Local Startup Wants You to Get Well Soon

Dave and Cindy Wamsley have lived in Mill Valley for barely a year. But in the short time since they moved here from Tallahassee, Fla., the couple has managed to weave the fabric of our town into their new company’s DNA.

The startup, GravityEight, is a website that seeks to tap into the burgeoning nexus of wellness and social networks, hoping users will use the site as a dashboard of sorts to do regular assessments of their well being in eight specific areas: health, finances, relationships, career, spirituality, community, lifelong learning, and leisure.

The company took its name from the Number 8  in the , and part of its inspiration came from the Wamsleys’ proximity to the , where they witness its conquerors of all ages. They also recruited Dr. Justin Mager, a partner at the Clear Center of Health, an integrative health clinic downtown on Throckmorton Avenue, as a co-founder and medical director.

“We really fell in love with this community, the surrounding area in Marin and its unprecedented commitment to healthy living,” David Wamsley said about the fledgling firm's Mill Valley roots. “It's an absolute point of motivation to see the level of well being and fitness in this part of California.”

The company launched a beta version of its website last month. It is essentially a platform for people to monitor their personal data and information gathered from the slew of new data-gathering gadgets like Nike Plus, which uses sensors in Nike shoes to track things like distance and running pace, and Withings, a series of wireless gadgets that measure everything from blood pressure to weight.

Wamsley is banking on the continued popularity of those devices and the hope that their users want to monitor data from several of them all in one place instead of making separate visits to the website of each individual device maker.

GravityEight had a stroke of luck in the past year in that many of the major gadget developers moved to open application programming interfaces (APIs) that would allow any outside software or Web developer to tap into the data collected by those gadgets.

“For every good tool out there, there are hundreds or thousands that users currently have to wade through,” Wamsley said. “That's our job.”

If a user decides to make GravityEight their platform for monitoring this data, the company hopes to employ a variety of strategies to keep them coming back, from the mechanics of games and positive feedback to a reward system and the ability to compete against and form teams with friends and family.

“The user’s actual experience of the GravityEight.com platform sets it apart,” Mager said.

GravityEight is by no means alone in this field, with a variety of companies like Healthways, MeYou Health and Keas all hoping to pounce on the trend. Wamsley said the company is distinct in that it goes beyond health and fitness. He's on the hunt for angel investors to help hire more staff and build out the content channels, but he is confident in his ability to raise funding, having drummed up more than $125 million during his last go-round in the Bay Area for dot-come startups like advertising exchange AdAuction.com and Internet incubator Campsix.

GravityEight’s space is part of a burgeoning movement that has been dubbed the “quantified self” in geek speak, with Wired contributing editor Gary Wolf summing it up at a TED talk earlier this year. Wolf said the movement is being driven by these new sensor-based devices, computers’ ability to analyze the data they collect and the explosion of social networks that allow people to collaborate and compete.

“The self is just our operation center, our consciousness and our moral compass,” Wolf said. “So if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better.”

In GravityEight’s case, users can earn “action credits” by showing improvement within the data – losing weight or getting a good night’s sleep, for instance. Those credits boost a user’s score on the site’s Wellbeing meter, a pie chart-esque graphic on the site’s front page that summarizes the user’s overall progress.

Each of the eight content channels are incorporated into the overall “game” experience. The more content you consume, the more “awareness credits” you build up.

Wamsley is focused on developing the site and enticing users, and then must answer the zillion-dollar question: how to make money from it. He said advertising and premium content will be the primary drivers.

“But right now, we're focused on connecting with our users, providing valuable services to them, and launching a clean, and simple user experience that people can use the first time they try it out,” he said.