If you’re worried about blowing your diet over the holidays – or
perhaps, thinking about making a New Year’s resolution to “eat healthy”
(you know, again) – an app called Applause,
now seed funded by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, may help.
The startup
aims to bring to market a more lightweight food and activity tracking
service combined with virtual support groups that offer you feedback and
encouragement from others like you.
The app itself is not exactly new, however. According to co-founder
and CEO Durga Pandey, he worked on it over the course of a couple of
years before leaving for Salesforce.com in early 2014 – which is how he
ended up scoring the angel funding, as you may have guessed.
Initially, he was bootstrapping the app, then called FitFrnd. But the
original concept was something that was more akin to a “Facebook for
fitness,’ including a variety of social features including friending, a
news feed, likes and comments, plus other social mechanisms designed to
help it go viral.
What he found, however, is that people didn’t want to add their friends and family to witness their weight loss struggles – they wanted that to remain somewhat private.
Pandey actually gave up on the app for a while as he worked at
Salesforce, until he came up with a new idea: he could take the idea of
Weight Watchers and its support groups, and put that into an app format.
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