Most tools designed to help people change behavior fail at the same point: the moment they add more steps than the habit they’re trying to build. Fitness apps are a clear example. The more features they add to help users track progress, the more work they create, and the more reasons users find to stop.
Zoe Pineau lived this problem before she decided to solve it. She lost 150 pounds in nine months by treating weight loss as a mathematical process, tracking every macronutrient with discipline. But when she tried to share that method with others, she hit the same wall every time: people understood it, agreed it worked, and didn’t do it. Friction got in the way of creating the habit of logging workouts and meals.
Her first app, MyFit Suite, tried to make tracking easier with a cleaner interface. Six years of development later, she concluded that easier wasn’t enough. In a saturated market, a better version of the same thing is still the same thing.
That experience led them to build Fitly AI, this time starting from a different approach: instead of complex features, it uses AI to let users describe their workouts and meals in one clean interface and coaches them to stay on track.
Hit play below to listen to the full conversation. Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Zoe and her husband Brad built Fitly AI in one month, compressing what previously took six years by using AI across development, design, and marketing. That speed only became possible once they were clear on what they were actually solving. Three lessons from that process are worth carrying into your own work.
Simplicity is a retention strategy
Friction is not a minor inconvenience; it is the reason most apps fail. Fitly AI was built around one question: what is the minimum a user needs to do to get the result they want? For Zoe and her husband, the answer was a single sentence. Every feature decision followed from that.
Lead with transformation, not product specs
When pitching investors who don’t share your context, explaining rarely works. Zoe leads with her transformation photos because they make the problem undeniable before she explains the solution. Find the equivalent in your own story: the thing that requires no fitness knowledge to understand but makes the investor feel the gap your product fills.
Track everything, then share it
Zoe tracks everything the team accomplishes over 30 days and turns it into a short business update. It keeps the team motivated and keeps investors informed without requiring a formal meeting. In a long fundraising cycle, visibility compounds.
These three takeaways point to the same thing: decisions that reduce the distance between where someone is and where they need to be, whether that is a user, an investor, or your own team.
Know a founder who is building in a crowded market and wondering why traction is slower than expected? Share the episode with them using the buttons below.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
| Time | Highlight |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Introduction |
| 02:50 | Introduction to Fitly AI and Personal Journey |
| 05:45 | Transformative Weight Loss Experience |
| 08:47 | Mindset Shift and Habit Formation |
| 11:32 | Understanding Weight Loss as a Mathematical Process |
| 14:11 | The Importance of Macro Tracking |
| 16:55 | Innovating Fitness Apps with AI |
| 19:47 | Simplifying User Experience in Fitness Tracking |
| 22:53 | Building Fitly AI: Lessons Learned |
| 25:31 | The Impact of AI on App Development |
| 28:25 | Leveraging AI for Business Insights |
| 30:33 | The Role of Prior Experience in AI Utilization |
| 32:30 | Data Privacy and Security in AI Applications |
| 35:02 | Collaborative Development: A Team Approach to App Building |
| 37:17 | Navigating the Fundraising Landscape |
| 39:22 | Addressing Competition: Lifestyle Changes vs. Quick Fixes |
| 42:18 | Motivation and Consistency in Fitness Tracking |
| 45:13 | The Future of Fitness Apps: Integrating AI Agents |
| 47:55 | Building a Funding Coach AI for Female Founders |
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
Zoe’s doctor told her the only options were surgery or hypnosis. She left that appointment believing nothing else was possible. What followed is one of the more unexpected founder origin stories I have heard so far.
The book that changed her mindset
Standing in a store, Zoe picked up a book about a woman who had gone from obese to competing in fitness shows. The realization that hit her was simple: the only difference between them was habits. Not genetics, not circumstance. Habits. That single insight drove 150 pounds of weight loss in nine months and eventually became the philosophical core of everything Fitly AI does.
The shortest feedback loop in product development
Zoe is not just the co-founder of Fitly AI. She is its most demanding user. She tracks her workouts and meals in the app every day, and Brad, her husband and developer, watches that happen in real time. When something creates friction for Zoe, it gets fixed. No user interviews, no surveys. The feedback loop is a conversation across the dinner table.
Built for the day after a bad day
Zoe is a perfectionist. One missed day used to mean the whole week was written off. Gentle Mode was built to solve that: it tracks exact numbers in the background but only shows the user a percentage, enough awareness without the spiral. The pirate coaching personality works on the same principle. Humor lowers the stakes. Both features exist because Zoe needed them herself.
These moments matter because they show how lived experience, when taken seriously, becomes product logic.
🗣 Which of these moments resonated most with you? Or was there another magic moment for you in the episode? Drop it below or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram!
The Quote from the Episode
"Your habits control your outcomes.”
— Zoe Pineau, co-founder of Fitly AI
Zoe said this in the context of her own weight loss journey, but it applies equally to how she built Fitly AI. The product exists because she took that principle seriously enough to remove every obstacle standing between a user and the habit they are trying to build.
If you know a woman who is looking to improve her fitness, tell her about the episode.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
Zoe’s episode sits at the intersection of three patterns that keep appearing across Women Disrupting Tech conversations this season. Each one points to the same underlying shift: the founders gaining traction are the ones who make it easier for users to get results, not the ones who give them more to manage.
