Six Months of MealByMeal

When starting MealByMeal, an AI-powered / SMS-based calorie tracker, I had three hypotheses why MealByMeal could compete: easy logging encourages retention, texting is a great / easy way to track calories, and logging foods over voice is useful. Here’s what I learned over the course of the last six months and tracking thousands of meals and close to a million user calories.

1. Easy logging encourages retention

Retention is critical because MyFitnessPal is an advertising behemoth. They expect users to churn after a couple months, but they can keep themselves as the default option for anyone looking for a calorie tracker by spending a ton of money on ads. This allows them to market to users at the right moment when they start looking for a calorie tracking or weight loss option, and makes it very expensive for competitors to compete on paid marketing to acquire users. You need a niche or a unique distribution channel.

So one way to make user acquisition cost-effective is to increase the average subscription length. For MealByMeal, I bet that easier logging would help retain users. I found this to be mostly true. If users didn’t churn from the trial, two thirds of users maintained their subscriptions over multiple months.

2. Texting is a great way to track calories

I’m convinced that texting was the wrong approach from a maintenance perspective. It costs more and has a lot of red tape. It’s also dangerous to use a chatbot. If a user convinces a bot to say something bad, you may get flagged and penalized.

Some competitors have recently launched that use Telegram / WhatsApp, but those are a bit more limited in terms of user base. Also, most people think of calorie counters as apps, so if you need to explain a different (non-standard) model, it harms user acquisition.

That being said, it is very easy to use for users, and it makes it fast to get to the first “aha” moment.

I will likely launch an app version of MealByMeal to mitigate a lot of these problems and allow building a great UX around the text-based infrastructure.

3. Logging foods over voice is useful

I haven’t explored this enough yet. Most of my users log by typing and not by saying, “hey siri, text mealbymeal that I had a banana”. Even the big players like MyFitnessPal don’t have Siri integrations, which seems a bit crazy.

I haven’t had much success yet in marketing MealByMeal to people who would benefit most from voice logging, but it’s a work in progress.

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