MyFitnessPal | Mike and Albert Lee

So we got Mike on your right, correct?

Yes.

And Al on your left, just so you know. And you guys are in fact brothers?

We are.

Yep. Okay.

We are.

Awesome.

Which one of us is older?

Does anyone know?

Yeah, which one is older? Left or right?

Left. Left.

You are.

This seems like a harder question to answer than I was hoping.

Mike's the older one.

Mike's the older one, okay. All right. Well, actually, I have some numbers I want to start with. So start by telling us how many years older you are than Al.

3 years older.

Okay. That's good, because my next number is 5. 5 million, actually. And that is, according to the latest— the last thing I could find, the number of foods that you have in your database, that you have nutrition information on in your database. The next number is 18 million. That is the quantity of venture capital that you guys raised. Is that correct?

That's correct.

Okay, in a single round. Um, and we can get into the details of this. 80 million is the number of users of MyFitnessPal that they were claiming when Under Armour acquired them. Almost exactly a year to the day, February 4th, 2015.

That's right.

So like, it's, you know, 2, 3 more days until the anniversary of the announcement at least. So yeah, congratulations. 100 million is how many users you're saying you have now, correct?

Mm-hmm.

And 120 million is the number they were targeting at the time of the acquisition. I don't know if that meant— intended the combined number of users or what you're going to hit in the next year. It was a little unclear from the news coverage. And then a number you guys are probably interested in is $475 million, which is the acquisition price.

That's correct.

That is the correct number. Okay. So that's a pretty remarkable arc, actually, for a company that raised a single round of VC. You actually got started long before you raised any money. So why don't you tell us the story about how MyFitnessPal got started and what it was like in the early days?

Yeah, I'll take that one. So, you know, when we started the company, it wasn't like We had some grand vision, this world-changing company that we were going to build. It all started because of my wedding, actually. So my wife and I were engaged, we were going to have a beach wedding, and we wanted to lose weight before the big day. And so, you know, we went to see a trainer, and the trainer said, oh, if you want to lose weight, you got to track what you eat, you got to count your calories. And he gave us a little book. It was little. It was literally about this big. I think it had 3,000 foods in it. And, you know, we were supposed to write everything down that we were eating. And, you know, I'm a tech guy. I've worked in the Valley forever. I love technology. And so there's no way I was going to do this on pen and paper. So I literally took the book. I think— I don't think it even made it out of the gym. I'm pretty sure I threw it in the trash. The recycling bin. Yeah. And then I looked for a website to help me do this. And at the time— so this will give you an idea of how old I am— Palm was mobile. So this was pre-iPhone.

Wow.

And I looked for a Palm OS app. And there were dozens of websites and apps that tried to help you do this, but they were all terrible. It was actually— they were hard to use. The UIs were terrible. They were— it was actually easier to just write it down on pen and paper. And so I was just looking for something to build really for fun. You know, my background's actually in sales and marketing, but I've been programming programming since I was 10 years old. I was just looking for something to build, and I thought, I'll build this. And that's how MyFitnessPal got started. It was just my own need. I ended up— so I built this site.

What year was this when you—

This was in 2005, was when the site launched. So I built it myself. It had been a long time since I had programmed, so I was literally Googling everything, like, how do you even list files in a directory? Googling that, right?

What did you build it in?

I built it in PHP.

Good. Everybody does that.

Yeah, yeah.

First time.

And so I finally got the site. I built it. And I sent it out to a few friends and family. And I did a tiny bit of marketing around it. I think I was spending $20 a month on AdWords. And I got my first few users, and they loved it. It was just simpler. It was cleaner to use. We did a lot of really simple things that even today people aren't doing. I don't understand why our competitors don't do this stuff, but like, you know, people eat the same things over and over again, right? So that was one feature that we launched with. We just made it easy. We remembered what you ate most often and made it easy for you to re-add those. It was a great feature. People loved it, and still nobody's doing that. I don't know why. And so, you know, we started getting all these emails from our customers that they loved our product, and most importantly, they were losing— they were having success with it. I mean, I'd get these emails and they were amazing. There were people that had lost 50 pounds, 100 pounds. I think somebody on the site, we've had people, a lot of people actually have lost more than 200 pounds.

Wow.

And, you know, these emails are incredible. And that's really been the heart of the success of the company from day one is people who have success with MyFitnessPal, love it, and tell other people about it. That's kind of, you know, even today, that's That's still the core of what we do.

Now, I have a question. Did you get it done in time for your wedding?

I did not.

I did not. And how did you look in the beach photos?

I did lose 20 pounds for my wedding. So, like, look, if you track what you eat, it works.

Yep.

It definitely works. You know, the hard part is sticking to it and making all those changes.

So tell us a little more about those early days. Like, you chose to build it in PHP. You had the skills. You were able to Google what you needed. Where did you get the data for nutrition information?

