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Officially shipped my first side-project.

So I had been wrangling with a side project idea for a while, and I always approached it from the angle of 'what's a good idea'?
As I realised, It's incredibly difficult to just force a good idea out of your brain. They usually just come to you after a while of boiling in your subconscious.

I often get asked a lot of questions about how I train/my exercise philosophy/strategy, and the answer always has the same framework, just customised to the individual:

What is your basal metabolic rate?
What are your fitness goals?

So after a while (longer than I care to think about) of boiling in my subconscious, I realised that the side-project that was most fitting for me to build was fitplans.

It does what it says on the tin. Calculates your BMR, takes your fitness goals, and gives you an exercise (weight-lifting centered) and diet plan.

At the moment it is a MVP (emphasis on the M), but I do hope it's something I can continue to work on in the months/years to come.

If you'd like to check it out here's the link: www.fitplans.co

I also made a twitter account just for this post, as I'm very bad at social media, but I'm trying to get better!

Thanks for reading.

  1. 3

    Congrats! It would be awesome if there were inches and pounds for those of us in the U.S. although a quick google conversion is fine!

    1. 2

      Thanks for your feedback! Yeah that's on the todo list!

  2. 2

    Hey Anthony, Congrats for the launch. The site and the fitness plan looks great.
    Just a quick suggestion. It would be also good to classify the plan as veg/egg/non-veg.
    What do you say?

    1. 1

      Hey!

      Thank you, that is a great suggestion.

      I am planning on implementing the option to exclude specific foods (i.e. fish) or whole food groups (i.e. meat), I will probably do both and test which works better, but because I have so few users at the moment it's hard to quickly test things.

      Thanks again!

      1. 1

        Perfect!

        Feel free to reach out to on Twitter. I might be able to help you with testing some features and brainstorm.

        1. 1

          Will definitely take you up on this offer! I currently have 0 followers so I am trying to build my twitter lol. Thank you

  3. 1

    Hey Anthony, congrats on the launch! I tried your product but for some reason I was unable to see the attachment. I think the idea of delivering your content via PDF files fits perfectly for the type of information you're providing, but I would personally prefer it in HTML. This is mostly because I consume my newsletters using an RSS reader.

    Also, I didn't see a way to unsubscribe from your posts. Not planning to do it before even trying it, but it was something I noticed right away.

    1. 1

      Hey!

      That's strange, I know that some emails I tested on with strong filters did keep our mail from delivering, but non actually sent the email without the attachment, I will figure this out and fix it.

      That has given me an idea of giving the user the option to receive it via html or pdf! I will be implementing that, thank you!

      Regarding the unsub, I am not planning on emailing my users with promotions or anything like that, so I didn't deem it necessary, but maybe I should make that clear in the email so people know.

      Thanks again!

      1. 1

        Thanks for your reply, Anthony. Just to clarify, I didn't see the attachment because I signed up using an account that allows to read my emails via RSS. How can stop emails to that account so I can sign up using a different one?

        This is inline to my recommendation about posting an unsubscription link at the bottom of your emails. You probably want to do that in order to maintain a good reputation and deliverability, increasing the changes of users getting their emails instead of them going to spam or being relegated to the "promotions" tab in Gmail.

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