003 — Create
Work is going great at the hospital, and I genuinely love my job. It is, however, feeling a little monotonous now that COVID-19 is slowing down. That being said, I do have a little more brainpower to spend, and I feel the urge to push myself to learn something new.
So I took to google search. I was researching startup podcasts on Reddit when someone recommended the “indie hackers” podcast. The first episode had me hooked. The guests had so much information to share, and the host, Cortland Allen, is an excellent interviewer. It all feels so natural — like two people just having a conversation, with you present in the room with them. About 40 episodes later, I’m still listening (I’m an auditory learner).
I decided to start working on my best idea: a macronutrient and calorie counting nutrition app. I did some market research, and there are no applications that produce what I am envisioning. This app would calculate the user’s total energy expenditure (TEE). The user could then adjust their macronutrient distribution (carbs, fat, and protein) to their specified percentages. Calculating the TEE is the easy part. The next step is having a database of recipes where the user drags and drops the desired recipes into meal slots. The app automatically adjusts each meal’s ingredients, portions, and recipes to equal the user’s predetermined calories and macronutrient distribution. Lastly, the app would create a shopping list to make life a little easier. The product would be 100% individualized meal plans available in seconds. Perspective clients would be saving thousands of dollars each year compared to paying a meal planning professional for an equivalent service.
Very quickly, I ran into roadblocks — principally being that I do not know how to code. My dad was a programmer in the early 80s, so I grew up playing around with command prompt and early HTML, but this level of coding was impossible for me alone. I decided to reach out online to discover a technical co-founder who shared my passion for nutrition, health, and wellness. I had shared my ideas with friends and family trying to get some feedback. It’s a little different when you put it out there for all of the internet to see. I was tired of having this idea going around in my head and not doing anything about it.
Meanwhile, I started to take free online programming courses starting with front-end development such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I was having lots of fun learning and knew that even basic programming knowledge would benefit any business idea I may have. I was still looking for a technical co-founder to start this journey with, and I started sending cold emails to random people on the internet with programming experience. Hopefully, I’ll find an entrepreneur who wants to partner with me and use nutrition to make the work a better place.
