M-T Strickland, Co-Founder at Metric Mate, Inc.

Quantified Health and Strength Training Data with M-T Strickland, Co-Founder at Metric Mate, Inc. transcript powered by Sonix—easily convert your audio to text with Sonix.

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Saul Marquez:
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Saul Marquez:
Welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket, Saul Marquez is here, and today I have the privilege of hosting M.T., He’s an electrical engineer with a plethora of experience in business operations, an avid gym goer and fitness enthusiast. It was a no brainer, really, when his business partner, Brackson Davis, came to him with a way to autonomously collect, store, track and analyze your strength training data. Metric Mate is a first of its kind patented AI platform that enables you to receive professional trainer level results without the time or physical proximity restraints. In this time of challenge, where we’re doing a lot more virtually and having to find out ways to do more with less in-person visits. I think it’s just a great time to have M-T on the podcast to talk to us about what he is doing. M-T, just want to give you a warm welcome. So glad you could join us today.

M-T Strickland:
Hey Saul. I appreciate you for having me on brother and having another gym enthusiast and avid gym goer to be able to talk to about this. It just makes me it warms my heart.

Saul Marquez:
I appreciate you saying that, you know. And man, I’ll tell you what, the pandemic has been a challenge. But, you know, I feel like I’m a big fan of the idea that those that can make it through the proverbial winter, you know, we can get creative and find ways to continue growing. We become stronger. And so I’m excited about what you guys have going on. So before we dive into the company Metric Mate what you guys are up to. Tell me a little bit about you and what inspires your journey in health care.

M-T Strickland:
Yeah, so, I mean, I’ve been in the gym for a long time, pretty much all of my life. I actually probably I want to say about what am I 34 for now. About 16 years ago, I had an injury that sidelined my athletic career, but that necessarily didn’t sideline my gym activity because, you know, surgeries, rehabilitation, going through all of that kind of made the gym a friend and foe to say the least like, I enjoy being in there because it gave you that physical activity. It gave you that good sweat and those endorphins. But going through the rigors of being able to rebuild muscles and tendons and things of that nature is just a beast, to say the least. And then combining that with the fact that the majority of the time I was in school trying to go through classes and study, and then I had to be at a physical therapist at a certain time and depending on what’s going on, that could kind of disrupt my flow of the day.

M-T Strickland:
So it’s been a is something pre pandemic when everybody was around and something that kind of halt your day. If you’re moving forward and you’re doing your thing and now you have to readjust to go and meet with a personal trainer or a physical therapist or a strength coach, it’ll kind of blow up your thing. So from a health care standpoint, we see Metric Mate being a tool that can be used to to move people forward when they have the time, when they have the space, without having to have a bunch of people in proximity. A physical therapist standing over you with a chart notating everything that you’re doing. Metric Mate gives you that level of accountability, that ability to be able to collaborate with a fitness professional and maintain your schedule, maintain your proximity restraints and still get that high level of intensity.

M-T Strickland:
So especially from a physical therapist standpoint, and people get to a point in their training where they don’t necessarily have the time or need to have the physical therapist in front of them the entire time. The Metric Mate is a supplement that gives that same level of accountability, the same level of visibility and an increased level of visibility, actually, with all of the algorithms and data that we’ve been able to develop to help out on that path, that we see this being a complete game changer for not only the professional athlete that’s looking to get that little bit of edge on a competition, but the everyday person that just needs that extra push to get to where they need to or they need that extra guidance to make sure that they’re developing so they could get back as close back to normal after an injury as possible.

Saul Marquez:
And that’s so interesting. And so let’s dig in M-T. So there’s a device, but there’s also software and walk us through what exactly it does and how you guys are adding value to an individual’s wellness and individual’s health.

