Aical helps users keep track of their daily nutrients intake and
adjust their diet. With aical, you don’t have to fill unfriendly
forms and search for your food to monitor your nutrients intake.
The artificial intelligence algorithms within the calorie
counting app, estimate your intake of calories, fat, carbs,
proteins, and fibre from just seeing a photograph of your meal.
All you have to do is snap a picture of your food, scan a
barcode from a product you are consuming, or tell Siri what you
ate. Simple as that.
We started building aical with the aim of creating a calorie
counting & diet application algorithm that would deliver
nutrition reports, better and faster. We went MVP-first, with
the goal to develop a mobile application that would provide the
best experience for the users while collecting the user feedback
from the market to validate our idea.
We invested over $50K in building the first version of the
mobile app. Within three weeks, we had already had buying
offers ranging $230K.
Here’s a look into how we did it:
Help people create a healthy lifestyle while keeping track of
their diet.
The challenge.
Aical was envisioned as simple to use, and human-centric mobile
application that keeps track of your calories throughout the
day. Since we were building a subscription-based business model,
we knew we had to make it as simple as possible to use, so as to
perfectly blend into the lives of our users. Hence, we took a
daily activity like taking pictures and snapshots with your
mobile phone and taught of making it the core of the
application. As a user, you could take a picture of your meal
and the algorithm would interpret the portion size, ingredients
and nutrients for you. Easy, huh? Yes, but then we took pictured
out our soups and realised how much of a challenge it is to be
able to extract exact information on the ingredients in a soup
bowl. Another problem we identified was that besides the main
meals, users frequently enjoy a small snack during their day.
The solution.
At this point, we knew we had to come with a few other solutions
for logging food into the calorie counting mobile app. Thinking
of the many life scenarios users could be in while enjoying
their meal, we came up with more ways of keeping track of
calories and nutrients: scanning the bar code on a product,
manually logging your food, and telling Siri what you ate.
Building aical, the AI-powered calorie counting & nutrition iOS
app.
Mobile App Business and Product Strategy. We started with
the business-critical side of the calorie counting & diet mobile
application. Although the problem we aimed to solve was pretty
clear from the very beginning, we wanted to be sure that before
getting into building the app, we have a clear vision of the
buyer personas, as well as real-life scenarios of users
interacting with the mobile app.
Moving on to the functionality side of the application, we went
through a feature prioritisation phase, in which we created a
roadmap of all the features the minimum viable version of the
digital product would contain.
We brought the platform we were going to make the first release
on into discussion and looking at a few stats, numbers and the
users we are going to target, we decided to go iOS first.
UX Design & Mobile Prototyping. Having the users personas
of the mobile applications defined, provided a robust framework
for creating the user flows and engineer pathways for users to
interact with the application. We started with paper and pen,
sketching all the app scenarios we could think of, on paper.
UI Design. Following the same principle of simplicity, we
aimed to offer aical a clean look. We used white and black, with
pink as an accent colour.
Mobile App Development & Testing. The development of the
aical mobile app lasted for about one month. Following an Agile
approach and building in a Lean manner, development was done in
one-week sprints. The architecture of the mobile app paid a
great deal at this stage. We had a cross-functional team of
designers, developers and testers continuously collaborate and
iterate on the app functionalities.
Launching aical. Before getting the mobile into the App
Store, we made sure to have the right analytics tools in place,
craft an eye-catching description and make sure we have a
bug-free mobile application, ready to interact with the users.
We launched a few advertisement campaigns, and the first month
of having aical on the App Store brought us, 9000 users, out of
which 150 were premium subscribers.
Takeaways.
Taking a quick look at a few numbers, you see that 40% of new
startups and digital product fail within their first month of
activity. The same numbers tell use that few startups reach
market validation in their first days of activity. Building
aical showed us how if you are looking to reach a high ROI with
your app, going MVP first and testing the idea with the core
functionalities of a mobile application can save you loads of
money. It gave us a better understanding of how to get the most
out of the data your app collects and to make sure that the
money we invest in building aical is solving real deal problems
for our users.
Looking to build your next mobile app? We hope that this story
of how we build a $ 1m calories counting mobile application
inspires you to bring your idea to life and launch a new product
on the market.
