BrandonMTurner

Boston, MA (No remote) - Full Time - http://www.loseit.com

= About Lose It! =

Lose It! is a popular iPhone / Android / Website application that changes people's lives by helping them manage their weight.

8M+ iPhone Downloads (currently top 10 in Health category)

500k+ Android Downloads (very new, currently top 15 in Health category)

2M Website enabled users (connecting to our website is optional)

2M Uniques per month across all platforms

9M+ pounds of weight have been lost by website enabled users (Estimated ~18M pounds lost across all users)

8k messages betweens users that opted into social features per day

450M+ foods logged by website enabled users

Current Team - 1 CEO (technical), 1 Developer (me), 1 Business Dev, 1 Community Manager

Current Stack - GWT, MySQL, Java (server side and Android), AWS, Objective C (iPhone), Membase

Current Tools - Intellij, Git, Navicat, New Relic, CloudBees, Asana

= Who we are looking for =

Lose It! is looking for new members (we have more then one spot open) for our product team to help us build our next generation of products. We believe that small teams of well rounded people can do great things, so we're looking for someone that can contribute to all phases of building a great product. We believe that iterating on our products with customers is the best way to build something great, so we'd like someone who enjoys talking to customers and making them happy (and maybe even helping to change their lives). As a software engineer at Lose It!, you'll be an early member of the team that is building the core product, the most complete and effective weight loss software spanning mobile devices and the web. You should have a passion for and a proven track record of building products that delight users.

= Who to contact =

{first name} at loseit.com - If you think you would be a good fit send me an email with anything (resume, cover letter, github account, maybe just a simple 'hello'. I'll read anything and everything you send).

You are grossly underestimating the amount people would care if Facebook went offline. The world would freak out. People have memories of their lives tied up in the service with the combination of photos, friends, and messages. The pent up data generated over the years is truly meaningful.

I think it is funny that the author suggests programmers should use their hobby time to work on something actually meaningful. I feel like he discounted billing systems and ecommerce in the process.

I have no problem with programmers working on other meaningful things during their spare time if they choose. But what I struggle with is why programmers don't work on meaningful projects during their time they dedicate to their actual employment. I feel like I work on something very meaningful because I have helped literately millions of people lose literally millions of pounds of weight. More over, I think Square (a billing system) has helped thousands (millions?) of merchants gain access to a new form payments for their goods that they didn't have before. And Amazon (an ecommerce store) has brought convenience to millions of consumers seeking fair prices for products they want; not mention a new distribution channel for authors and merchants. Those seem meaningful to me.

Boston, MA (No remote) - Full Time - http://www.loseit.com

= About Lose It! =

Lose It! is a popular iPhone / Android / Website application that changes people's lives by helping them manage their weight.

8M+ iPhone Downloads (currently top 10 in Health category)

500k+ Android Downloads (very new, currently top 15 in Health category)

2M Website enabled users (connecting to our website is optional)

2M Uniques per month across all platforms

8.5M+ pounds of weight have been lost by website enabled users (Estimated ~20M pounds lost across all users)

8k messages betweens users that opted into social features per day

450M+ foods logged by website enabled users

Current Team - 1 CEO (technical), 1 Developer (me), 1 Business Dev, 1 Community Manager

Current Stack - GWT, MySQL, Java (server side and Android), AWS, Objective C (iPhone), Membase

Current Tools - Intellij, Git, Navicat, New Relic, CloudBees, Asana

= Who we are looking for =

Lose It! is looking for new members (we have more then one spot open) for our product team to help us build our next generation of products. We believe that small teams of well rounded people can do great things, so we're looking for someone that can contribute to all phases of building a great product. We believe that iterating on our products with customers is the best way to build something great, so we'd like someone who enjoys talking to customers and making them happy (and maybe even helping to change their lives).

As a software engineer at Lose It!, you'll be an early member of the team that is building the core product, the most complete and effective weight loss software spanning mobile devices and the web. You should have a passion for and a proven track record of building products that delight users.

= Who to contact =

{first name} at loseit.com - If you think you would be a good fit send me an email with anything (resume, cover letter, github account, maybe just a simple 'hello'. I'll read anything and everything you send).

1) The screenshots you show on apple.com / itunes / app store are showung apps I have never heard of / don't visually look that good. First thing I would do is improve the quality of the the app screenshots in your app screenshots.

2) When you click an app, it should show the name and a few of the recent reviews, not take you out of the app to the app store, it is to much of a context switch from a user standpoint when you do that.

