Many foods were either not available in these products, and so had to be manually input, or if they were available then they were hard to find. The first thing Mike Lee wanted to change about 2003-era calorie counters was the user experience, which he found frustrating. “But to my amazement,” Lee recalled a decade later, “none of them worked the way I thought they should work.” There was no shortage of online solutions. Lee looked at over a dozen existing online calorie counters in the summer of 2003. So he immediately threw the calorie counting book away and looked for an online solution. His first reaction to being told to count calories on paper? There’s got to be a digital method! PDAs were the precursor of the modern smartphone-some of you will remember the PalmPilot from the late 1990s-and so Lee had gotten an early entry into the world of mobile communications. In the early 2000s, he’d worked for Handspring, a manufacturer of PDAs, or personal digital assistants, that went on to merge with Palm in 2003. “Write down everything that you eat in a notebook.” “You need to start counting your calories,” the trainer advised, tapping the book. It contained calorie counts for about 3,000 foods. At the end of the first session, after Mike Lee and his fiancée had sweated off maybe half a pound, the trainer handed them a small book. His fiancée also wanted to lose some weight before the big day, so the couple went to see a personal fitness trainer at their local gym, 24 Hour Fitness. The only trouble was he had put on weight over the summer and didn’t want to walk down the aisle with a pudgy tummy. It was the summer of 2003 and Mike Lee, a 32-year-old Silicon Valley marketing executive, was looking forward to his wedding day later that year. Trackers is now available on Kindle and in other digital bookstores. In this exclusive excerpt from ReadWrite founder Richard MacManus’s new book, Trackers: How Technology Is Helping Us Monitor & Improve Our Health, he reveals founder Mike Lee’s secrets for building an app that has helped millions lose weight. MyFitnessPal recently sold to Under Armour for $475 million.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |