Kale is an easy way live healthier by tracking and sharing what you eat with your friends. It started as a simple text message between friends, and has evolved into an online community with an iOS client and web app for professionals.
Last January, a friend of mine was in a difficult spot. He despised his body. It stressed him out, made him feel terrible, and he knew he wasnât enjoying life the way he should be.
Him and I were close friends since "high school Halo". He knew Iâve always been (unreasonably) passionate about health and fitness, so he came to me asking for help.
Obviously, my answer was âletâs do it.â
What a difference 3 months made. Â I had never seen him so energized. He was very proud of what heâd accomplished. He was eating great foods and started crushing CrossFit. All in all, he lost 40lbs in total weight. We didn't track BMI, so I'm not sure how much muscle he gained, but I can assure you that much more than 40lbs of fat was burned.
Iâve trained hundreds of people to become stronger, healthier, and feel happier with themselves. I know the role motivation plays in self-transformation, and I know how difficult it is to change behavior. Itâs no easy feat.
There are thousands of variables that lead to success. But none may be as important as the ability to break things down into tiny habits. Chaining these tiny habits together can cause some serious behavior change.
You canât climb a flight of stairs without taking the first step. Similarly, you canât lose 40lbs without saying no to the first bag of Doritos.
The journey for my friend started when we met at a coffee shop to plan the first month. We were going to focus on changing just one, small aspect of his life. Based on his schedule, we determined that nutrition would be that one thing.
Off to Borderâs we ventured. I pointed my friend to my favorite "healthy eating" book - The Paleo Diet Solution by Robb Wolf. Thus, I empowered him with tool #1 for behavior change: education.
Knowing the powerful effect that record-keeping has on progress (and inspired by Tim Ferrissâ little tip in 4-Hour Body), I asked my friend to take a photo of everything he ate. It would be a food diary of the simplest kind. No need to describe what he ate, how many calories, how many grams, or any sort of point system. Just take a photo.
I also knew the power of peer accountability. If I could hold him accountable to his peers (me), it would be one more notch in the proverbial ladder to success.
Me: âI need you to take those photos, and text me every time. To make it fair, Iâll do the same. Iâll record everything I eat, whether its a delicious rack of ribs or a bag of M&Mâs, and Iâll send it your way.â
Him: âSounds fair to me. Iâm in.â
I decided to take it a step further, and join my friend in recording and sharing everything we ate.
And it worked marvelously.
By the close of the first month, my friend was shedding weight. He was already feeling better than he had since elementary school. We parted ways in May, success in hand.
Distractions and backburners
This photo-logging was a one-off event; I didnât think much more about it until later that year.
Instead, my sights were set on:
Other ambitious ideas (workout marketplace app, PaleoPal food finder app, bite-sized educational videos for nutrition pros, etc.)
Client work (paying the bills doing design and development.)
Side projects (WordPress screencast to try bringing in a little side cash.)
All that distraction kept me from realizing what Iâd found, but it kept my ideas percolating in the back of my mind.
It wasnât until the end of summer that this photo-sharing technique reared it's beautiful head. Another friend needed help, and I wanted to track my own food to see how certain types of foods affected my energy.
Apple had just released iOS 6 beta, and with it, the ability to upload photos via Safari. This was a perfect chance for me to a.) solve my own problem, b.) help a friend, c.) build something fun to learn new tech.
I sat down on a gorgeous weekend (shame on me) and cranked out a small web app that did one thing; this app allow a person to upload a photo to a list. Basic, ugly, but functional. I showed my friend how to use it, and started using it myself.
Fast forward / spoiler: Iâve used that app to record almost every meal Iâve eaten since then.
My goal with this web prototype was test the most important assumption: that people would _consistently_ take photos of what they eat.
I didnât care so much if it helped you eat healthier (yet), because if I couldnât get you to record your meals how could I expect you to change your diet?
I needed a specific target. You canât design a great product with a million people in mind. You start with one person. Then two. Then 10.
Easy decision: I would focus on people like me. People in relatively good health that can afford to splurge a bit on healthier foods. People that feel like they can be doing more to improve their health. People that shop at Whole Foods, participate in CrossFit-like activity, and own an iPhone.
I could have gone after a different segment, but after listing them out (with their pros/cons), this one made the most sense because it was the quickest route to answering my hypothesis.
Finding the first few testers
I convinced a handful of family and friends (that met my previously mentioned criteria) to join up and try recording meals. I made little improvements here and there, but I really didnât want to invest any more time in this if it was something only I found useful.
But the proof was in the results. Each person continued to log their meals consistently. Not only that, but it actually helped them eat healthier. They would think twice about posting crap, and the app on their phone served as a reminder that they wanted to eat healthy stuff. I had a new hypothesis to prove.
Letâs take a quick break, shall we? At this point, itâs November 2012. I started thinking about this idea in the beginning of 2012. I built my first iteration of the idea in August.
What Iâm trying to say is that ideas take time to grow, build, test, and learn. Donât feel like crap when youâre a month into a project and feel like you havenât gotten anywhere. Take your time, and build something worthwhile. Make sure youâre solving the right problem.