3) However you are picking to show the applications needs to be improved. All the apps I saw are boring low quality apps.

Definitely not the top list. I opened the Health category which I follow very closely since my application is in that category. I study the top 100 app positions of many apps in the category to see how they are changing each day. I scrolled through about 15 apps in the discovery app and didn't recognize a single one. If it is hand curated, I would say it is poorly done.

Boston, MA (No remote) - Full Time - http://www.loseit.com

= About Lose It! =

Lose It! is a popular iPhone / Android / Website application that changes people's lives by helping them manage their weight.

8M+ iPhone Downloads (currently top 10 in Health category)

500k+ Android Downloads (very new, currently top 15 in Health category)

2M Website enabled users (connecting to our website is optional)

2M Uniques per month across all platforms

7M+ pounds of weight have been lost by website enabled users (Estimated ~18M pounds lost across all users)

8k messages betweens users that opted into social features per day

450M+ foods logged by website enabled users

Current Team - 1 CEO (technical), 1 Developer (me), 1 Business Dev, 1 Community Manager

Current Stack - GWT, MySQL, Java (server side and Android), AWS, Objective C (iPhone), Membase

Current Tools - Intellij, Git, Navicat, New Relic, CloudBees, Asana

= Who we are looking for =

Lose It! is looking for new members (we have more then one spot open) for our product team to help us build our next generation of products. We believe that small teams of well rounded people can do great things, so we're looking for someone that can contribute to all phases of building a great product. We believe that iterating on our products with customers is the best way to build something great, so we'd like someone who enjoys talking to customers and making them happy (and maybe even helping to change their lives).

As a software engineer at Lose It!, you'll be an early member of the team that is building the core product, the most complete and effective weight loss software spanning mobile devices and the web. You should have a passion for and a proven track record of building products that delight users.

= Who to contact =

{first name} at loseit.com - If you think you would be a good fit send me an email with anything (resume, cover letter, github account, maybe just a simple 'hello'. I'll read anything and everything you send).

8 weeks = 18.8

24 weeks = 27.2

52 weeks = 33.8

These numbers are tricky though because the longer someone uses Lose It! the greater chance they hit their goal weight and no longer are trying to lose weight. Also, a lot of the really dedicated loggers that have been around a year or more are often high performance athletes that never intended to lose weight in the first place. They are just using the service out of discipline to their trade.

The average weight loss of all users that have achieved their goal and maintained it for at least 2 weeks is 21 pounds. This kind of backs up the idea that weight loss will slow over 52 weeks (on my service) because most people that achieved their goal only had 21 pounds to lose in the first place.

I suppose I am one of those people you are referring to that spread these lies and am causing a lot of damage. I make a calorie counter / weight loss app and website that is based solely on calories in versus calories out. I think you are massively underestimating the success rate of people that use a calorie deficit rate. Literally millions of pounds have been lost for millions of people using just my application alone. All evidence of actually using the application points to the fact people will lose weight. Sure, once people stop using it they might gain weight again if they don't control their calories. Thats why it is lifestyle change and shouldn't be considered a diet. But I don't think that discredits the millions of pounds lost. From our records, and as posted on our homepage:

"96% of users who use Lose It! for 4 weeks lose weight" and "The average Lose It! user loses 12.3 lbs"

Its hard for me to believe that a caloric deficit doesn't work when I see a lot of data right in front of me that suggests otherwise.

The law mostly. Otherwise ownership of companies would be mostly pointless, similar to that of gambling (in that your fate would be mostly random, more so then it currently is).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_directors#Duties

You really shouldn't be puzzled at this. It is actually pretty easy to explain if you have ever worked on a large scale website before. The problem is you begin to accrue large amounts of data and metadata (data about your data). And just "getting rid" of that data is actually hard at scale for a few reasons:

1) Lets say I post on your wall and then I delete my account. Does that mean the message should be removed from your wall? What if you really liked the conversation in the comments that took place after I posted the comment, you are just out of luck? This gets trickier and tricker to handle these types of problems as things like groups, forums, and tagging get added to the social network feature set. All of a sudden is very confusing and unclear what exactly should happen with this type of data. Let's say you do keep that message, when how much of the deleted account is required to keep alive to maintain your database relations (this assumes you are using a normalized relational database to manage your site).

2) The site I work on gets a lot of data from users. It isn't uncommon to have ~5MB from a single user in our database. The actual delete operation on that tables is really rough. If 4 users all tried to delete their account at the same time doing a straight DELETE on the tables would be horrible. Not to mention it leaves holes in your tables in some cases.

