Last week I shared how I’m enjoying my day job communicating change at KPMG, but my heart is in my work with Alfred, and that I got into a start-up mentoring program run by Australia’s best known venture capital firm Blackbird.
The 3 month program is called ‘Giants’ and designed for start-up founders at the beginning of their journey, and has a huge list of mentors from companies like Atlassian, Canva and AirBnB to help solve problems.
So I’ll be doing a few of these recap posts throughout Giants to share how it’s going and what I’ve learned.
To improve the lives of others
For my first mentor check-in, I chatted with the Giants lead Meg Williams and after sharing Alfred’s story, she suggested I go back and revisit why I’m building Alfred, something I hadn’t thought about in years.
But before retiring, I’d given how I want to spend the rest of my life a lot of thought, and remembered my ‘why’ is to improve the lives of others, after growing up in a house where both my parents have dedicated their lives to doing just that.
Mum looks after old people at the end of their lives, while Dad cares for sick kids at the beginning of theirs, and I want to help people in between with something I use to struggle with: low self-esteem caused by mindless eating.
And after reflecting on my chat with Meg, I found it interesting she got me to start my Giants journey there, because I’ve realised that’s exactly where any new Alfred user need to start too.
I think anyone can lose and keep off weight if they want, but struggle too because they’re unclear why they actually want to lose weight in the first place, and doing it just because society or a doctor is telling them they should.
My original why for losing weight was to get out of the Brumbies fat club. But when I retired, my why became “to feel good about myself and have more energy” as I always felt crap and constantly tired when I was heavy.
If you’re an Alfred user, I’d love to know your why in a comment below.
Calorie counting vs eating mindfully
For my second check-in, I met with Melia Rayner, Blackbird’s Communications Manager and Strategist, to discuss why after 6 years of working on Alfred, I still struggling to explain what it is and why it’s not about calorie counting.
“Who are your users Ben and what do you know about them?” Melia asked.
“Outside my friends, I’m not sure. But Alfred does seem to be working best with Dads”
“Interesting. Why do you think that is?”
“Maybe because I’m a Dad and I designed Alfred for me. Or perhaps Dad’s prefer our simple approach to weight loss.”
“Hhmmmm… what’s the breakdown of male v female of your users?”
“I don’t know”
“Well… don’t you think it’s time you find out?”
So we did some digging and found that 66% of Alfred subscribers are male, with an average age of 41.
Melia then went on to say:
“You need to know who you're talking to. Women find the term ‘calorie counting’ triggering, but you’ve said Alfred is about eating mindfully. So perhaps you should describe Alfred as a ‘nutrition platform that helps people eat mindfully’ if you want to get more women using it.”
I think Melia is spot on, but I’m gonna stick with communicating to Dad’s because I understand them better and have learned that if I try to communicate to everyone, then I’ll communicate to no one.
Even though Alfred is about “Eating mindfully” and not about “Calorie counting”, I think I still have to describe is as that because a lot of blokes don’t know what “Eating mindfully” means. But they do what know what calorie counting is, and aren’t triggered in the same way emotionally as women are by the term.
Blokes just think it’s too much work, which is why we designed Alfred to take just 1 minute per day as you outsource all the work to a nutrition student.
And while I’m obviously not a women, I do get how they can be triggered by the term “calorie counting” and I’ll share what we’ve built into Alfred to prevent anyone using Alfred who has an eating disorder in another blog, as I want Alfred to be a tool my daughters can use if they want, but hopefully won’t need.
Thank you
We also launched Alfred’s new pricing last week, as $4.99 was far too cheap for the value we provide and not sustainable if we want to keep improving the service.
We’ll be using the extra cash to give the students a raise and hire more so we can process meals faster, and continue to build features that make calorie counting fun and easy, and eventually take only 10 seconds per day to do.
Also a huge thanks to everyone who upgraded to a yearly subscription! Awesome to have you along for the long haul!
Thanks for sharing. This just shows how important it is to continue talking to people, both already and newly connected. It's so easy to shut off to others due to shame but only through sharing, can others help.
I’m on my fourth day using it. I’m using it because I was using the stress of life during a frantic period of life become an excuse for me to eat poorly during certain times of the day and I was putting on a bit of weight. I’ve lost 25+ kgs three seperate times in my adult life and I don’t want to do it again, particularly if I can avoid it. I just want to be healthy and feel like I have energy, especially now I’m a dad. I know what it’s like to feel like basic things are a big effort and I don’t want to feel like that again. I guess I also want to set a good example for my boy when he’s old enough to understand.