M-T Strickland:
Got it. So, yes, there’s two parts to the platform. We call an entire platform because everything works together that involves your mobile device. So your Android or Apple mobile device or your Windows power mobile device. And it connects to a piece of hardware. So the first piece of hardware that we came out with and if anybody goes to our website, themetricmate.com they could see more information on this. But we developed a smart pin. So, you know, the selector rise machines that you use in the gym where you use the pin, the metal pin to select the weight that you’re working on. Then you go through the exercise, so that type of machine has been the same for eons. You had the plates, you had a cable that led out to the apparatus that you were either pushing or pulling, and you utilize that metal pin that literally sometimes had a little clicker on it, which made it the smartest pin in the world to allow. It clicks in and it secures itself. Like you use that to select the weights and you go off to work. So what we saw in Metric Mate was an opportunity to put some electronics, some smarts onto that apparatus to give you your reps, your sense, what exercise you’re working out on.

M-T Strickland:
If you did a full rep or if you did a half rip, how quickly you’re doing your contraction of your muscles or your extension of your muscles, the force that you’re applying to actually lift the way the intensity that you’re working out on, all of these and more are metrics that we’re able to collect just by replacing that dumb pin, for lack of a better word, quote unquote, with one of our smart devices. And that’s the device that we started off on, on the market with first. And then it uses Bluetooth, which is a safe communication platform, communicates it directly to your device or your mobile device. And now you have that information collected for you autonomously. No need to write it down on a piece of paper or manually input it into your Fitbit app or whatever app that you’re using. You can utilize the measurement device to the stream that directly. And we’re actually looking for opportunities to partner with some of these existing workout platforms so that they can take advantage of this autonomous software as well.

Saul Marquez:
Very cool. Very cool. So there’s the pin. So basically you would go to the gym or your home gym and just rather than use the machine pin, you plug in your own pin. Yep. OK, gotcha. And it’s tracking all these metrics for you. And so what about if somebody doesn’t have that kind of machine? You know, what if they just got dumbbells and say they got I mean, I’m talking about myself here. At the house.

M-T Strickland:
I love it.

Saul Marquez:
I’ve got I’ve got my squat rack. I could do everything off of that including bench. And I’ve got my pull up bar, my dip station, dumbbells, kettle bells, Right.. But I don’t have the pin out of the game here.

M-T Strickland:
Not necessarily. So this is the first form factor that we came up with because it was just the easiest to work with. Yeah. From an engineering standpoint and a lot of gyms have these machines inside of their facilities.

Saul Marquez:
Oh yeah.

M-T Strickland:
Because it’s already started three years ago. So this is pre pandemic when we were looking at everything, looking at the landscape of the fitness realm and we were actually doing more B2B. So what we wanted to actually happen was we sell these pins to the gym, the gym outfits their equipment with the pins, and then you come in with your app on your phone and just connect to the apparatus that is already in the gym. But due to the pandemic, which everybody in the business world has had to figure out how to pivot and maintain that forward progress due to this once in a lifetime event, for some people, we had to change the way that we were looking at our market and how we attacked it and being able to give the person their own pin, which is something that has been a feedback of ours from consumers that we’ve talked to since the beginning, like, hey, where can I buy my own pin? Where can I get mine so I can have it to myself? And now that this event has happened in the world and that seems more feasible and like you say, being able to use it at a home gym and use it at your gym or your hotel gym if you decide to travel, became a lot more prevalent and important.

M-T Strickland:
We started pushing it towards the consumer and with that, we also had to figure out ways to incorporate the types of equipment that you’re talking about, like just the free weights and the dip bars, the pull up bars, the squat racks that you might have at home or even in the gym. And so we expanded our patent portfolio to include smart devices in the Metric Mate room that incorporate dumbbells, incorporate barbells. So we’ve got so we’re working on designs for those now, where we’re with our engineering team confirming how we’re going to actually manufacture those apparatuses. But we do have the technology patented and it is in the purview of where we’re going in the future. This apparatus, it just fit our first thoughts as far as how we were going to enter the market, since we’ve done so much development on it and got it to the point where it’s so accurate, we’re like, we’ve got to make this smart pin thing work.

