committed to rolling out Kinotek across its 180 locations nationwide.
One more thing: as of this writing we have surpassed 330 locations using us nationwide and our annual recurring revenues are nearing $1M. Not bad after just two years in the market.
What’s new with the future mission or goals of the company?
In the last two years, we’ve done much research on understanding the issues humans face with their musculoskeletal (MSK) health. For example, studies report that 1 in 2 adult Americans suffer from some MSK pain, and that 1.7 billion humans are suffering worldwide. It’s so bad that the World Health Organization calls it a global epidemic. Women are the fastest growing sufferers as they are living longer and facing post-menopausal impacts to their bone strength.
However, our great discovery is that when we can educate individuals on how they currently move and how they can move better to prevent issues (and prevent unnecessary surgeries!), we can help a lot of people live a better, pain-free life.
So, after getting to market and truly understanding the impact of Kinotek, we developed this simple and powerful statement: Kinotek’s mission is to enable all humans to move better and pain-free for their entire lives.
What have you learned or has surprised you about the industry since we last spoke?
I think there are two hugely surprising things:
Wellness is the best place to start. When we last spoke, we thought our customers would be physical therapists and chiropractors that want a new and better way to measure human movement. As it turns out, while we DO offer this, these professionals and their businesses are under so much pressure from low insurance reimbursement rates that they don’t have time to help people understand how they move. It’s all part of the broken healthcare system that only treats sickness and doesn’t care about long term injury and pain prevention. Insurance by design drives for the shortest treatment period possible! To be clear, individual physical therapists absolutely care about their clients but they are trapped in a system that doesn’t allow them to give the care to clients they would like. So our huge learning was that we could start with the wellness industry where people want to take the time to improve their health. Which led to huge surprise #2.
Fitness professionals didn’t realize they needed a new way to communicate. Fitness professionals come in a very wide range of skills and experience and most are hungry for new technology to help them measure and monitor their clients’ health (i.e. like MyZone that measures member heart rate, or InBody that measures body composition). Even so, when it comes to educating and gaining buy-in from their clients on exercise programming, it seems everyone just wants to use a mirror (in their own words), or perhaps show a video of someone else. Kinotek fundamentally changes this dynamic by providing each individual client’s OWN data, along with client-friendly reports with scores, graphs, and 3D visuals. We’ve gamified and hyper-personalized really important information that anyone should understand about their own body. Clients are engaged and motivated to take action. Even for experienced fitness professionals who may be skilled educators, they embrace Kinotek’s reports and visuals because they enhance the client experience. The exercise programming feature gives them new ideas and new ways to think about caring for their clients.