During the last couple of months, I have started training with more rigor, aiming to improve my physical form and trying to achieve some personal goals that I set for myself. A very relevant part of this process has been eating healthy food and fueling my body with the macronutrients it requires each day, so I started tracking what I was eating. Soon after I started, I ran into an annoying problem: every time I ate outside home, I struggled to fully understand what I was fueling my body with, so I couldn’t record my proteins and carbohydrates well for that meal. My best option was telling Claude what I was eating, with estimated quantities, and getting a rough estimate of the macros. There was no context whatsoever, and the results never left me completely sure that what I logged was what I ate.
I started asking people I knew how they kept track of their macros when they ate out, and all the answers were the same: guessing with an AI what was on their plate. That was when it hit me: there is an opportunity here. And I wondered, could there be people who were limiting themselves from eating out because of this? How can we improve this part of the customer value chain? There is a real bottleneck here that could be worth looking at.
So, together with my team, we brainstormed for a couple of hours and ended up with the first idea of MacroTable, an app that allows you to keep track of your macros while eating out. What we proposed was an app that partnered with restaurants to get real information about their dishes and, at the same time, could recommend and modify dishes for diners so they can 1. keep track of what they are consuming while eating out and 2. get recommendations of places, dishes, portions and more, this way guiding them to stay within their macro goals at all times, no matter where they eat.
My role in the team was to conduct the market research, identify key changes that had happened in the industry that could allow an app like ours to do well in the market, and then design a business model that could make MacroTable viable. This confirmed, up to a certain point, some of my beliefs on the subject, but it also made me rethink others that I had taken almost as certainties. At the start of the research, I assumed most people who track macros do it for fitness, like me. I was designing for myself. The research did not support that: a large share of trackers do it for medical reasons, such as managing diabetes or food intolerances, and for them a rough estimate is not good enough. That changed how I saw the problem. I had to set my own habits aside and let the findings lead. When we looked for the opportunity, there were clear signs of unmet demand: people already tracking at home but losing control as soon as they eat out.
So, once I had a better idea of the problem and the context around it, I moved on to the business model. The first idea was to charge users a premium subscription, but then we noticed that we were going to struggle to get enough users to pay for the premium version of our app to break even. So, that is where the restaurants came into the revenue model. We decided to have two revenue streams: 1. a variable fee on our customers’ orders and 2. a fixed amount for the Premium version of our app. Since we were going to be working closely with the restaurants and we were aiming to help them divert some diners to their businesses, it made sense to have them as a key partner. For Premium users, we would offer the chance to get more features from us and to use these tools outside the MacroTable system.
But we started wondering: how were we going to sustain our position in the market? Just using AI to estimate macros and having a nice, versatile app wasn’t enough to sustain our competitive advantage. So, the idea came: let’s deeply integrate with the restaurants so we can have a real and verified database of dishes, preparations and macros for a big set of restaurants. Our differentiation should be in the real and accurate data that we can offer our clients, not in the app itself.
The problem was the trust people had in what everyone was telling them they were consuming, not the information itself. So, with this in mind, I modified our business model to put the restaurants at its core. I needed to create value around the information the restaurants could offer us, and with that help people choose what they really wanted. Restaurants that were really focused on healthy dining had an enormous chance to get promoted and shown to their actual target customers. The key was getting enough restaurants to adopt our system and enough clients to join our app. It was tricky because to get restaurants in, we needed people using the app, and to get people into our app, we needed restaurants to partner with us so we could have the right information to give to their clients.
There are many points to look into again and again, but there are two that I currently think are critical to the business:
1. Since we use AI for Premium users and they only pay a fixed fee, the cost they represent to us could be higher than the fixed fee they are paying. How could we solve this? Should we limit their use? Should we change the Premium pricing and add different levels so customers can discriminate by themselves, based on their knowledge of how much they are going to use the app?
2. Who is assuming the cost of verifying the restaurants’ macros per plate? This is a relevant point: if we don’t get this information, our whole business model might collapse.
What I learned from working with this team is how much an idea can change once it is shared with people of different backgrounds and experiences. Our brainstorming did not start well. The ideas were generic or too simple, or we could not see how a disruptive technology would fit into the customer journey. Thirty minutes in, with nothing to show, I proposed an idea I had been carrying around for a couple of months. It was simple and had no disruptive technology in it, but the team immediately started building on it: adding features, cutting others and reshaping it until it fit the project. In a couple hours, an idea I had developed alone for months became something completely different.
Looking back, I think we were stuck because we started from the technology and searched for a place to put it. Progress only came when we started from a real customer problem. Our app does use technology, but its value comes from solving one specific moment in the customer’s journey.
