Alex Peacock - When the Workaround Is the Product

Alex is a product builder and founder at Leisure Labs, where he helps fitness and wellness companies make better build, buy, and roadmap decisions. Over the last 15 years, he’s worked on more than 50 products, from connected fitness features to product strategy for larger enterprise teams. His work now includes Connect by Leisure Labs, a product company focused on common gaps he sees across the fitness and wellness market.

Alex from Leisure Labs joins Marco and Jonas for the first episode of This Feature Will Save Us.

They talk about a feature from the Netpulse days called X-Capture, which let gym members take a photo of a cardio machine console and log the workout from the image. At the time, it solved a messy problem: fitness operators wanted connected equipment, but connecting every machine directly was a headache.

The conversation moves into the stuff product teams usually have to sort through before a feature ever ships: timing, simplicity, internal alignment, and the difference between something that demos well and something that actually holds up.

They also get into the 2021 omnichannel rush in fitness, AI prototyping, vibe coding, and why Alex thinks hyper-personalization at scale is the next real shift for fitness and wellness products.

Alex breaks down:

• Why X-Capture worked as a simple workaround for a complicated integration problem
• How product teams decide between building, buying, or connecting multiple tools
• Why company vision problems usually become roadmap problems
• What the fitness industry got wrong about omnichannel during COVID
• Where AI helps product teams move faster, and where it still gets risky
• Why vibe-coded prototypes are useful, but not the same as production-ready products
• Alex’s take on hyper-personalization at scale

Transcript

Marco Benítez (00:00)
Mr. Alex.

Alex (00:01)
Hey guys!

Jonas Dücker (00:03)
How's it going?

Marco Benítez (00:03)
How are

you?

Alex (00:04)
Good, how are you?

Jonas Dücker (00:06)
Wow.

Marco Benítez (00:06)
It's doing

really well.

Jonas Dücker (00:07)
we're very excited that this is the first episode and it's with you. So yeah, I'm very grateful. Easy one to start with. Favorite fitness product right now.

Alex (00:17)
My favorite fitness product. So I'm a runner and I really like the runner app. ⁓ And I like it because it does one thing really well. It focuses on telling me what to do, holding me accountable. If you're working towards a race, you can just tell it, okay, this is the race I'm doing. Build me a plan and it does it. And the plans actually work. So yeah, that's my favorite.

Marco Benítez (00:43)
Awesome. Red or black? What's your favorite color? Red or black?

Alex (00:49)
Always black.

Jonas Dücker (00:50)
Cardio sports are strength training.

Alex (00:53)
video.

Marco Benítez (00:55)
Favorite foods.

Alex (00:57)
Favorite food? I love Spanish food.

Jonas Dücker (00:59)
⁓ Outside of fitness and wellness, favorite app you're currently using.

Alex (01:04)
⁓ My favorite, certainly from a user experience point of view is City Mapper. I use it in every city I go. a UK company and they started building. a journey mapping, but it's designed around the city. It looks at multimodal transport. It's just really simple. I need to get home. Tell me how to get there.

really good UX and they're adding more cities all the time. So that's probably my go-to outside of fitness.

Marco Benítez (01:36)
very good one. Married or single?

Alex (01:40)
Me, I'm married.

Marco Benítez (01:41)
No. Which one do you prefer?

Alex (01:44)
Which one do I prefer?

Jonas Dücker (01:45)
Yeah.

Marco Benítez (01:46)
Hahaha

Jonas Dücker (01:50)
We're gonna skip that one to most underrated metric in product

Marco Benítez (01:50)
Two different... ⁓

Alex (01:50)
Very happily married.

Most underrated

metric? I would say in the context of apps, app store rating. I think it's easy to kind of become obsessed with product metrics internally, but actually your customers will really tell you what they think. I pretty underrated. think it's important. Customers should be, product builders should be focusing a bit more on what their customers are saying, what their app store ratings are.

Marco Benítez (02:21)
AI in fitness. Good or bad.