Saul Marquez:
No, and that makes sense. Right. And that’s just me right now. I like pre pandemic. I was in line with what you’re saying. And a lot of times these things are better off as a Model B2B. So by all means, I was more it was about, hey, is this going to work for me now? And then we could zoom out now and say. A lot of this and folks, you’re listening to this podcast, you obviously know you’re you’re entrenched in health care and we all know that health care is B2B, you know, and it’s B2B2C really. And so and so the model is certainly something that we all have to consider. And each of our businesses and M-T obviously is going for a B2B thing here. And I think it makes sense. And then, you know, the idea of let’s think differently right. like, why would an insurance plan why why shouldn’t they go talk to a gym right about health care information about a certain population? I mean, why not.

M-T Strickland:
A myriad of data? A myriad of information could come from that un siloing of the health care field, from the fitness field. Because everybody sees them as being separate and disjunct when in actuality they go hand in hand. And I really started understanding that when I started talking to people in the health care field about pre habilitation. So everybody knows about rehabilitation, post surgery, post procedure, getting back to your normal. But in actuality, there’s a population of people who are not suited for surgery. Their muscle density or dexterity or something about their fitness prohibits them from even going through the procedure that can make their life better. So having information about their previous workout habits, if there are any or what they’ve done on the back side, will help people understand how to get them back to where they were before. And that’s a revelation that we had going through this process and talking to people in the health care field and better understanding the pain points and the issues for surgeons and physical therapies and what they could utilize from the data that we collected on Metric Mate.

M-T Strickland:
Yeah, Metric Mate started in the gym. Like literally like I don’t know. I don’t remember what I did last time I came to the gym. And just through conversations, it’s like, well, this has tremendous health care benefits. We could be the bridge between what people did in the gym pre injury and how we get them back to where they need to be post injury or even just giving more information on people that need is this rehabilitation and making sure that they’re tracking correctly so that you can better plan the surgery, better get data to the insurance companies as far as the people that they’re insuring, and just help make life easier, let alone the ability to be able to be schedule agnostic. So I don’t necessarily have to make it across town to the physical therapy office. I can go to my Planet Fitness down the street, utilize my Metric Mate device, and then send this data to my physical therapist. And they have everything they need to make a determination on what my next workouts procedures could be.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah, and there’s interesting and there’s a lot of thinking we could do about this. I mean, is there a workman’s comp application, you know, in those cases where there’s requirements? You know, I think the encouragement here is for us to think differently and M-T and his team are doing a really nice job with the fitness aspect of it. But my challenge to the listener base today is what kind of applications do we have for this type of technology, for what we call health care in this country? And so and so talk to us a little bit about what you guys have done potentially to improve outcomes. And maybe you take a fitness angle on this one, or maybe you have a story that you want to share there that does kind of bleed into the health care topics we cover here.

M-T Strickland:
Man, amazing question. And as I talked about earlier, I have a sort of sordid history with health care. You know, they go to the physical therapists and having to endure an extended period of time of being worked and grinded it to be able to get my muscles back to where they were, pre surgery, pre injury, pre trauma in general. One thing that Metric Mate prides itself on is the ability to be able to provide the providers and users with information that you necessarily don’t get just by eyeball site, just by looking at what’s going on and trying to understand this to a visual lens. We want to go deeper. We want to have more data. We want to give better understanding, which leads to faster recovery times. Faster strength, building muscle, building intervals allows you to be able to drive your workouts to achieve the fitness and the goals states that you’re looking to be able to achieve. That’s what Metric Mate pushes for health care. Imagine an insurance company that pays out massive amounts of money for a physical therapist to be able to work with and rebuild and regenerate the muscles after an injury, being able to cut their time in a third and a half just by being able to have a deeper understanding of what’s going on with those muscles, what’s going on with that user, how they’re doing, their exercises. Are they actually getting the rest period is that there is a prescribed target, are they exercising at the intensity that will allow them to be able to progress, or are we seeing some other injury manifest because of this type of workout that they’re doing which could later on down the road costs more money?