3) Is it actually legal to delete the data? Can Apple just delete an account where charges can be placed? I would think they need to keep a history of who used what credit card and so on. I am guessing that medical records and emails for large companies have some kind of restrictions about data retention.

4) The backup issue. If a user deletes their account, does the user expect that the company also goes through all their backups and delete their information from there as well.

All of these things add up to a pretty big burden pretty quick and I think it is logical to see why companies might choose to not allow people to delete their own data. I can also understand why people disagree with that decision, but it really shouldn't be puzzling.

If it is "just 1s and 0s", does this mean making desktop software is also 'not real work'? And thus, copying desktop software is also not problem just as copying music is not a problem. And programmers should go find a new way to make money that is not developing and selling desktop software?

This is a crowded space as you mentioned. I don't know why this is any different then Flipboard from reading the description, only thing maybe is that you remove advertisements and make it easier to read. However, the big difference between you and Flipboard is that Flipboard has a brand that I know of, its free, and I know there is a large team behind it making it better all the time (or at least trying to).

Edit: One thing I forgot to say, is that the app actually looks pretty nice. Sadly, I don't think that is enough to break into the market.

Boston, MA - Full Time - http://www.loseit.com

= About Lose It! = Lose It! is a popular iPhone / Android / Website application that changes people's lives by helping them manage their weight.

8M+ iPhone Downloads (currently top 10 in Health category) 200k+ Android Downloads (very new, currently top 15 in Health category) 1.5M+ Website enabled users (connecting to our website is optional)

1.5M Uniques per month across all platforms 7M+ pounds of weight have been lost by website enabled users (Estimated ~18M pounds lost across all users) 8k messages betweens users that opted into social features per day 450M+ foods logged by website enabled users

Current Team - 1 CEO (technical), 1 Developer (me), 1 Business Dev, 1 Community Manager

Current Stack - GWT, MySQL, Java (server side and Android), AWS, Objective C (iPhone), Membase

Current Tools - Intellij, Git, Navicat, New Relic, CloudBees, Asana

= Who we are looking for =

Lose It! is looking for new members (we have more then one spot open) for our product team to help us build our next generation of products. We believe that small teams of well rounded people can do great things, so we're looking for someone that can contribute to all phases of building a great product. We believe that iterating on our products with customers is the best way to build something great, so we'd like someone who enjoys talking to customers and making them happy (and maybe even helping to change their lives).

As a software engineer at Lose It!, you'll be an early member of the team that is building the core product, the most complete and effective weight loss software spanning mobile devices and the web. You should have a passion for and a proven track record of building products that delight users.

= Who to contact =

brandon attttttttttttttt loseit.com - If you think you would be a good fit send me an email with anything (resume, cover letter, github account, maybe just a simple 'hello'. I'll read anything and everything you send).

I think people generally just have a really hard time understanding the value of a non physical good.

The product I work on has this very problem. We have saved thousands of people's lives with the application we made. Seriously, we get an email every single day where someone explains how they lost 50 or more pounds using the product we make and it took them from being pre-diabetic with high blood pressure to normal insulin levels with normal blood pressure. They have full energy again and are living a wonderful life now. This does feel pretty good when we hear these types of things, however we are a startup and we have investors that want to see a return. If the user does mention money, they always say how happy they are that they would easily pay 99 cents, maybe even all the way to 5 dollars for the app now that they know how good it is. Thats not a good sign for us. We made something that saved their life (maybe forever, maybe they will gain the weight back over months time period) and they value it at the same price as value meal at McDonalds that has a short term (maybe 20 minutes of enjoyment) and has the reverse effect on their life. I don't think the users measure the value the same way because our application is not a physical good. It is assumed by people that apps, software, or websites are little worthless toys that should be free (I don't know how computers came along and all of sudden people didn't want to pay for anything, though I did fall in this trap until I got my degree and worked in the field). I know my mother has this problem as well, the only apps she has ever bought for her iPad is when I bought her a iTunes gift card for her birthday. She loves the apps she paid for more then free ones. Especially, Words with Friends for example, but she has a hard time rationalizing how it is worth ~4 dollars yet has entertained her at least 20 minutes everyday day for the last year, and she hated the advertisements in the free one!

This is not quite true. There is still reason to take funding when a startup is profitable, and it happens all the time. Off the top of my head:

1) Not making enough money to scale according to future demand

2) Want to move into country which is usually costly

3) Strategic investor that the money is nice, but really the deal is done to get the connection

4) Want to enter a new industry or release a new product

5) Want to acquire some some technology (could be a company, product, patents, etc...)

