Have I lost my marbles?
And if by some miracle I haven't, what is everyone else overlooking?
For those of you who don't know, my day job since retiring from Rugby has been building Alfred, an energy management app that simplifies tracking your food and exercise.
But the reality is I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing, and at times I think I've totally lost my marbles trying to build an energy tracker in an already crowded fitness market.
I started working on Alfred during the final seasons of my career after tracking my food helped me to escape the Brumbies Fat Club, and I want to make it easy for anyone to experience the benefits that come from tracking what you eat.
But when the Alfred prototype fell apart for the 3rd time, I realised I needed to do some research and figure out what makes a startup successful, and to avoid the pain of a 4th failure.
And there's no better place online for startups to look for help than Y Combinator (YC).
YC is the world’s best known startup accelerator and it help launch more than 2,000 companies, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit and many more.
It’s founder is Paul Graham, a smart guy who’s essays about startups are the stuff of legend in the tech community, as he writes in a clear and informative way about everything from having kids to writing.
And in the essay How to Start at Start Up he says:
A crowded market is actually a good sign, because it means both that there's demand and that none of the existing solutions are good enough.
And reading that was music to my eyes, as I’ve been told that I'm wasting my time and money trying to build an app for a saturated market, and that people who want to improve their health thru food already had great solutions.
But I’ve experienced something different, which has led me to believe that lots people will track their food once the tools to do so are easy enough to use regularly.
Graham goes on to say:
You don't need to worry about entering a "crowded market" so long as you have a thesis about what everyone else in it is overlooking. In fact that's a very promising starting point. Your thesis has to be more precise than "we're going to make an x that doesn't suck" though. You have to be able to phrase it in terms of something the incumbents are overlooking.
So with that in mind, what is the fitness industry overlooking?
Trying to be perfect
After getting out of Fat Club, whenever friends or family mentioned they wanted to lose some weight I would say “just track your food” and download Myfitnesspal (MFP).
But when I’d asked them how they where going with it, I kept getting the same two responses of "oh, I'm just not disciplined enough" or “It’s too confusing and takes too much time”.
Curious to know why no one was getting the benefits of tracking like I had, I decided to do some reading and learned that apps like MFP where originally designed for body builders to track their calories and macronutrients, who previously had to record that information using a pen and paper, or enter it into an excel spreadsheet.
Which explains why regular people struggle to use them… because apps like MFP aren’t designed for regular people!
If you want to become a bodybuilder with 3% body fat, and prepared to dedicate your life to diet and exercise, then MFP is great.
But if not, why would you use a tool that’s designed to achieve that?
It’s like using a hammer to chop down a tree, when what you really need is a saw, and I think most people don’t want upend their life and instead just want to lose a few kilos easily, so they feel better and have more energy for everyday life.
And I believe all that’s needed to achieve that is to be “consistently mindful when eating”, as eating on autopilot was the main source of my struggles.
Looking back, I was only able to preserve using MFP because I had the ‘Get out of Brumbies Fat Club’ carrot dangling in front me and had the time to learn how to use it.
But regular people don’t and are then labelled as “lazy”, when they are unable to keep up the lifestyle that goes with trying to look perfect.
If Myfitnesspal is Photoshop, then Alfred is Canva, the Australian startup that’s made it easy for anyone to do graphical design, as the previous tool (Photoshop) was designed with professionals in mind.
People who’s careers are dependent on getting every detail in the picture perfect, and have the time to learn how to use it.
So what is everyone overlooking?
Most diet apps are trying to get users to be perfect which only sets them up to fail, and most people just want to lose some weight easily and have more energy without having to follow a rigid diet and exercise program.
My wife said this blog was starting to get too long, so I’ll continue it next week and explain how Alfred is different and how “he can do all the work for you”.
I think your Keep. It. Simple. Stupid idea relates to most people. And most people relate to it.
I think your approach is correct Ben. As a member of the retired front row club I can relate to your Blog. I look forward to you solving the problem