As we head into the holiday weekend, it’s always nice to share happy local startup news—especially during a year as tumultuous as 2016: Apple has chosen Ann Arbor, MI-based MySwimPro as the year’s top Apple Watch app.
“We definitely weren’t expecting to win anything like that,” says CEO Fares Ksebati. “When you’re trying to build a product, you’re not thinking about awards. I only found out because I saw it mentioned on Facebook in a blog post. Then I found the Apple press release online and read our names next to Twitter and the other winners. It was pretty exciting.”
Ksebati also gives much of the credit to co-founder Adam Oxner, the company’s lead iOS developer. “He built the watch app from start to finish, and that’s a really cool accomplishment,” he says.
MySwimPro offers custom swim workouts, training plans, and coaching for swimmers at all skill levels. Ksebati says the app leverages Apple’s HealthKit technology, and what makes it unique is that it has “redefined personal coaching on a device” through swimming. It’s also the first swimming app designed for the Apple Watch.
MySwimPro has been making waves around the region since it launched in 2015. The company has gone through a number of accelerators, including the University of Michigan’s Desai Family Accelerator, DTX Launch, and Techstars’ Startup Next program, and counts four-time Olympic medalist Peter Vanderkaay as an advisor. It was while MySwimPro was at Desai that things really started to take off.
“We were featured on the homepage of the Apple store—that was a significant bump,” he says. “Then, we were on the Google Play homepage.” Ksebati says MySwimPro exceeded 100,000 users a few months ago.
In 2017, Ksebati says the company will focus on building a worldwide swimming community and adding more personalized features to the app. MySwimPro is also in the middle of raising its first round of investment capital.
But most of all, the MySwimPro team is looking forward to seeing what it can accomplish next. “We were recently featured in [Apple CEO] Tim Cook’s keynote address,” Ksebati adds. “We’re super excited.”