6) Fear of a larger company moving in and attempting to take out the startup

7) Profits are simply not enough to to sustain growth that would allow you to make multiples of current profits

8) Legal troubles in the near future that are believed by the investors and CEO to survivable

One thing to remember to think about while job seeking is that you likely will make less money off an exit if you join a company that is breaking even or making a profit. The people most rewarded are those that took it from non-profitable to profitable.

Hard to tell what you think 'cool' is. Unlikely, though for me it was cool, is ReactOS.

Its a full, from the ground up operating system that is meant to be binary compatible Windows XP.

I worked on it for 3 years, and I can tell you that even though the group of active developers is small, the people are great and there is a large of amount of people watching you (future users?). I thought it was cool because it is huge (code and complexity wise), there is a wide range of things to do, and it can teach you so much. I think I learned more working on this project for 3 years then I did from getting my degree at top university. Just remember, it will never bring you fame or fortune, what I learned took me to a job at Microsoft and now at a startup with a lot of traction.

I used to work at Microsoft, and there was a few of these type of people you described. My personal feeling is that their up sides usually even out to their downsides. However, there is a chance it really is a good idea, you really can execute on the product vision, and he really can sell it.

The way I think you find out if he is valuable is not is simple (ha, I say this, but I have no experience actually trying this so I could be horribly wrong):

Tell him you will dedicate to X amount of hours to development over Y amounts of weekends to make a prototype. If he can take that prototype do something with it (investment, sell it as is or with little more work required, etc...) then you will join him as a real cofounder. I would suggest something in the range of 30 hours over 4 weekends but it may depend a lot on the idea.

All starts have very small chances no matter what.

Moreover, I think a cofounder would serve you very well based on some of the things you said. (Granted, with few details of your actual product, I could be completely wrong.)

"I would just need a large server" - Another technical cofounder could probably help you with the real scaling problems you will have if you get traction. And sadly, in most technical products, simply having a large server is not enough.

"I would need ... some graphic design company to design the logo and images. I also would need a ad company to create a name" - A creative / design focused cofounder would be of really great use. This is going to cost you a lot of money you probably don't need to spend.

"I.m looking for I think is around 100k." - A business knowledgable cofounder could really ground you here. A VC would not do a deal this small. That is not interesting to them at all. A seed investor, angel, super angel, whatever they are called might be interested but it would really help decide to invest in you if you have someone that has a real grasp on business projection and how much money you will really need.

First and foremost, suicide is not the answer. The number for the suicide hotline is 1-800-273-8255 and you should either talk with them or someone you know that is truly looking out for your best interest (this might be exclude a friend a family member sadly).

Second, this is just my advice that has brought me a lot of happiness. And I have no idea if this works for other people. But as time has gone on, I have learned to do things that make me happy. Which is often goes against conventional wisdom. A good example, I bought tickets to a movie one night with a friend. We went out to dinner with other friends before hand. We were having such a good time, we just skipped the movie even though we had both already paid 10 dollars for tickets. I scaled this idea to high profile decisions in my life. Like leaving a job everyone thought I was foolish to leave because of the money, etc.. Its your life, you have limited time to live it. You have to make decisions right now to make you happy. If you don't like getting your degree, just stop doing it and do something else.

It is hard to define what the "general public" is in your post. But I will assume, that you mean, at one day will 50% of the population that has access to a computer will be able to code.

And from me, I think that is an easy "No". I don't know why they would want to either. A lot people are not interested in buildings things (physical or digital) and are not interested in how things work. If they were, then I think by this point the general public would know how a car works, but I would say most people don't have a non trivial understanding of a simple motor.

Moreover, I think you are highly overestimating the ability of the general public in that it is a "small step" from going from wrapping text with some kind of special marker (<b>,<i>, etc...) to change the font style to how a DOM and layout engine works. In my experience, obviously this is very anecdotal, it is hard to explain the difference between block elements and inline elements, margins and padding to people that are smart (at least in my opinion) and truly want to learn.

Right now we make very little money from the advertisements and / or products we sell (We sell Fitbits, Withings scales, our book, tshirts). We have a strategy that we have not executed on yet but have been heads down working on for the last few months.