Alex (02:24)
it's great. It's going to be game changing. I think there's a lot more to see. think there's going to be a lot more utility coming over the next 12 months, Everywhere is a huge opportunity.

Jonas Dücker (02:37)
harm to any of the two but conference HFA or FIBO?

Alex (02:41)
Hmm, so I'm European, so I've been going to FIBO ⁓ for a very long time. I think ⁓ from a scale and spectacle point of view, FIBO is always good. But HFA when it's in San Diego is pretty nice too.

Marco Benítez (02:57)
bad executions or bad

Alex (03:01)
I think that depends on the stage of the company. So when you're early, will kill you first because if you keep building stuff nobody needs, then you're never going to break through. But once you get to scale, execution becomes much more important, especially in B2B because you're looking to build credibility, scalability.

Jonas Dücker (03:26)
That's perfect leading into the next question. B2B or B2C?

Alex (03:31)
B2B, so that's my happy place.

Marco Benítez (03:35)
All right, well, Alex, you have been building a lot of products during the last, I don't know, how many years you have been building products and dreams for other founders.

Alex (03:49)
in the current guys, four, but in total I've been doing this for 15 years.

Marco Benítez (03:55)
15 years, how many products, more or less, how many products did you were part of?

Alex (04:02)
would say north of 50 less than 100.

Marco Benítez (04:06)
Wow, that's a lot, a lot of products. And do you realize that you are really helping a lot founders to build dreams? That's really awesome. mean, I'm a founder, so I know how difficult it is to build products. And now that you are helping them to do all these type of things, it's really amazing. you have any, you cannot, of course, you can name it or not, whatever you feel comfortable, but

Do you remember your favorite one or favorite feature that you built during all these years?

Alex (04:41)
I mean, I can't entirely take all the credit for this, but one of my favorite features, if I go back to the the NetPulse days, had a white label app for fitness operators and we had a feature called X-Capture. And at the time, it was a feature where you could use the camera on your phone to take a picture of your console on your on your piece of cardio equipment.

and it would record the workout summary at the end of your workout and put it into your workout history. And it was one of the features that has, I've known every single time I demoed it, it had a kind of an instant reaction. It was like a wow, a wow feature. So ⁓ that one stands out for me.

I think it was just one of those things that was so simple and so effective. At the time, it sort of felt like it doesn't sound super impressive. I everybody's scanning their expenses receipts and AI's processing images every day. 10 years ago, pretty unique in what it was doing.

Marco Benítez (05:47)
When you were building that, or with your team and Or what was your feeling in that moment? Like, really impact you

Alex (05:56)
I think it was simple, but it was solving a problem for us at the time. We were looking to try to create universal appeal. So it was the sort of the generality of it. well, you know, making all of your gym floor connected and collecting all the data from all the equipment is going to be so complicated. Wouldn't it be great if we could build something that actually just.

took all of that noise away and just worked every time. So I think in that context, it was, we could see that it was going to be a real differentiator for us.

Jonas Dücker (06:31)
on the point of like simple is do you feel like when you're builder, right? You're a builder, you've been doing this, you've been obviously sometimes in a leading role in a delegating role in a building role, like is simplicity sometimes that one ingredient that actually makes features versus kills features if it's getting too complex? your take on on simplicity? Yeah.

Alex (06:51)
I think.

Yeah, I think it's something that is one of the most common things that we see or apps that are sort of trying to be everything to everyone. We have to have a feature that solves this. We have to have a feature for that. And I think hard to have enough conviction in one particular area to say, okay, this is what we want to be. This is where we want to go.

it's so important to have that focus that really helps in terms of actually when you come to making the hard decisions about priorities, then need to have that kind of clarity and simplicity of thought to be able to navigate those conversations.

Jonas Dücker (07:38)
that a product challenge or is that a company challenge?

Alex (07:42)
It's both. mean, it starts with the company. It starts with clarity of vision. If you understand what your vision is and what problems you're trying to solve as a company, then it becomes much easier to then build a product vision against that. if the vision from the top is kind of fuzzy, then it's hard to create clarity lower down.

