[froo]

I pitched this idea to YC last year, basically.

Mine also had "GPS on phone to monitor person's level of physical activity to help tailor diet to their dietary needs"

We even worked on putting this together so that the algorithm could work automatically for a family who had different dietary requirements.

The problem we found is that it doesn't work for the consumer market. We focussed too much on the idea and not enough on consumer behaviour, which if we had done our market research would have shown this to be not so good an idea.

We found that the dietary consumer market is focussed on selling you early into things you wont use, because the people that generally need these products have low motivation.

Those people who buy dietary books, supplements, exercise equipment etc generally purchase them and might use them for a month or two before essentially "giving up" at best. That's why most businesses targetting that large market are focussed on getting your money early, because relying on longterm revenue is a bad idea.

Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig use a similar model, although the diet plans they use are actually loss leaders so they can sell you their other products, which is where they actually make their money. The diet plans in the long run is where people stop going, but they've already extracted value out of you by purchasing their material.

[10ren]

That makes sense. But it reminds me of search engines cluttering up their portals with ads, and having pay-for-ranking search results - which also made sense. That was the market before google. I don't know if an analogous change of market exists for diets.

[froo]

Well the thing is that is one of the conclusions we came too after having built a prototype. I'm not a skinny guy (nor was my partner), we built the thing for personal use and after several months of use we had found that it was simply too much additional effort that a simple meal plan could accomplish on is own. There were several things we didn't account for in our initial design.

1) Battery life on the mobile phone... Keeping your GPS on during waking hours is a big drain in current generation phones

2) People sticking to the plan (ours was designed so that you could go "off plan" if you felt hungry and it would adapt) ... during early testing if you skipped things, it could go out of whack

3) Motivation, we let several people use it, not including ourselves (about 15 all up) and we monitored the use and we found that in almost all cases (except 1) that people just stopped using it after around a month, with it's novelty wearing off after about two weeks. That's when we started to look at how the business models of other Dietary businesses work.

Basically, it had little more than novelty value - a simple meal plan and exercise would have achieved the same result.

(On a personal note, I found it just as easy to ride my exercise bike while watching TV and eating smaller portions to keep losing weight, I just bought smaller plates and glasses to change my perspective of the amount of food I was eating.)

[10ren]

Please take this with a grain of salt, as a possible perspective (I don't know if it's helpful or not). Let me detail the roles in the analogy:

You made a search engine. You found you weren't making any money, so you studied how other search engines made money, and you found that they had ad and paid-position results. You didn't like that, so you didn't continue. Then google took the approach of trying to give people what they want (fast, uncluttered, relevant results), and then later (literally years later) working out how to make money from it (this was a whole project in itself: text ads, relevant to search, priced by auction: adwords, seemingly "inspired" by goto/overture).

Your point 3 (motivation) seems to be the show-stopper. My suggestion is to consider if there is a way to solve this problem - not in order for you to make money, but in order to help people diet. Illustrative examples (recall that I don't actually know anything about it):

- Make it continually novel, with new content being added all the time (like HN, or WoW), or the "achievement unlocked" of some games, or Nintendo games. Or a new diet every week. Or even as a platform with new perspectives on the diet coming out each week or day (like a daily horoscope or cartoon maybe?). Don't know if this would work, but the idea is to attack the problem of novelty wearing off.

- Or expand on the solution you found in your personal note: tell people to buy smaller plates and glasses; and buy an exercise bike, with instructions about how to set it up with the TV. Maybe this seems trivial and obvious, but I'm guessing it wasn't the first thing you tried yourself - maybe encouragement and guidance would make a huge difference for some people.

Maybe it seems that you can't make money from this; but (I believe that) if a business finds a way to help people, it will find a way to make money. The thing that is potentially exciting is that maybe there is a fantastic way to be extremely helpful to people in dieting, that all the other businesses have missed, because they were focussed on the business model that worked - instead of doing that, find a better way, like Google did.

It sounds like you've done a thorough and intelligent job (and also that you are sick to death of it), and that you were excited about your solution, not about the problem. Let me emphasise that I really have no idea if there exists such a solution as I'm outlining - I just wanted to communicate a focus on your customer's problem, not business models. Reading back that previous sentence, it sounds kind of rude to me, but I hope you'll understand how I mean it.

[froo]

oh I understand what you're saying, the thing is we over-engineered a problem which has a pre-existing, simple and effective solution (diet + exercise).

With our solution, we figured with the addition of the GPS, we could also do things like warn people if they went into the wrong place... eg walked into a mcdonalds, it not only could let them know that they shouldn't be there, but perhaps could provide them with alternatives close by, so instead of just a mealplanning solution but also a mentoring thing.

But in the end, it was just a novelty which wore off.

[10ren]

Thanks for the quick reply. I see what you mean.

pre-existing, simple and effective solution (diet + exercise). I agree, but it doesn't yet seem to be a solved problem for many people - in practice. Still, that's a different question

[froo]

Yeah, the problem with diets and exercise is mostly a continuous motivational problem if anything I figure, which is why the current business models are set up the way they are.

People are really motivated for the first few days/weeks, after which their interest wanes it seems. That's why it's set up as a "pay early" type thing.

Honestly, I think something like the wii fit is a step in the right direction. Make it fun.