Alive
Are You Alive?
That's been the most common question I've heard recently. Fair enough, it's been about 8 months since my last update. I'm alive. And so is Hobbes. Let me catch you up.
Last August, I launched a private beta with about a dozen people. I got useful feedback on what worked and what didn't. But almost as importantly, I was building Hobbes to use myself. And I wasn't compelled to use it. That was a problem.
The first issue was meal logging. If you're going to track what you eat, it needs to be low friction, quick, and accurate. That version of Hobbes was none of those things. Logging a meal through a chat conversation took 20-25 seconds, the portion sizes and calorie estimates were wrong often enough that you'd lose trust in the system, and alternative modes like voice and image logging weren't good enough either.
But here's the thing: even if I had built perfect logging, it still wouldn't have been compelling enough to keep using. There was something missing. A calorie tracker, no matter how frictionless, just isn't an app I want to open every day. I suspect most people feel the same way, which is why 90% of people abandon diet apps within a week.
So, I went back to the drawing board. Over the last few months, I rebuilt the app from the ground up. I tried three different architectures for the chat interface before one finally came close to what I wanted. I redesigned the UI. And most importantly, I went into the research on how people actually build healthy habits and built a new habit system from scratch.
The result is an app that I actually like using. There is still a lot of room for improvement, but so far so good. That's a different feeling than where I was six months ago. I think I've managed to build something with a unique point of view, one that goes beyond the calorie-counting approach that every other nutrition app uses.
I'll share more about the specific features and why I built them the way I did in future updates. For now, I want to get it into more hands.
I'm looking for people to test the app for a couple of weeks and give me honest feedback before I open it up more broadly. If you'd like to help, just reply to this email with two things:
- Do you have an iPhone or Android?
- What's your Apple or Google ID (email), so I can add you to the testing list?
Thank you for sticking around through the silence. More updates coming soon. I promise it won't be another 8 months.