Marco Benítez (08:06)
you think that was more because of the, timing or was more because the feature itself, You know, it's always like the feature or timing what's your thoughts around that?

Alex (08:21)
It's both. I you're building products, it's trying to sort of strike that balance between being too early and missing out. timing is everything it has to be you have to be building something that solves a problem that exists today, not a problem that may exist at some point in the future.

but also the further along the process you get, the more crowded the market is pretty key.

Jonas Dücker (08:50)
I want to.

Marco Benítez (08:50)
Or maybe the

market is pushing at some point, right? Because for example, I can see, for example, wearable devices like Apple Watch or even Polar and Garmin. They have been building wearables since probably 20 years ago, maybe. And wearables are completely different. They are in a very different momentum 20 years ago than what we have today.

So that's why I was asking about timing. It's timing, the market is pushing, the company is pushing so hard during all these years that at some point everyone is going to

Alex (09:29)
It depends if you're looking to create a category and you've got plenty of resources and plenty of time at your disposal. So I think as a if you're early, if you're looking to create innovation, then you have to accept that creating a category or opening a not for the faint-hearted. It's a long road.

Jonas Dücker (09:53)
I want to take actually timing as an excuse to do a little bit of a question more about timing on your end, because you obviously announced pretty recently still a new company, a new product that goes to market. Correct me if I'm missing, but it's Connect by Leisure Labs, right? What's the timing? What have you seen that was leading up to taking the decision to build Connect by Leisure Labs? And then obviously, please give us also a short kind of...

Alex (10:10)
Correct.

Jonas Dücker (10:21)
Intro to what this new company is about and how this is linked to leisure labs in the background.

Alex (10:27)
Yeah, sure. So, I mean, if I start with Leisure Labs, if I sort of step back to when we founded Leisure Labs four years ago, we started the company as custom development and digital transformation agency, really focused on the fitness and wellness space. But more than that, we wanted to really solve a particular problem that we saw, which is that a lot of organizations, particularly in the enterprise, are

really stuck in this kind of buy or build dilemma. they try and sort of solve problems with off the shelf solutions that, you know, may may promise a lot, but don't necessarily solve all of their problems well? Or do they build everything they need from scratch? And, course, the traditional agency model is, you know, agencies are paid by the hour, so it's in their interests to build everything time.

And we sort of looked at it and said, well, really make sense customer point of view, because if there is something that gets you 50 % of the way there or 80 % of the way there, then why don't you take that and build on top? So create this kind hybrid buy versus build. And this is really common in a lot of other sectors, but it's really not been historically that common sector.

So we started with this kind of principle don't want to build stuff that already exists. And that served us well as we scaled Leisure Labs. And in fact, grew more from just the development consulting. And we did that because realized that we were waiting for people to come and tell us what they wanted. And a lot of the time they didn't really know.

actually what we needed was more product and consulting expertise to help our customers figure what they wanted to And so that part of the business grew. And then last year we realised that actually there was a third part of the puzzle which is, they know what they want, they know that they've now got to find something or build something.

But now we have multiple customers that are trying to solve the same problems. And actually we can't find a product in the market that solves this problem. so what do we do? We don't want to build it five times over. So actually what is needed is a a gap. And where Connect came from because we said, well, actually where we see common requirements from multiple organizations and we see an unmet need for a product, why don't we build the product?

And so we set up a product company, Kinect. teamed Danny Woods, who's the CEO of that business. And Danny is running that. it's a product company. So it thinks very differently from the consulting agency business. against unmet need.

And the first thing that we're really focusing building at scale. personalization engine is the sort of first product out of the for Connect, which is ⁓ something we launched at the beginning of this year.

Jonas Dücker (13:40)
Awesome. And I mean, especially with like the AI hype, the build or buy decision might even be more relevant today, right? Because ⁓ a lot more companies will believe, we can we don't have to buy. So like, I think that's strategic move, because you get them so far already. And then it's, or they work with the agency side to get the rest done, or they can actually build on top by That's great.