You might be surprised by the buying behaviors of "Do-It-Yourself" weight loss users compared to the rest of the industry. Much of users come from Weight Watchers because they don't want to pay anymore. Moreover, no one goes to WW thinking they are going to get anything for free, where 100% of users come to us thinking they will not be spending a penny. This is something we will work and try to rite the ship as we execute our plans. Once we do that, we will have the other half of the data that I mentioned (in my original comment) about which one brings in more money. As of right now, Lose It! is free and we lose money as we build our platform and brand.

For what its worth, this data might play a role in debate but doesn't provide proof either way:

Our app is #8 in our category in the App Store and #13 in for the category in the Android Marketplace. It is free and has no advertisements; only available in US / Canada markets for both. We only get about ~1250 downloads a day on Android and about ~3500 downloads a day on iOS.

With that skew in raw downloads combined with a variance of stereotypical buying habits on each platform it is easy to see a way where iOS revenues could outweigh Android revenues by a lot.

From our standpoint, at our scale, advertisements are almost worthless to the amount it would hurt our brand. No agency, in Google itself, has shown us revenue predictions that make our mouth water. We have also experimented with a few direct placements (heavily target to our audience, and we did the design work of the advertisements ourselves) but will likely not continue with that in the future because of how bad they perform.

I was an active developer of ReactOS for about the time period of 2003-2007, including acting as the release engineer for the project for 2 years.

I feel like I can speak from unique stand point as I saw everything from the inside.

ROS is a lot of things, but one thing it is NOT is production ready.

From what I can tell, not a lot in the process has changed since I left. I am sure a lot of things code wise have changed but not enough to make a marginal difference.

One of the biggest issues ROS faces is the lack of testers. Since it can't be used a production OS very few people will actually test it. When I was there, we had 2 dedicated testers. For a whole operating system, that will not cut it.

Another issue is with driver compatibility. While it is true that it runs good on emulated hardware, it has a long long way to go before actual Windows drivers let it run on actual hardware. One small thing in the driver can cause everything to stop working. And with only ~20 active developers at the time, there is a finite set of hardware that can be debugged on. Not to mention only 3-4 of the 20 developers were skilled enough to fix issues with device drivers.

ROS is also fighting uphill battle by chasing Windows when Windows has 100s of developers working on it. I left ROS and worked for Microsoft for two years so I also know how much faster MSFT is going then ROS. Though, even if they got to full XP compatibility it would be one of the most impressive feats I have ever seen of open source, I just don't see it happening anytime soon.

And finally, the last main issue with ROS is the developers itself. There was so few dedicated, we only had ~30 people with write permissions. Of those, only 15 were active. And those 15 were all working in their own area. I worked in shallow (read: non complex) Win32 API and user applications (cmd.exe, control panel, etc...). But everyone had their own section they were interested in and they worked at their own pace with little to no oversight. You either need focus/vision or resources to make real technical progress on a project this large. Without one of those you have no chance. And ROS didn't have either.

All that said, I loved working on ROS. It taught me how to write real code and I learned way more from working on ROS then I did getting my degree. The people on a personal level were great, and some of them were the most technically sound developers I have ever met. Sadly, a whole OS is being carried on their back.

The downside for with GA is the non-realtime status. Sometimes takes more then 12 hours for the hits to come through in the dashboard. Other then that I really like it. I think Mixpanel does do realtime, but that single feature alone is not enough to justify paying for analytics while we are still not making money.

Square

1) They solved a really hard problem. Basically they opened channels for merchants that used to only be able to take cash to credit cards. I have already used this twice on the consumer end. Once at a concert to buy a tshirt, once a cupcake food truck downtown.

2) They did an exceptional job of design in both hardware and software.

3) They had a real vision on their own, 'Apple Style' where they saw the problem and had a vision to a real solution. They didn't have to make a MVP and keep iterating (not that doing that is a bad idea) but have a vision that turns out to be true is always very impressive to me.

4) They executed in a exceptional time period. They had everything in place from from engineer to design and operation in the amount of time other startups take to make a webapp that is much less as sensitive (read: involves larges of amounts of money in a traditionally slow industry).

I was an active developer of ReactOS in 2003-2007 (this is basically where I learned to write production code if you count the code I wrote as production ready. In actuality it wasn't; and I was surprised not to see me being called out explicitly in the article :) ). The project has some issues since this is little to no direction or focus.

While both suggestions made by the author of the article are undoubtedly a good thing. They would have been more a lot of work to get setup and all the developers to agree on. The project is rarely used or tested by actual users since the operating system itself is so primitive compared to other modern operating systems.

It is easier to think of the developers of ReactOS has lone hackers independently working on their own personal itch and the ReactOS codebase just happens to provide the perfect playground. We all had our own goals and we rarely if ever got in the way or even worked with other contributors.