M-T Strickland:
Those are the types of insights that we give at Metric Mate, being able to see deeper into what’s happening on the physical level so that everybody involved can be more informed and hopefully we can get that patient back to homeostasis and a quicker manner. That saves money for the insurance company that saves time for the user, that saves energy where where the physical therapy can devote more attention to somebody that needs it a little bit more as that patient progresses towards being back at full health. It seems like a benefit on all sides.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah, that’s really great. It’s the power of exact information and no guestimates. It’s direct feedback real time.

M-T Strickland:
Real time without hesitation, any time in any place. And that’s what goes back to the remote and being able to take advantage of those types of insights without necessarily being in the same area.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah. Now, that’s awesome. You know, it’s great to hear that. And so as you guys have been building the business, you called up COVID. And maybe that’s the one thing. But I’m curious, what what are your biggest setbacks have been and what a learning that’s made you guys better if any learnings have come out of that.

M-T Strickland:
Man, you know, the COVID has been an interesting time. So pretty covid as I was saying, we were B2B. So we were going to gym, going to gym equipment manufacturers and wholesalers, gym equipment wholesalers and schmoozing with them and helping them understand the device. And we had a whole list of people that were excited about incorporating Metric Made devices either into their gym or using it as a up sale on the gym equipment, gym wholesale equipment manufacturer list. So they would say, hey, you want to buy this piece of equipment for a couple more dollars? We can add in this Metric Mate device that gives you all of the smarts of these ten thousand dollar, twelve thousand dollar, twenty thousand dollar pieces of equipment that are out there now for your basic workout equipment. So we were part of the 2020 who was going to be a year like no other. We had a paid pilot getting ready to start with the gym here in Atlanta coming up in June of 2020. And so we were ready. We were pushing forward. Our application was going like, all right, we know what we’re going to do. We’re going to get into these gyms. We’re going to wow people. We’re going to do all these demos, have everybody join the platform because we already had at least one hundred and fifty people from the limited amount of demonstrations that we had to join the platform.

M-T Strickland:
And we’re waiting for us to get a facility where they could go and use it. And then the pandemic hit. It was like, OK, so everybody started calling and pulling out like, hey, we would love to have you, but we had to worry about this. We got to worry about that. We don’t know what the future’s going to look like. So we were crushed. Yeah, we were we were literally crushed because we worked diligently to get all of this set up and had invested money into buying more smart pins and developing out the technology and getting the mobile application running the way that we wanted to and all of that kind of just like shattered with it like two weeks. We got everybody pulled out, everything was done, but our money was still invested. So got.

Saul Marquez:
The one thing that didn’t change it.

M-T Strickland:
Nobody nobody was pulling back saying, hey, we know it’s a pandemic, so we’re going to give you your money, back. It’s like, no, this boy service is done. So the coffers were low and we were scrambling for a way to pivot what we have without losing traction to continue to push forward. So one of the biggest learnings that we got out of the experience was to never give up. It might look grim, it might look low, but you got to keep pushing. You got to keep trying. And that’s literally what brought us to the point where we are now. It’s that we kept pushing, we kept striving, we kept looking for opportunities to change the way that Metric Mate, the ship of Metric Mate it was going on, which is a pretty small ship right now. But is the rudder still has to turn for the ship, to turn? So we didn’t give up. We kept pushing. We put it in the long nights, even though we weren’t really seeing fruits from it. And that’s how we came up with the opportunity with the physical therapist. That’s how we’ve been able to push through everything that’s been going on so far and come with the personal pin platform, which took a huge shift in our mobile application development timeline. We had to change what we were doing from being more business focused, being able to give the gym information information about their machines and all of that as far as being B2B to being more customer focused. So what is it that the customer wants to see? What’s going to entice them to want to be a part of the community, what is going to build their trust and their confidence in the fact that Metronome is going to deliver them accurate information in real time, exactly the way that they want it.