Alex (14:05)
Yeah, and

that's the flip side of it is much build or to vibe code or prototype, but it's also much easier to connect things together. So as you look at kind of interoperability between systems, in particular is making that much easier than it was years ago to actually take multiple systems and multiple components and

and connect them together. you don't need to find silver bullet, the single product that does everything. You can say, actually here are five products all application in my business and I just connect them together. And I was really good at doing that. I think you see people now talking much more about their own personal tech stacks.

ever before. That was not really a thing mainstream conversation a few years ago, but now everybody has half a dozen AI tools that they use different parts of their own productivity stack. So that's happening at a level and obviously at an organizational level as well.

Marco Benítez (15:09)
Which is crazy, you have this big tool, AI tool, which is like a black box at the end of the day that you can do whatever you want and you can try things really quickly with your experience and your team experience, you can narrowing the story in that the clients can understand. And that for me, leave me a question for you

How do you build these new features and everything when you talk with a lot of founders, you talk with a lot of CEOs, product managers

How do you narrow in that story? Because we as founders, we as C levels or maybe we have so many things in our minds and we recollect data in terms of new features with investors, with our clients, internal feedback. And then you're this third party it's trying to narrow in

everything in only one thing because also we don't have a lot of money as you well know as a startup so how do you play with all these things in your company

Alex (16:24)
It's a team effort, right? So you've got a lot of different stakeholders. And again, it depends a lot on the stage that you're at. So we're dealing with enterprise organizations that have team of 100 in their technology organization. all of parts of that and the different stakeholders, but we're also dealing with C level.

At a startup level, it's very different. mean, you may be dealing with a founder maybe a couple of have different ingredients in there. But ultimately, you along the line is you've got product, you've got engineering, and you've got commercial. form that takes, if the CEO is the product guy, then

role there is going to be protect the vision and protect how do something that is strategically The commercial side, all about what does the customer want, what is the customer asking for? then engineering is always going to want to build the best thing they possibly can.

So you've got that sort of tension between those three and in different companies, it's whole teams of people that are represented across those three different areas. But in a be one or two people. rare for it to be one person that's doing all three, but of product and commercial here and then engineering a CTO, co-founder. our role really is to figure out, ⁓ who are the stakeholders?

responsible for the product and the product vision and who's responsible for what the customer wants, the voice of the customer and then who's responsible for the kind technical feasibility, what we're building and are we building it in the right way. sometimes that's different people, sometimes it's us.

Marco Benítez (18:12)
and how do you cut through the noise? Because it's like too many, too many people talking to you to build something. do you, which one do you have to hear?

Alex (18:23)
mean, you have to listen to all three to some extent. The most important thing really is to try and sort of create consensus of outcome. So, customer is asking for this product, want to build this, engineering want to do this over here. But actually, does everybody have the sort of same shared vision for where this product is going? Because if

voice of the customer focused on the right customers, then you're going to wrong messaging coming in. If engineering and building an enterprise platform and actually what you're trying to do is create a sort of an then a problem

so it's really the first thing to do is okay, does everybody here have the same vision of what we're actually creating, what we're building? then if not, then you've got to try and create some sort of consensus of outcome before you even into the sort of the healthy tension that you see between those three areas.

Marco Benítez (19:26)
So that means that you help to align the vision at some point, or it's because, do you have any story where everyone has a different idea to build something and it's for you to take that

Alex (19:40)
I mean, we've had situations that this doesn't go away in big organizations either. mean, we have, if I think in startups, it's almost easier because you've got a small team and they're usually a lot more success and they're really invested in an idea.

the larger the organization gets, the more competing priorities you get, and the more, I guess, different motives you get, the business becomes much more say in some ways it's actually harder when you have examples where actually customers will bring us in, and this is where spoke earlier about.

We started more on the side and actually grown the consulting side of the business a lot in the last couple of years. And the reason for that is actually we found that particularly larger organizations, want somebody to help them navigate that internally or in some cases get out of their own way and actually will often come in and we'll run a workshop or we'll run a series of programs where we can sort of help an organization.

create internal what they're looking to achieve. It's a process.

