MyFitnessPal: Vom persönlichen Ernährungstracker zur $475M-Akquisition

MyFitnessPal took part in a UCLA study that tested whether a physician introducing patients to the app and helping them sign up was enough to start a health change.

“is having your physician introduce you to the app and help you sign up enough to kickstart a health journey?”

The introduction on its own did not move outcomes. The founders concluded that people have to be ready to do the work, and that logging frequency, not the referral, is what predicts success.

“What we learned is that just introducing people to MyFitnessPal wasn't enough.”

A 2010 change to Saved Meals split each saved meal into its individual food entries in the diary, which broke the way part of the user base had been using meals as a stand-in recipe tool.

“you were using Saved Meals as a way to calculate recipes, then this change probably contains some drawbacks”

People logging a recipe wanted one diary line for the dish, not a line per ingredient, so the change made their diaries harder to read.

“Now that we are adding all of the individual components, your diary has become more cluttered.”

The team designed a food grading feature that gave foods letter grades so a user could see at a glance whether a food was healthy, and put the concept to a panel of users invited into the office.

The panel rejected it. People already knew which foods were unhealthy and did not want the app to make them feel bad about eating them, which would have pushed them to stop using it.

In the months right after the 2013 round the founders hired aggressively and let spending run ahead of the business, then spent about as long again pulling it back.

Having a large bank balance for the first time removed the constraint that had kept them lean, and the reflex was to answer problems by adding people, exactly what their investors had warned would happen.