M-T Strickland:
So being able to make that pivot, being able to make that shift has allowed us to be able to now be to the point that we’re getting ready to start preorders on our Metric Mate device, our first major device, which is a smart pen. So definitely go to the website and sign up for our mailing list so we can keep you posted on that, because it’s going to be an exciting time, as well as allowed us to be able to set up different pilots. So we have a pilot with an athletic program that we’re getting ready to start that will help us be able to collect data for the Metric Mate ecosystem, but also be able to utilize some of our pediment protocols that we’ve installed into the actual software. So being able to know when the last time a machine was used so that somebody can come and wipe it down and make sure that has been sanitized since the last used. Being able to give metrics and data on facility usage. So how many people were in the facility at one time? How many people were on these machines?

M-T Strickland:
Which machines got used more so, you know, to attend to those machines a lot more frequently. And a bunch of the protocols that we developed over this time to help with limiting the transmission of the virus and any sickness that we might run into later on in human existence while Metric Mate is around. We’ve been able to brainstorm and develop different protocols and standards that we incorporated into the Metric Mate mobile device to prevent those those types of spreads and help people feel more comfortable about being in a gym facility, because a lot of people are fearful right now. So being able to keep a level head. Keep pushing through staying innovative because George Dorio, one of the founders and implementers of Venture Capital, said get to work as though somebody is out there making something that’s better than what you have. And so keeping that mindset and making sure that we’re looking forward and try to be on the forefront of innovation. The pandemic has accelerated a lot of that. We definitely expect it to be on that type of wavelet period. But now that when that gets dropped into your lap and you have to implement some of those thought processes a lot earlier than you thought, it’ll make and move pretty quick. So.

Saul Marquez:
Well, that’s a great, great story and certainly good call out. You know, a lot of people are still apprehensive to get to the gym. And having a solution like this, I think will be really helpful for a lot of these gyms that are struggling right now. And then from a physical therapy perspective, potentially an opportunity to to do things in a more data driven way and to get kind of more reproducible results. And that’s something interesting. Good food for thought for all of us. So M-T, This has been really interesting. I think the listeners are going to definitely take some pearls out of our discussion today from a business discussion, but also from a what can Metric Mate do for me. Folks the address is themetricmate.com. Check them out. If something today resonated. And if you are interested in getting one of these preordered devices are also collaborating with some of the research that they’re doing. M-T why don’t you leave us with the closing thought and the best place where the listeners could get in touch with you if they are curious and want to continue the conversation.

M-T Strickland:
Without a doubt. Without a doubt. Well, Saul thank you. First of all, thank you for having me on. It was definitely a great time. Our conversation before we started recording was great, so I knew that this podcast was going to be awesome. So I appreciate you for having me on and giving me the opportunity to talk more about this amazing platform that we’re generating over here at Metric Mate. Closing thoughts. Just this is a hard time for everybody. And we’re all in this together. There’s always something to glean and hang on to no matter what the situation is and the positivity and positive energy. There are people like Saul and myself and my business partner Braxton and several people in this world that we’re trying to continue to push forward and make sure that people have those sources of positive energy and positive vibes to be able to glean from. Take them where you can and continue to push forward towards your dreams because nothing’s over until it’s over. So it’s like it’s definitely a good time.

Saul Marquez:
Well said.

M-T Strickland:
Yes. And for you to be able to reach us, definitely go to metric mate, themetricmate.com and sign up for our mailing list. You’ll see it in a big red box on our website. We want to build that community so that when we do bring new platforms and new apparatuses forward, everybody can be aware. Also, follow us on social media at Metric Mate. Download the application from the Apple App Store. We are coming to Android soon, we’re working diligently on that, but we are in the Apple App Store app Metric Mate. And check us out. We always looking for feedback. The feedback is very important to us at Metric Mate. We want to know what the consumer wants, what the physical therapist wants, what the personal trainer or the strength coach is looking for so that we can work together and make this apparatus into the number one fitness platform in the world.

Saul Marquez:
Love it, M-T. Well, folks, there you go. Different ways to get in touch. And for the full transcript and show notes of the show today, just go to outcomesrocket.health. In the search bar type in metric mate, and you’ll find all the links and things that we discussed. M-T big thanks to you, man. Glad you made the time to do this today.

M-T Strickland:
Saul man, thanks for giving me the opportunity, brother. I will take it any time. And this one was definitely a great one.

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