Jonas Dücker (20:53)
Like did you ever came to a situation where you were like internally you are so not aligned, we can't help you until you don't really align internally on what you want to actually achieve, what you actually want to build.

Alex (21:07)
I think we see pockets of that. I can't necessarily point to an example stepping away from an project or an entire engagement. happens a lot in pockets where it will be, think you need to figure this piece out first, or I think we need to come back to this in six months. Why don't we look at tackling this problem first?

So we'll often sort of help guide our customers on the timing of and the sequencing their efforts because it's difficult to try and force something in there are other factors in the organization or other things that need to be considered before you can actually start to

Marco Benítez (21:47)
is. And that led me to another Do you remember?

company saying something like, this feature will save us. Or in other words, this is going to be one that it's going to help us to move to the next revenue stage, or maybe to end users or with our customers. And you had that feeling that it's not going to work?

Alex (22:16)
I think we saw a lot of that in 2021. And I think a lot of brick and mortar fitness operators believed that they needed to suddenly become companies and, other conversation was about omni-channel. an omni-channel brand and how do we...

digital community to be as big as our physical wasn't one company. That was everybody in the industry for a period of time. I think it took the industry a little while to figure out that actually strength is in human contact, the physical community.

People want to go back to the gym, they want to go and work out and they want the human connection. Trying to compete in a digital marketplace when you're a brick and mortar company doesn't entirely make I think a lot of companies, know, put an awful lot into effort, which they've, you know, subsequently rode back on quite a bit. So, yeah, I think there are many examples of that.

Marco Benítez (23:24)
It's crazy, right? Those days when we were in COVID, it was like a bubble, right? And I remember Omnichannel was the word in all the conference. Everyone was talking about Omnichannel and Netflix, Peloton.

You know, all the big brands doing different type of things in the fitness space for the Omnichannel was really crazy. generally speaking, pandemics if you think about it, everyone in the own houses, working and doing fitness and it was really crazy, crazy moments.

Jonas Dücker (24:02)
I want to change gears here again a bit and go back a bit more to like the conflict or the challenge between vision of a company versus product vision and product roadmap.

It feels like things are just accelerating at crazy insane speed, especially, and it's a lot through the hype of AI that people think now we can do what we've planned for like the next four five years, suddenly all in just a year or you manage expectations clients and partners of yours now

that maybe accelerate company visions and then where roadmaps actually can't really hold up because there's still a reality of like a gap between what is possible with these new technologies versus what is still needed to be done at the back of these, you know, vibe cooling tools at the nicely quickly set up a front end solutions. There's a lot more to it. And you know that you've been building for such a long time, like the whole back end side, it's how connectivity works. There's regulated spaces where data privacy

cybersecurity things that's not really covered or discussed in when you see just a quick vibe coding. how do you manage really expectations of clients and partners versus reality of roadmap and backlogs, especially in this accelerated space today?

Alex (25:20)
I think what we're looking for really is we think about the product roadmap and the product vision, we're looking for kind of stability at a high level and flexibility at a low level. So what I mean by that is the long-term vision and the long-term objectives and outcomes and problems that you're trying to solve need to kind of stay relatively stable.

at a quarterly level, you're going to be constantly reassessing how you meet those priorities. Then on a day-to-day level, the sprint is going to be changing all the time. day-to-day priorities are going to be and the quarterly priorities are going to be moving based on, we've now seen a shift here. We were

we were working on a product a few years ago, chat product. And we were working on it before LLMs were released. And so we were kind of aware of this thing that was coming and halfway through building sort of simple chat agent, suddenly we had access to these

these large language models at enterprise level and we were able to kind of plug into that. change in terms of the product that we were able to deliver almost overnight was it was completely a hundred X, but the problem that we were solving and the actual customer experience itself wasn't that different. It was just suddenly this opportunity had opened

to basically leverage we'd never been able to do before. So that's the kind of thing where the last thing you would want to do at that stage is to say, oh, we're just going to ignore this this new AI tool that's out there. We're just going to keep building simple chat, and we're going to not take advantage of any of this stuff that's coming

that would be totally the wrong thing to do. So you've got to have that flexibility and approach, but it didn't change what we were actually looking to create and the problem we to solve.

