Things Are Getting Serious...Preparing for a 1-Month Roadmap to Launching Fitness App

For the past 15 days or so, I've been brainstorming new ideas and have finally decided on one. For those of you who haven't read my first article, there's a link to my idea spreadsheet--in case you're curious: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/brainstorming-ideas-for-mvp-20556c1c09.

For the next month, I will be creating a fitness MVP designed for meal-prepping, beginner-level bodybuilders who are interested in reaching their weekly macronutrient goals while saving the most money on their favorite food items.

This is a very big market, but my focus is not on helping users track their calories per se. I see a lot of these other apps only serving as a manual tracker of calories and macronutrients, but I am more interested in knowing the optimal mix of foods I should eat to maximize my macronutrient goals while minimizing how much I spend to buy these items.

None of these apps do that, as far as I know.

This is strange to me considering how often I use a simple Python script I created, an Excel spreadsheet, and a Jupyter notebook to plan my meal prepping for the week. I felt what I created was immensely helpful to me, especially as a beginner bodybuilder who didn't know how to cook.

What exactly is in 2 pounds of chicken breast, and how do I know if I'm not missing out on greater portions of fat from chicken thighs if I hadn't chosen one over the other? Well, I could have both, but what if I'm on a budget?

All these questions are jogging my brain. I'm having a good idea of who my ideal customer should be.

This is also a good starter project for a bootstrapped, micro-SaaS.

I envision this app to start out as a simple form/questionnaire. It'll walk users through creating their profiles. What's your height, weight, fitness level, etc. Then, it'll present the user with 3 simple ideal dream states. Do you want to cut weight, gain muscle, or maintain? What's your weekly budget?

Then, a search field to select favorite food items. These will start out with a tailored set of appropriate foods given the dream state chosen beforehand. The user can also select more food items by searching for them.

This should have a database of food items to be taken from an online food store. I need to pull data from some kind of API so that all the associated costs along with their units of measurement are known. Get all the macronutrient data from another site, like a government site. Not sure how I'm going to do this exactly but that's for another time.

App also needs to allow the user to add additional unit constraints. What if you don't want more than 6 lbs of chicken thighs per week?

The questionnaire would handle that scenario by first calculating a preliminary mix, then confirming with the user if the portions selected are too much or too little. After the user confirms portion sizes, the app will recalculate and take off or add more food items into the mix.

This is how I calculate my weekly food budget, personally.

After all that, the app will show their ideal weekly mix of food items and how much it will cost them. What'd also be great is if the app allowed you to directly place the order on the app with Amazon Fresh/Whole Foods delivery.

Would I be able to get an affiliate cut from these purchases? That sounds like an interesting pricing model.

The pricing model should also include a recurring fixed cost, which is probably going to be much lower than I would like since it's a B2C app. Similar apps in this space go for about $8.99 - 14.99 per month.

For my first target MMR, I would like to reach $10k per month--the typical Indie Hacker goal 😂, but it's a good, round number! If that's the case, on the lower end of the price range, I would need 1.1k users to keep paying for the app. At the high end of the pricing range, I would need 667 paying users.

I'd like to capture 2-5% of the market, so that means this market needs to have at least 22k - 55k. I think there are definitely at least this many people in my niche.

For this app, it seems difficult to justify paying for the app at $14.99, but I don't know just how much they're actually saving in terms of time/money. Well, they'll be eating healthier. That's for sure.

I feel like if I link the option to send orders out to Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, or Instacart from this tailored set of food items, then it would save users a lot of time from having to choose items themselves.

Also, I would need to keep careful track of which food mixes they decide to keep and what their total costs were compared to the expected budget. If it's lower than budget, then call out how much they saved by using the app. That may help to justify the costs of paying for this app. Might also reduce churn too.

I envision churn coming from the aforementioned and also from users simply not sticking to their dietary goals, or graduating from it.

More experienced bodybuilders may not need this app, but it's hard to say. I recently went back to my make-shift script in order to introduce new items and see what would happen to my costs as well as the weekly food mix breakdown.

I wanted to cut my body fat % down to 13-15% from 20%, so I needed to cut certain foods out from my diet I knew were too fattening. I used the app to help me with this.

But let's keep it simple. First, create the questionnaire. Implement the delivery payment integrations later. Ask your first users if they would actually benefit from this.

I don't want to do freemium. I want to test the market by putting a paywall upfront. The site at the root directory needs a WordPress installation for the SEO and landing page.

What will my distribution channels be? Probably SEO, content marketing. I think Instagram partnerships would work well with this, but this is not a free channel. Should I create an Instagram page for this? I don't know.

This is all a bit of a black box. Google ads might work really well for this actually. Maybe I should test the idea out by devoting a small budget to paid ads, see if it gains any kind of traction. I might actually start with this.

On SEO, I still haven't done the right research to see just how competitive this niche is. It's a specific niche: budget/macro-conscious, meal-prepping bodybuilders.

Maybe messaging could be like, "Stop dirty bulking! Eat cleaner by meal prepping. Use this app to help you." Yeah...something like that lol 😂. This needs some extra consideration.

I'd also like to start a personal blog too. My first goal is to do a little more research into this target market and the competitiveness of the keywords I'll be trying to rank for.

If I decide to pursue this project, I'll probably create a personal blog detailing the journey.

Thank you all for reading 😊.