Yeah, so when, you know, we have 5 million foods today, but we started with the USDA database, which had 7,000, I think. And, you know, we pretty quickly realized that that wasn't enough. And so that was one of the core innovations that we had, was we just started crowdsourcing the data. And we just, you know, everything that people were putting up, you know, my wife My wife is the one that I credit with that suggestion, because I was debating it. Well, you know, if we let all these other people just submit this in, how are we going to quality control it? You know, what are we going to do there? And she said, well, I'd rather just have it than not have it as a user. And so I thought, huh, well, that's a pretty good way to look at it. And so we just decided to go for it. And, you know, that's definitely one of the real strengths of the company is that we have so much food data. And now we do all kinds of cleaning and all kinds of deduplication, all those techniques. But back then, we didn't have any of that. And we still went for it. And it was a really key decision.

And it's still primarily crowdsourced?

That's right.

OK.

Well, the good thing is that you actually have a lot of time to work that out. Because when you first put that in place, the number of users that we actually had contributing was really small. And now that you have 100 million people around the world who could potentially contribute to it, you need a lot more advanced, robust systems to handle that stuff. So the good news is you can put it out there, and like many things, you have enough time to actually work through what the issues are live with real customers.

So you said at the beginning you were doing a very small amount of AdWords marketing. $25 a month, you said? Yeah, $20, I think. $20? OK. And then you started getting emails from people saying they loved it. When did you realize, like, oh my God, I've actually got something here that might be a business?

Yeah.

So, you know, it was just a labor of love, right? You know, I would work on it at nights and weekends. And one day I was actually— you know, I was working at a different startup at the time. And on a whim, I just said, ah, maybe I'll— I wonder how much traffic MyFitnessPal is getting. I'll just check Google Analytics. And I looked, and I was totally surprised. MyFitnessPal was actually getting more traffic than the startup that I was working That's when I thought, you know, maybe we should actually spend some time on this. And so I called Al, and I said, Al, you've got to quit your job and start working on this with me. And that's when we decided to work on it full-time.

And how old was the site at that point?

I think it was like 2 years old, something like that.

2 or 3 years old. OK. So around 2007.

Yeah, 2008, I think, was the year that we both quit.

OK. And so it was still just a website at that point. Is that right? I mean, 2008, I don't think there were even any mobile apps until later in the year.

There were, but it was really early in the iPhone store, the App Store. So yeah, it was web only, but we knew that mobile would be big. So I used to work at Palm, and at Palm, always diet trackers were some of the most popular apps that were out there. And it's the perfect mobile use case, right? You want to track when you're eating. You don't want to have to remember everything that you ate, go sit back down at your computer and do that. And so, you know, when we started working on it full-time, the first thing we focused on was building an iPhone app.

It was actually the first Apple commercial that featured an app was one of our primary competitors who had launched earlier than us on mobile. So they were actually the first diet and nutrition tracking product in the App Store.

Did you feel like you had missed the boat at that point? Or— because, I mean, that would be a big blow, right? Apple singles out a major competitor, and you sort of feel like maybe they're going to win the land grab.

Yeah. I don't know if we felt like we missed the boat. You know, I mean, like I said, we weren't even really aspiring at that point to build this massive company. We were just happy to kind of be in the game. I remember we had a conversation with him, this friend of ours. We launched, you know, we had the benefit of having— we had this web install base. And so we had about 200,000 members by the time we launched our iPhone app on the web. And so we just emailed them, and instantly our, you know, our app shot up the charts. So we were, I think, top 10 in health and fitness, you know, literally day one. And then we just sort of stuck from there and kept climbing. And I remember one time we said to Al, I said, man, if we could just get to number 5, like, that would be awesome. And then this friend of ours was like, number 5? Why don't you try to be number 1? And like, honestly, you know, it's such a stupid realization, but like, it was really powerful. We're like, of course we should be number 1. And that's when we started like really going after it. Yeah, we just started like— that was kind of the first time we started thinking bigger, right, about what MyFitnessPal Yeah. And that's why eventually we ended up taking venture money. But it took a while, I think, before we really saw the opportunity.

So years ago, I was talking to Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet. He was a columnist at the time, technology pundit. And I got a chance to ask him how he got to where he was. And he said, well, what do you want to do? And his goal at the time was to be the world's top technology pundit. And I was like, oh, I'd be happy to be the world's number 2 technology pundit. I was like, that's your mistake right there. You have to aim for number 1. That was a big mistake.

They were ahead of us for a long time. It was actually— from the time we ended up launching, which was in 2009 on the App Store, to the time that we eclipsed them for the number 1 position was probably over 2 years, right?

Yep. Cool. That takes some patience, then.

You really had to hang in there.

There are some points where you're like, man, Can we really take these guys? But I think a lot of times for us, it always comes back to what do we think about the product?

Yeah.

And how do we look at the things that we expected we would be able to do versus what we were actually doing? And what was our confidence level that we could execute those things? And I think we always felt really good about our prospects as we were continuing to make the product better. And I think that at least gave us a little faith that, hey, if we just keep doing this stuff, we'll get there.

Yeah. What was that— can I ask what was that competitor that you were—

It's an app called Lose It.

Lose It? OK. And where are they now?

I don't know. Honestly, we don't really pay that— they're still pretty popular, but pretty far. They're probably growing 4 or 5 times slower than we are.

Way down the list. OK. Well, congratulations on getting to number 1.

Thank you.

Yeah.