Jonas Dücker (27:37)
makes sense. It's still challenging, Especially I imagine this more like you being as a third party, I see it internally, as to give an example from our end, we obviously see always like we have our bigger picture vision, we have the roadmap, we do our planning for the roadmap and the backlog. And then obviously, you get a lot of pressure from the outside world, you see competitors moving extremely fast, you see other companies doing a lot of new things, launching new products in you like,

Okay. ⁓ And you start pressuring maybe even your own team. like, and now I imagine still like, if you work with a third party and you representing that third party Alex, then I feel like it's even easier that these companies will pressure you on like, Hey, Alex, we need to move faster. Like, why is the competitor moving so quick? And why can't we move faster? Like because even since it's like easier to push

the pressure to someone, I guess, than if it's the internal own team. we have what's, do you, is that happening a lot? Is that something you feel constantly? Is that something that's managed through expectation?

Alex (28:45)
For sure. about kind of the iron triangle as well in terms of, know, what is the constraint? it time? Is it cost or is it scope? So do you want to build the best thing you possibly can regardless of how long it takes and how much it costs? Do you want to build

as quickly as possible get to market quickly for as little as possible and build the of the MVP, build the smallest thing you can. Or is it like, is the amount of money we've got to spend, how do we make it go as far as possible? triple constraint effectively of those three. And the first thing that we do with any

with any project or any client is try and understand what order are those in? is the number one of three constraints? then how do we go from there? So are we trying to build as fast as possible? Are we trying to build the best thing possible? Or are we trying to do make the money go as far as possible?

Marco Benítez (29:46)
But it's very abstract, do you think, Alex? It's like also trying to define MVP as fast as possible or even, you know, for me, it's very abstract. I'm as a builder trying to build an MVP. It's like, okay, what's an MVP? I know, I know what does that mean, but it's like a...

the expectations of the clients. It's really complicated. And nowadays with AI, everyone thinks that you can build the complete product only with one script. So how do you fulfil this to your clients? Because again, aligned expectations, it's really difficult. And more, if you are a third party, how do you handle these type of things with your clients?

Alex (30:40)
So AI is actually massively helpful in this because it means can go a lot further in the very early stages. what used to happen with development is that you would have, know, the customer would try and articulate what they wanted. You would try and put it into user stories. They would sign off on the user stories. You would go through this whole process of

know, traditional development and then the designs and you'd go back and forth on the designs and then you'd build it and at every stage it would be, that's not quite what we thought or that's not quite working in the way that we it was going to or that's not quite what I meant. So you're constantly course correcting and recalibrating. Whereas now

AI image generation and vibe coding, can say, I've heard what you said. Now I've built a prototype of what we think that looks like. Is this what you mean? ⁓ okay. Yeah, that's, no, that's not what I meant. Can we move this over here? So suddenly before you even get into the process, I think the most important thing is this distinction between a proof of concept that you can build in

you now in a few hours versus a production ready product. what it is helpful with is the ability to make sure that when you do build a production ready product, whatever that looks like, you're not suddenly unveiling this thing at the end. And it's not what the customer was expecting it to be because you've been able to iterate and in some cases you've even been able to do

You you can do user testing so much earlier than you ever could before because you can build a thing and vibe code it and test it. And actually it's not difficult to build different versions and an A-B test. And opportunity in product development is huge. So we find that it's been really helpful in actually unlocking a lot more of that clarity much earlier on because can bring things to life.

much earlier in the process than we ever have been able to before.

Jonas Dücker (32:50)
On that note, I wanted to jump in and do you have a lot of partners and clients now reach out to you they already have something vibe code? Like they did already a pre-work being like, I think that's what we need and that's what we want? Or is that still more on your end that you just use this as a tool to show prototyping and get sign a partner from a client?

