Inspiration
née started from a gap we kept hitting ourselves. The audio-fitness market is basically a running market - Nike Run Club, Zombies, Run! and even within running it's rigid: try to get a proper interval or tempo session into your program and you're stuck, because those apps just don't let you structure that. And if you do anything other than run , strength, CrossFit, rowing, cycling, mixed cardio - there's almost no coached audio experience for you at all. We built née to close both gaps. It brings audio coaching to every modality - all types of cardio, strength, and CrossFit - and it lets users build and customize their own programs, plugging in the exact workouts they want, including the intervals and tempo runs the incumbents can't handle. There was a second, human signal underneath the technical one. When we mapped our audience's community overlaps, audio-drama and podcast communities sat directly on top of fitness communities - a demand pocket the big players ignore. And most fitness apps are built for people already winning, not the person starting over after a breakup, burnout, or a hard year. née — "born as," a new name for a new chapter - is built for that person: flexible enough for any training style, and framed as the physical side of getting your life back.
What it does
née is an audio-first fitness app built like a streaming service for training. Its immersive audio workouts are episodic and Netflix-inspired — story-driven sessions you press play on like a chapter, with fresh, on-trend workouts dropping every week so there's always a new episode to come back to. Alongside the ready-made content, a build-your-own mode lets you plug in your own workout and have née structure the coached audio around it. It layers real-time voice coaching over your own Spotify music, ducking the track for cues and handing it back. Unlike run-only incumbents, née works across cardio, strength, and CrossFit — including the intervals and tempo runs other apps can't handle. It's positioned not as "burn 300 calories" but as the physical side of rebuilding.
How we built it
a native iOS/SwiftUI app with a custom segment-based audio engine that sequences coaching over live music. On the backend, a Cloud Run service handling workout content, scheduling, and calendar/event sync. We integrated the Spotify SDK for music control and audio ducking, and built a unified workout model that merges audio sessions and calendar events into one consistent training view. On business side, taking on inspiration of recommendation systems, we are in the process of using data for strong channel establishment and enhanced precision communication strategy to directly target each user group.
Challenges we ran into
The speed of data processing. The clearest next hire is a data scientist / ML engineer versed in recommendation systems: someone to move us from hand-picked content to a model that surfaces the right episode for the right user, and that can precisely locate the content and narratives that drive traffic and resonate deeply — turning our community-affinity insight into an automated, compounding personalization engine.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We shipped a working audio engine that genuinely coexists with Spotify — coaching and music sharing one session without stepping on each other — which is the technically hard core of the product. We also landed a sharp, defensible market position: instead of fighting Nike and Peloton for "fitness," we found a niche (audio-immersive workouts for people rebuilding) that our own audience data proves is real and unserved. née is also avaialble on appstore as of 12th August.
What we learned
Users are the real product team. née launched on August 12th as our third iteration — and every rebuild taught us the same lesson: users give the best feedback, and the product only gets sharper by shipping to them and listening, not by polishing in isolation. Each version was less about our assumptions and more about what real users showed us they actually wanted.
Build a product that stays fluid. We stopped thinking of née as a fixed app and started building an ecosystem of new content that is flexible enough to move with the vibe , to read what our target market and the wider culture want, and respond with precision content fast. With the technological age of ai, consumers will be shifting towards highly customisable content, that's how I shaped née's product strategy.
What's next for née
An LLM-driven narrative engine at the core. née aims to generates engine that turns a user's real healing storyline into their workout storyline, producing personalized, story-driven sessions on demand. Trained and prompted only on ethical signals, it powers the weekly content cadence at scale and makes every session feel written for the person pressing play. Paired with a recommendation layer, it doesn't just generate narratives — it learns which ones resonate and routes the right story to the right user.
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