TextWeight Tracks Your Weight Loss Progress, Bugs You Through SMS | Hacker News Reader

TextWeight Tracks Your Weight Loss Progress, Bugs You Through SMS

techcrunch.com

29 pointsjohns15 comments

This is the app that was launched on HN this morning after my husband stayed up all night coding, fastest turnaround to front page of TechCrunch I've ever seen. Nice job honey. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2057706

Thanks dear :)

Aaaawww, true love.

I like it. Beats my iCal "diet" calendar. Brainstorming about how this can be used to track muscle gain for those with bioelectrical impedance scales. IE, you're gaining weight but body fat % stays the same, ∴ some amount of muscle gained.

While I applaud another honest attempt to help people lose weight, I am also skeptical that an app written in a single day managed to get TC'd the next. I feel doubly so when there are far more interesting apps in this space such as Lose It or Lose It (http://loseitorloseit.com).

FTR, I have no affiliation w/ LIOLI other than that I'm a user who finds it valuable and believe it more deserving of PR than this app.

Sharing privately with a trainer or nutritionist can be supplemently awesome. As well as getting tip of the day texted back based on the results. Well done.

All good ideas. We work with partners in academia to study exactly those kinds of things. This service is just a very simple example. It's surprising how just one question and raising your awareness can make a huge difference. We've seen this in a number of published studies.

Public graphs are movitational for me.

I made similar personal app at http://fatgrapher.com and one of the key features for me is the that my graph is public.

We used the principles: weigh/graph everyday, skip dinner whenever more than 1 pound behind the 'pace line'. The 'pace line' graphs ideal progress towards weight loss goal.

Question: - US phone numbers only or other?

Ideas: - Provide an interface via twitter, either personal msg or DM. - You could also provide an optional weekly public tweet of weights reported.

Btw, I have twitter set to SMS me on receipt of a DM, which you could exploit to provide broader SMSs and save a few $s. Just sayin'.

I really like the simplicity of the app.

US phone only, for now.

Longer term, we're looking to understand better people's sensitivity around sharing weight. It's a tricky area. There are several studies in academia exploring this where we've partnered with investigators.

Sorry I misspoke. Canada works too.

Very nice. What service are you using to send the SMSs?

Twilio

$.02 / sms. Have you hashed out any monetization plans?

His wife works at Twilio :)

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