Alex (33:11)
It's a mixture. I would say 20% of the time they would come with something vibe-coded. think maybe we'll see that increase. we will often do now is we will actually go through that process with the customer. So where we might do product historically that We'd have a vision board or

At the end of it, we'd have a lot of post-it notes on a wall and we'd have to then go away and capture that. what we'll actually do now is can workshop with the customer and we can actually have a vibe-coded proof of concept at the end of the workshop. So what you're coming out with is very different outcome. And to be able to say, we'll get to that in a workshop of a day or two days and at the end of it, we'll...

will have actually worked with you to sort of proof of concept that we can then go away and deliver. You're creating the certainty there and So that's probably the most common thing that we do is we'll actually, you know, we'll co-create it with the customer.

Marco Benítez (34:14)
That's really interesting because maybe, not in the future. I think this is something that we are living today. Maybe the new founders and the new startups, the founders are not going to be technical founders at the end of the day. And they are going to be more focused on the dream, more focused on the product. Maybe they

build something with Lovable or Base 44, all these vibe coding. then they will send you everything to you and then you can build real good stuff, right? And you will have tools to build because now you are not going to be the, what they say, but also they, you will have this like, okay, this is what they want. Let's improve it. Let's make it very secure with it.

whatever they need to build like HIPAA, GDPR, whatever. And then you will have more like tangible product, right? So maybe this is going to happen more and more.

Alex (35:19)
For sure. I think we will see a lot more of that use of those tools. And the good thing is that you can be non-technical or moderately technical and be able to actually get a lot Once you get, I come back to my point scale and when you get to a point where you're actually building something for production, for

vibe coding is a dangerous game to play. we've seen all sorts of horror stories know, vibe coded products going to mass market and being out there and actually, know, realizing that nobody actually understands how this product was built or how it works, it was all built by AI. I think there is a point at which, you know, you need to, you need the human in the loop piece.

to actually get to a articulate an idea in a You can go a lot further without any real sort of technology background, is interesting and I think the other the other aspect of that to consider is not The fact that customers can come to us with much more clarity but if you actually consider impact it has on on investment, you know as someone that's

know been through that and been out and raised capital you know how hard it is investors idea is Bring your idea to life in a way that interests them. So actually if you can do that without having to go out and you know do any sort of heavy heavy engineering lift you can actually put a their hands and this is what we're creating and you know creates a different story for investors as well

Jonas Dücker (36:59)
Back in 2021, everyone was raising on a presentation. Now it's on the Vibecode solution. yeah, Coming slowly to closing Alex and based on the motto of our podcast, this feature will save us. We have to make the question of, so what is the feature that's going to save us? What's the killer feature, the next feature on the horizon? Anything you can share from own products to from connect to clients.

Alex (37:03)
Right exactly that yeah

Marco Benítez (37:05)
Exactly.

Alex (37:27)
I think I would go relatively broad with this and say hyper personalization at scale. So I isn't, you know, one single use case, but actually the thing that is going to really be a step change for our industry in particular is the ability to actually do deliver proper hyper personalization and whether that's,

really, really effective workout prescription or whether it's personalized recommendations, personalized content. I that's what is going to be a step change for us from a technology standpoint over the next 12 to 24 months. And I think we're starting to see, I don't think anybody's really doing it well yet. But we're starting to see some really

some really interesting kind of early signs of now it is possible to have a completely personalized experience. The technology, the infrastructure exists. think, know, there's a lot of companies investing a lot of money in this. So I think we're going to really start to see some results over the next year or two.

Jonas Dücker (38:33)
Awesome. On this note, we will close it out. We appreciate you coming on. Alex, for folks, Leisure Labs, they can find you on LinkedIn, personal, as well as the company, right? Or what's the best point to...

Marco Benítez (38:34)
That's great.

Alex (38:48)
Yeah, LinkedIn is

always the best place to find us. can check us out online at legellabs.co.uk as well.

Jonas Dücker (38:56)
We will link this as well to the first episode that will go live one more time. Thanks so much Alex for being the first guest here

Alex (39:01)
Amazing.

Thanks for having me, great to chat today.

Marco Benítez (39:05)
Alex, was a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time.