Health Business Update

In my last post I introduced The Diet Selector, which is a website (I built) that took someone’s lifestyle preferences and found the optimal weight loss diet for them. Around 50 people ended up using the site, but unfortunately most users were friends/family who were there out of curiosity rather than to actually try to lose weight.

While chatting with a friend, we came to the conclusion that consumers have scant access to evidence supporting the benefits of any weight loss diet. So we thought that crowdsourcing diet reviews could shed some light on what actually works for people. Thus Version 2 of the site was born. It is essentially Yelp for weight loss diets where people can rate and review diets they have tried in the past. If you have ever tried a weight loss diet, I would greatly appreciate if you rated/reviewed it here (and if your diet isn’t on the list, email me and I will add it).

Anyway I made many mistakes with these initial website launches including:

• There was no product to sell and no meaningful call to action once someone had used the tools.
• I did not conduct customer research before building the site. There was no reason to believe anyone actually needed this sort of thing.
• There was a distribution channel problem. I should have gone to where my customers were instead of assuming they would come to me.
  • For example, a large cohort of people looking to lose weight hang out on Reddit and Facebook and I did not engage them.

In hindsight I followed this sequence: idea -> product -> customers. My process was backwards. The correct approach is: Customers -> idea -> product. So now I am banning myself from coding and only focusing on interacting with potential customers/the health and weight loss community. The new goal has 2 components:

1. Engage with potential customers to better understand their problems
2. Build a list of potential customers that I can contact once I begin to sell a product/service

The plan: I am going to offer personal weight loss coaching to anyone who is interested. The idea is to help someone change their eating habits over the course of 2 weeks such that they can sustainably move to a lower weight/more desirable body composition. I’ll charge $150 at the outset so the user is committed, but guarantee a full return of the payment for any reason at all (including just wanting your money back)! So let me know if you want free weight loss coaching.