Launch day at AAL HQ

We’ve been building up to something big in our Air Aware Labs day jobs and it’s finally landed today! As a reminder, Louise and Sacha are CEO and CTO respectively, alongside Louise’s co-founder Dr Will Hicks as well as a wider team.

Today we launched our new 24/7 tracking feature in AirTrack. This builds on the first version of AirTrack, which linked air pollution levels at an individual’s exact location and offered cleaner routes and insights into when pollution is lower, and could be accessed directly or via Strava, Apple Health and Google Health Connect. Now our AirCoach feature tracks pollution exposure throughout the day and week, taking into account activity rates (when lungs are working harder) and how pollution varies between transport types, indoor environments and the outside world.

It offers lots of cool new features like leaderboards, summaries of your exposure and forecasts to help you choose the best times. But here we wanted to talk a bit about our personal experience of delivering this.

Remembering that Sacha has spent most of his working time on this (other things do crop up like cyber security upgrades), while Louise has mainly been focusing on investment for Air Aware Labs through this period. For previous product development, Louise usually led most of the user research and engagement, whereas this time our colleagues Dan and Lia did most of this. (So the subtext here is: take Sacha’s story rather than Louise’s vaguer recollections!)

So, it went something like this:

• Sacha thought it would be a cool thing to expand AirTrack beyond individual activity tracking, while Louise (alongside Will) was having a more commercial-focused discussion with a potential buyer who describes almost the exact same thing… We guess that’s a good description of how a CTO vs a CEO comes at product development, and in this case it luckily pointed the whole leadership team in the same direction!

• This was round-about September, once we’d launched our Cleaner Routes feature. So the next phase went deep into tech development while we worked out how best to capture the background tracking data (whether a user is in a vehicle, walking, cycling, indoors etc) and link that to air pollution data at the right level of granularity. This also needed to look at how to conserve phone battery life. Louise remembers Sacha sitting on the sofa waving his mobile in the air before heading out for a quick walk around the block at decidedly odd hours! Sacha remembers lots of cool code…

• After that we got into a phase of user testing, as well as running a pilot with our software developers’ (and investor) company in the Philippines. This brought to light what users wanted including use of leaderboards and some way of making sense of the vast amount of data coming through. It also allowed Will to focus in on how to make the scoring make sense now we were moving away from single activities. And on how to estimate indoor air quality (something we will enhance as our first product development task after today!)

• We’re more or less post Christmas now, when we started on more of the user design/experience/interface work. We had used natural language summaries of air pollution data before (since last summer), but we needed to work out how to shift this up a notch, bringing different notifications at different points (eg what does a user need to know that day vs what have their trends shown over a past period). So that was a big one, alongside all the typical stuff of the look and feel of the app - colours, amount of detail, how to move between screens etc.

• Sometime in the depths of winter, Dan (introduced above - our Chief Product Officer) came up with the idea of having something available to users before they had even signed up. So we started figuring out what we offer for the different tiers of subscribers and what information we needed from them to make those tiers work (location data being the crucial one). This was all driven by user feedback; and we went through another round of testing with users - now in a formal beta testing group.

• Something we’d wanted to do for ages was to give forecast air pollution data not just retrospective. Louise was a bit of a bore on that one, having heard it from many users! Luckily Sacha made a new best friend (Claude code) over the last few months and was able to bash out new features such as that in no time (well, less time, and only because the human-built underpinnings of our system, both scientifically and technically, were so strong!)

• The final few weeks have been working on the styling of the app, tweaking the notifications, final decisions on pricing and which users get what, and how we track all the numbers we need for our own analytics. And for Louise, now finally getting properly engaged rather than helicopter view - lots and lots of work with Lia on the marketing plan, build up, onboarding a set of global ambassadors, new website content and more!

Happy to say we are still alive, talking to each other and (we hope) still friends with the rest of the team! As well as those mentioned above, Sacha’s development team (Dan, Roy and Ken) in the Philippines have been fantastic and, along with bringing top-class engineering and design, also brought experiences and perspectives that were quite different from ours in London (for example, in the Philippines, motorbikes are much more common than in the UK and so we added motorbike as a configurable vehicle option).

Hopes and dreams

What are our hopes? Well we already have over 3000 users in over 90 countries, but we hope this takes it even higher - dare we suggest five figure user base in almost all countries by the end of the year? We do want to see strong revenue from what we think is a great premium offer - to ensure the long-term sustainability of the company. But most of all we want to see people accessing this data - a level of air pollution insight we think doesn’t exists elsewhere - and really taking action to protect their health.