Time to go public

Hi All and Happy New Year!

I wanted to start this new year by introducing my project to the community (and the public in general).

I’m the Indie Hacker of a project I’m calling “Friendly Food Tracker”. It’s essentially an app that allows you to record what you eat by sending a text message.

The Problem
I like to keep fit but I’m also prone to chocolate and red wine. Sometimes as life has been more stressful I’ve overindulged in the chocolate option.

As a result I spent a lot of my 30’s with my weight yo-yoing and as a further result I’ve spent a lot of time using MyFitnessPal to track what I eat and make improvements.

And it works. It works pretty well and is no doubt the runaway leader in it’s field but two things always annoyed me about it;

• Scanning a barcode to get calorie information is great but when a meal is home-cooked or a takeaway, the UI is a nightmare for searching. This was compounded by having to add food quantities - who really knows the grams of potatoes and carrots in a Sunday roast…

• I’ve always hated the idea of calorie restriction. It’s such a negative mindset. I’d rather celebrate a healthy, well balanced diet. Besides that, I’ve never felt I needed to know my calories to the nth degree. I just want to hold a mirror to myself and understand is my diet healthy or unhealthy? If it’s unhealthy then I’ll make the necessary changes but I just need a way to find out.

My Thinking
I needed to find something to solve these two problems I had with MFP and so I came up with the “Friendly Food Tracker”. I solved the above problems by;

• I use a chat interface because I used to spend between two to five hours a day on a train commuting and I got to observe how a lot of people used their phones. Everyone was either consuming content through social media, gaming or streaming services or they were sending text messages.

In fact, the App and Play store charts confirmed this. You’d have to go to around No.30 in the charts for a form-based app to appear and they tended to be Uber or Tinder. With this in mind, I figured a chat based app would be my best option for a low friction UI. As a non-designer it also made my life easier.

• I once read a book by a nutritionist called Matt Fitzgerald called Racing Weight where he introduces the concept of ‘Diet Quality Score’ (DQS). With DQS if you eat healthier you get positive points and if you eat unhealthy food, the score is negative. I figured this is exactly what I was looking for and could codify this logic into a product.

The Result
My background is in tech but as a Database Engineer and now Product Manager - it’s certainly not Front End.

But I knew that recording food needed to be a phone app and I wanted it to be cross platform from the start.

So I’ve taught myself React Native and I’ve built an MVP for myself. It solves all the problems I’ve had with MyFitnessPal and I figured I should now share with you all.

I've also had to build my own food database and that's been a pain! But hey, it's been enough to get me started and actually using my own product...

My Ask
I reckon I’m a few weeks away from a closed public beta release.

If you think this is something you’d be interested in and you’re based in the UK, then please let me know, or you can sign up from here.

I don’t mind if folks want to sign up just to see the product but I know I'll get more valuable feedback from folks who genuinely want to track their food.

At the moment I’m only looking for UK-based beta users because I haven’t done any internationalisation yet and foods like chips etc have different meanings across different countries. Therefore I’m starting with the UK and will go from there.

Hope to hear from you all soon!