Show HN: Pulse – the wearable for n=1 habit experiments
blog.pulse.siteMost wearables collect data and hand you a dashboard.
Pulse goes a step further: it helps you run experiments with your own habits, and actually shows you what makes a difference.
No subscriptions. No locked features. Just tools to test what improves your sleep, focus, or energy. Hey HN, I’m Mani - Co-Founder & CTO @ Pulse. This started from my own burnout trying to optimize performance. I tracked everything, changed habits constantly, got a bunch of wearables, but could never figure out what was working vs wasn't. Most devices just give you a score based on some generic/population model and leave you to figure it out. They treat everyone like an average. With Pulse, we wanted to build something different -- a way to actually test what works for your body in real life. Happy to answer questions about the tech, hardware, or what it took to get from idea to (almost) shipping Soooo.. most commenters here created an account 48days ago and only commented ONCE (here). Astroturfing? Definitely doesn't increase my trust in the company promoting Pulse. i get why that looks suspicious. we've actually got about 5000 preorders and a closed beta group of ~50 people who've been testing the app with us for months. so that's probably where they're coming from - long-time community members who just don't usually post on HN but got excited to see us launch here. feel free to hop in our Discord and check them out - i can assure you they're not bots lol https://discord.com/invite/pulsemode definitely understand the skepticism though! happy to answer any other questions about the actual product I've been waiting for this launch for so long, congrats to the team on launching! This will not be your average wearable. The team behind it is so motivated and experienced that it is hard to comprehend what they cook... But if you can see the vision, you are in. This sounds super interesting! Dumb question maybe, but how is this different from just using an Oura ring or a WHOOP + journaling? Like is the value more in how you visualize the data, or is it actually doing something different behind the scenes? hey - great question
i used whoops journalling feature for several montths. what I found was that it often throws 5+ variables into one “correlation”, creating a lot of noise where it ends up suggesting X impacting your sleep, when it could have actually been Y. Pulse is built for n=1 experiments: you isolate a habit (like less screen time, consistent wake up time, caffeine impact), test it, and see if it actually helps your sleep better or not. think self-controlled studies That does sound great! I am a big fan of data, but the data needs to be read in a correct way ofcourse, otherwise is useless. Hyped to try this out - curious to know exactly at what time I need to stop drinking coffee.. This is a game-changer! Most wearables just tracks, Pulse empowers! Love that it encourages self experimentation to actually learn what works for you. And the no subscription model??? Huge respect to the team! Wearable without subscription is definitely a GO! Why spend much on subscription if PULSE can provide everything regarding your health without it. This project is going to fly. A great and motivated team who moves at lightning speed. Cant wait to receive to device and start pulsing. Big congrats on the launch of Pulse!
Can’t wait to get mine and start testing what actually helps improve my sleep, focus, and energy Been following this project for a while since I was looking for am alternative to whoop. Really looking forward to testing soon what specifically made you look for a Whoop alternative? Will this track and provide recommendations based on the body types of people from different countries? Been testing the beta for a few months now. Really enjoy it. Excited to get my Pulse device. thanks for being part of the beta! your feedback has been invaluable in getting the experiment framework right. more to come v soon!! I really looking forward for this can't wait for the app and my device! thanks for the support! really excited to get devices into everyone's hands haha Can decentralized tech like MPC improve trust in health wearables? good question! MPC is interesting tech but probably overkill for what we're doing. we're exploring more approaches tho. the crypto/privacy tech space moves fast so we're keeping an eye on different solutions. Dude i love this thing, cant wait for my order to arrive.
Some questions : will you ever implement a subscription and how does pulse compare to other app/bracelet combo? Is it at least as accurate as the competition?
Also what i envision is that i can sell my health data for at least the price of monthly food haha on subscription - we're committed to never adding one.
on accuracy - we've been running daily tests against all the major competitors and while results vary device to device, we're definitely in the competitive range. closest results we've seen are with oura actually in terms of numbers. and yeah on selling health data - that's part of our vision! a marketplace where you can choose to share anonymized data with researchers and actually get paid for it. love pulse and their incredible product :) “The blog post makes it sound like a nice step beyond generic fitness bands. How flexible is the API or data access for custom experiments?” You forgot to remove the " from the LLM generated comment before posting it.