It looks pretty good and it rather snappy UI.

I don't fully understand what makes this better/different then DailyBurn.

I would be interested to know what kind of conversion rate you have at 10 dollars a month. A lot of fitness tracking / and calorie counters have turned into a commodity to users I feel like. Selling things to gym and trainers seems like it is very hard from what experienced for a few reasons (most notably, they make little money and they are not interested upselling their customers unless it somehow directly results in them getting leads for doing more personal training sessions).

A couple quick notes / suggestions:

1) Adding connections to Facebook / Twitter / or internal social networkings will only result in a win for you. We see this very clearly with Lose It! (the product I work on)

2) When clicking on top level nav items that only have one subsection (Notes and Program) it should auto-select (ie. navigate) to the subsection. Otherwise it is just 2 steps to get everywhere.

3) The visualizations are not that compelling which I think is a combination of 2 factors. First, they are simply line graphs of numbers the user has manually entered. There is no depth / substance to the graphs. Moreover, in the demo there is so few data points it really amplies how shallow they are.

4) Ont he goals tab there is a lot of data and I don't really follow what is showing. Perhaps since I am not a avid weight lifter myself. There is also switching between different date formatting in that chart and there looks like there is some kind of escaping bug where it says \"Christine\"

5) Under Strength tab when you click into the textbox for "Reps Until Failure" the text from "Click to Enter" does not clear. Seems like that is would get very annoying.

6) If you are going to expect users to enter so much data manually I suggest also adding a data export feature and also create nice looking printable summaries of their progress.

Anyways, it looks good. Excellent work on launching, thats always the hardest part. I wish you the best luck and welcome to the health and fitness industry.

I think I am probably a little above average when it comes to reading, understanding, and fixing other people's code. Here are a few things that helped me train myself:

1) I read a lot of open source code, the more you read the more aspects you learn about the way other people code. 2) I fix a lot of bugs. At first I fixed bugs in an large open source project. Thats all I did in the project, just kept fixing bugs. Then when I got my first real job outside of school (MSFT) I fixed tons of bugs. I poached bugs off other people (this has a side bonus of your team quickly growing respect for you).

Now, those are things that will help grow your skills but probably won't help you at this moment.

Here are some tips for the way I approach the problem:

1) Use a debugger. Right from the start, use a debugger and look at the variables that are coming and going. Look at their values. Do this over and over again.

2) Rewrite the code. Even if you don't use the code and you end up reverting it all (which I do more often then using my re-written code). Start with the smallest methods and work your way up. You will begin to run into issues that the original author also probably ran into. Often times, these issues force the code into a certain form which would be non obvious just reading it.

It seems like they have a subset of the features that we have created in Lose It! and they are clearly going for simplicity.

Lose It! is a little more complex(?) in the sense we do full food and exercise tracking. But I do still have some insights into the observations they have written about.

We offer reminders to log your food if you have done so far today. Users can pick the time and then we use iOS notifications to remind them, similar to the way they remind users to log their weight. Tis feature is iOS only, no Android or web only version of it. If you compare users with reminders enabled to users without reminders enabled we see users with reminders enabled lose 1.8 more pounds. (8.4 vs 6.6lbs)

However there are two other observations that we see from the Lose it! base. First, weighing yourself daily is stressful. People get down on themselves all the time because they gained weight from one day to the next when they thought they were doing good. This is because people fluctuate weight so much day to day based on so many factors. Most users on the forums always recommend only weighing yourself once a week. We also had to build in a buffer range for users once they hit their goal weight because so many users complained that their weight moves around so much once they hit their goal weight they kept getting bumped back into a weight loss plan.

Another pattern we see is that users that have a Withings scale that automatically records their weight receive a lot of value (expressed in emails to us, posts on the forums, or written on their wall) from the device. We haven't had time to run stats (on how it effects weight) on this yet but we are starting to talk about the 'passive tracking' for users that have a Fitbit and a Withings connected to their Lose It!. Users cannot get over how much a better picture of their health they get after the values come in on their own. The Withings scale takes the textWeight idea to a new level. Sadly, both of these devices are pretty costly and out of the range of a lot of people. So textWeight might be a good way for people to track weight that are on a low cost budget.

All in all though, the most important feature that will improve your weight loss is accountability via social / friends both online or in real life. Studies have shown this in the past so we are not the first to notice or the first to say. In fact, this is the first thing out of the mouth of most health startup CEOs.