Why I'm building augo

It was September 2024. I was sitting in complete silence on day seven of a ten-day, silent meditation retreat when it hit me: I had to build the coaching platform I'd been dreaming about for years.

Let me back up.

My relationship with endurance sports started as an escape. After burning out from tennis (a sport I'd played at an international level for a decade) I discovered running in 2013. What began as stress relief became a love affair. Eight marathons later, with a 3:14 PR, running had given me something tennis never could: pure joy in movement.

Me at 15 years of age, training tennis 4h/day at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida

When I started coaching amateur runners in 2021, I wanted to share that joy. Help others discover what their bodies could do. Guide them to their own breakthrough moments.

Me doing my 7th Marathon, part of the Rio de Janeiro Challenge: A half-marathon on Saturday and a full-marathon on Sunday. I won 1st place in my age group for the Challenge.

While I did achieve that, I also found myself drowning in administrative nonsense and working with below-average data that barely supported my coaching.

Every Monday, I'd open Final Surge (after abandoning TrainingPeaks because seriously, $9 per athlete per month to allow athletes to move their own workouts?) and start my weekly ritual of clicking through athlete profiles. Alphabetically. Because there's no dashboard that shows me who actually needs my attention.

I'd spend Tuesday texting athletes on WhatsApp: "How are you feeling this week?" Because somehow, in 2025, coaching platforms can't capture this most basic information effectively.

Wednesday through Friday, I'd hunt through scattered session feedback, trying to remember who felt great when and who was struggling. The platforms treat these insights like afterthoughts, burying them in calendars where they disappear forever.

Then Friday would come, and I'd stare at meaningless graphs that told me nothing about whether my training was actually working. I'd base my decisions on whatever athletes remembered to tell me during our weekly check-ins, knowing that athletes regularly go from "I'm great!" to injured in a matter of 2 conversations.

This drove me insane.

In my day job as a data scientist, I work with technology that can predict customer behavior, identify patterns in massive datasets, and automate complex workflows. Yet somehow, the coaching industry operates like it's still 1995.

The breaking point came when one of my athletes (let's call her Ana) texted me that she couldn't run because of knee pain. When I looked back through weeks of session feedback, the warning signs were all there: slightly higher RPE scores, mentions of "tired legs," skipped strength sessions. But they were scattered across different channels and lost in the noise (can anyone relate?).

If I had better tools, I would have caught this. Ana would still be training for her goal race instead of sitting on the sidelines.

That's when I knew I had to build something better.

Here's what augo will be:

A platform that actually understands coaching workflows. One dashboard that shows me how all my athletes are doing, prioritized by who needs attention most.

Automated check-ins that capture how athletes are really feeling, not just their workout data.

Machine learning models that spots patterns I might miss and flags potential issues before they become injuries.

Technology that treats coaches like the professionals we are, not drivers driving in the dark.

augo will give athletes a clear, beautiful view of their training and progress. They'll know if their training is working, when they're adapting well, and when something needs to change. No more guessing. No more scattered information.

My co-founder (and wife) Fabi and I aren't building this because we think coaching needs to be automated. We're building it because we believe great coaching deserves great tools.

The human connection, the motivation, the strategy, the belief in an athlete's potential: that's irreplaceable. But the manual work that keeps coaches from focusing on those connections? That can and should be automated.

Every coach who's ever felt frustrated by their platform, every athlete who's ever wondered if their training is working: this is for you.

We're not just building software. We're building the future of endurance sports.

And it starts now.