Business models? They can be discovered
About this time I started wondering about the possibility of creating a legitimate business around this âthingâ. I loved helping people improve their health, and I loved nutrition, and I loved building things⊠so if I could find a way to start making money from this, Iâd be set!
I shared my idea + progress with at least 50 people over the course of a few months. I'm talking to people  from all over: entrepreneurs, designers, developers, family members, random people, etc.
Each of them gave me interesting feedback, whether it was their perspective on the market, the product, the business model, or why they thought I should change my name from Kaletrain (long story) to just Kale.
It was incredibly important that I talked to so many people, because it really helped me narrow-in on creating a sustainable model that worked.
Talking around, I discovered that there existed a group of professionals that would quite literally squeal with delight at the opportunity to track nutrition so easily. This meant they would pay. This also meant I could make money and keep building this thing. This also meant I did a happydance:
I continued (and still continue) exploring different business models. My number one priority is to help others get healthier, but number two priority is to be able to continue offering this. Paraphrasing Zuck, Iâm not building a service to make money, Iâm making money to build a better service.
Sidenote: I have a huge vision. I want to change the way the world thinks about food and how it impacts their life. I want to help people live healthier, happier lives so that they can appreciate life and live it well. I want to open restaurants. I want to build sustainable farms. I want to shift pharama companies into thinking "preventative".
I had the itch to flex my Objective-C muscles and build out a native iOS app for this thing⊠mostly because I couldnât stand how slow the web app was.
Tech sidenote: could I have built a fast, native-like web app? Sure. Did that tech interest me at the time? No way. I knew how to build fast web apps. What I really wanted to learn was a lot more iOS dev, so thatâs the decision I made.
A few weekends zoomed by, and the end of December brought me my first iteration of the native iOS app. I loved it. So did my users.
Of course, there were hundreds (literally) of issues with it. It wasnât anywhere near the level of polish I set for myself. The engineering was incredibly poor and unrefactored. The design was sloppy and inconsistent. From a technical standpoint, I hated it.
But I had a fracking product in my hand, that I had built to solve a specific problem I had, and it was absolute joy.
I set a deadline for myself: If this were to hit the App Store by the end of January, what would I absolutely need to fix in order to get it out?
Using that as a guide, I found that there wasnât much I needed to do. I added a a few buttons to pop up UIWebViews that linked to the web app (for signup, settings, password reset, etc., the small things) and decided to push it up to the App Store.
That was quite a process, as it was my first time submitting anything to the App Store. I was incredibly nervous as I waited and waited for my app to be reviewed.
Iâve heard of the horror stories of apps being rejected for no apparent reason. I would wake up in the middle of the night and wonder âShit, what if because I mention the word âsubscriptionâ and Iâm not using in-app purchases, theyâll reject and ban me from the store forever?!â
I was just impatient. Within 2 weeks, I was approved and the app was on the store.
More happy dances for everyone!
Iâm now testing Kale with complete strangers. I am not marketing it. I am not actively reaching out to people to try/buy it.
Iâm still learning, and thatâs ok.
Funny story: the morning after it hit the App Store, I woke up and read an email (from the web app) letting me know a user had signed up. It was an email from Russia. I couldnât believe I was already getting hacked!!
Oh, wait, another email, this time the user has a French email address⊠and a Spanish address⊠and finally a Gmail⊠wait another minute here, how are all these people signing up for my app? I havenât told a soul?!
Turns out, the App Store has quite an extensive reach. 350+ million devices where people have access to the App Store. And it looks like people are searching for this stuff daily.
Today Kale has 65 members and over 850+ meals shared. Iâm talking with gym owners and personal trainers to incorporate Kale into their client work. Iâm making it easier for people to track and share their meals every day. Iâm already changing peopleâs lives in small ways (have some wonderful responses/testimonials from my early users!)
But thereâs so much learning to do.
For example, I just recently built an entire section of the web app centered around food exploration. I didnât ask anyone if they needed, I just built it because I thought it would be awesome. I didnât even think too much if I thought it would be useful.
Turns out Iâm finding itâs not so useful. Bah. None of my users use it. Heck, I donât even use it.
So Iâm shifting my product strategy. Iâm focus on having the mobile app delight my primary user (person wanting to eat healthier) and Iâm shifting focus of the web app to pros that need tools to help others eat healthier.
There are many more things I want to share with you all, but Iâll leave you with a few key points:
Itâs incredibly difficult to do this process alone. Iâve tried pulling people in to help me, but I havenât found a good fit yet. Finding good people that share your passion is redonkulously difficult.
For the most part, I wake up thinking about making Kale more awesome. But there are some days where I donât. And thatâs perfectly okay.
Thereâs always more to learn, and many ways to do it, but building + testing a product is by far the most useful way to do it. It beats discussing an idea, or mockups, or even prototypes.
Building products take time. Be patient, and make sure youâre building something useful.
If you found any of this useful, let me know over on Twitter @pvm. If youâre interested in eating healthier, check out Kale for iOS on the App Store.