Removing friction is the new differentiator
Femke Delissen (Ep. 150) monitors elderly patients using WiFi signals instead of cameras or wearables, removing the friction of wearing a device entirely. Carmen van Vilsteren (Ep. 151) argues that a product fitting existing clinical workflows will always beat a technically superior but complex alternative. Zoe’s answer to the same problem is a single sentence replacing multiple screens. The specific context differs across these episodes. The logic is identical.
The shift from apps to agents
Rachel Gilley (Ep. 156) spent her episode explaining how brands need to show up when AI platforms answer questions, not just when users search. Zoe predicts that users will eventually manage fitness, finances, and scheduling through one preferred agent that coordinates specialized tools behind the scenes. Both guests are responding to the same structural change: the interface layer is moving from applications to conversation.
Founders are building faster with less
Marsha Goei (Ep. 149) validated her dating app concept using paper profiles, WhatsApp, and Excel before writing a line of code. Sabrina Nowicki (Ep. 153) prototyped in Figma and tested with real users before hiring engineers. Zoe compressed six years into one month using AI across development, design, and marketing. The pattern is consistent: separate validation from building, and use every available tool to close the gap between idea and product.
These trends matter because they are not isolated experiments. They are a signal about where the most effective founders are placing their bets.
🗣️ What is your experience with fitness apps and tracking your food? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Leave a Reply
Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
Maaike Steinebach has a specific image for what it takes to keep a fragmented industry moving in one direction: dog walking. Not the easy kind, the kind where you're holding five leashes at once, a startup, a government body, an investor, a healthcare provider, an insurer, and every one of them wants to go a different way.
That image comes from episode 159, where Maaike and Sophie van Dijk talk about building FemTech NL, the organization they co-founded to connect the more than 90 FemTech companies currently working in isolation across the Netherlands. The episode traces how a fragmented industry, one where labs, startups, hospitals, and investors rarely see each other's work, starts to move toward collaboration instead.
In this short clip, Maaike walks through what happens the moment one of those puppies pulls in a different direction, and why keeping all of them aligned takes more than good intentions. Listen to the clip below, and if the conversation resonates, subscribe below to find our full conversation in your inbox on 2 July 2026 at 8:00 CET.
What I Want to Leave You With
Most tools designed to help people change behavior fail at the moment they add more steps than the habit they are trying to build. Zoe's episode is essentially a fifty-minute proof of that idea.
What makes her story unusual is that the insight did not come from market research or competitor analysis. It came from standing in a store, reading a book, and realizing that the gap between where she was and where she wanted to be was not fixed by adding more. It was fixed by changing one thing at a time until the habit held.
That is also how Fitly AI was built. Not by adding features, but by asking what the minimum viable habit looks like and removing everything that gets in the way of it. The product reflects the person who built it, which is rarer than it sounds.
For founders, the question worth sitting with is this: how much of what you are building is actually serving the user, and how much of it is serving your assumptions about what a complete product should look like? Zoe spent six years on the first version of that answer.
Listen to the full conversation with Ana Herrero-Wallace on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Zoe Pineau
Zoe Pineau is the co-founder and CMO of Fitly AI, a chat-based fitness and nutrition coaching platform based in Charlottetown, PEI, Canada. A certified personal trainer and nutritionist, she lost 150 pounds in nine months through macro tracking and went on to compete in bodybuilding. Her personal transformation is the foundation of everything Fitly AI does.
Before co-founding Fitly AI, Zoe spent six years building MyFit Suite alongside her husband, Brad. When users began gravitating toward conversational AI, the two rebuilt the product from scratch, this time with conversation as the interface rather than the feature.
Zoe has been featured in Oxygen Magazine and is the primary public face of Fitly AI. You can follow her on Instagram, TikTok, and connect with her on LinkedIn.
About Fitly AI
Fitly AI is a chat-first fitness and nutrition coaching platform available on iOS and web. Instead of navigating menus or searching food databases, users describe what they ate, snap a photo of their plate, or ask for a workout program in natural language. The AI handles the rest, including logging, tracking, and personalized coaching.
The platform combines a full macro and nutrition dashboard with a conversational AI coach that builds context over time. It tracks meals, workouts, water intake, weight, and personal notes, and adapts its advice based on what it knows about the user: their goals, injuries, preferences, and history. Coaching personalities are customizable, from a drill sergeant to a chef to a pirate, depending on what keeps the user engaged.
Fitly AI integrates with ChatGPT and Claude via Model Context Protocol, allowing users to update their fitness data through whichever AI assistant they prefer. The founding team sees this as part of a broader shift: away from standalone apps and toward specialized agents that work behind the scenes inside a single conversational interface.
Fitly AI was built by Pineau Labs and launched on June 18, 2026 at the Atlantic Venture Forum Showcase in Halifax. It is currently pre-seed and bootstrapped. You can learn more at fitly.chat.
Listen to Episode 158 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Events that Women Disrupting Tech Must-Attend
Some great events take place this spring. Below are some that you definitely want to check out. For a full overview of all events, including links to buy tickets, please check the events page.
Diverse Leaders in Tech Events
If you like being in the know about what is happening in the DEI space, Diverse Leaders in Tech is the place to be.
Every last Thursday of the month, they have monthly in-person meetups for tech people, HR leaders and supporters of diversity to exchange insights, tackle challenges, and take action. It's a vibrant, safe space where diversity is celebrated.
You can find their events on the website. Joining your first event is free.
Leave a Reply