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Serial entrepreneurs J.J. Allaire and Charles Teague have been working heads-down together for nearly one year, helping Apple iPhone owners lose weight.
The two co-founders are behind Lose It!, which is the long-reigning, top free weight-loss application on Apple Inc.’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone App Store. Teague recently talked with Mass High Tech in the company’s first media interview since it launched in 2008.
“The experience of using a calorie tracking application was pretty painful for most people,” Teague said. “It sort of under-delivered in terms of helping people lose or manage weight.”
The iPhone presented an opportunity to change that by providing a set of user inputs and gestures that could make calorie counting less annoying, he said.
Teague left a venture partner position at Cambridge VC firm General Catalyst in March to work on the app with Allaire, who had developed version one and put it on the app store in November of 2008. The two had worked together at Allaire Corp., which Allaire co-founded with his brother, Brightcove Inc. founder Jeremy Allaire. The company sold to Macromedia in 2001. Then, J J Allaire and Teague were co-founders together at Onfolio Inc., which sold to Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) in 2006.
An Apple iPhone ad featured the app, with its signature rolling food counters, in late 2008 and early 2009. Teague said that gave Lose It! its initial boost. Since then, it’s remained near the top of the health app lists, and near the top 100 overall, he said.
Other devices besides the iPhone are in the pair’s plans, he said, as are new features for the application.
But so far, FitNow Inc., the company the two set up behind Lose It!, hasn’t generated any revenue. The app is free and does not run ads. Teague declined to comment about plans for developing future revenue streams.
“We’re in no rush to figure that out,” he said. “The number-one thing we want to figure out is how to make this product the best weight management and weight loss program that we can.”
Teague said the startup, which has one full-time employee in addition to the founders at its Back Bay headquarters, is adequately funded by private investors, but he declined to disclose amounts.
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