“JJ Allaire was tracking his calories in an Excel sheet and thought 'well I could be doing this better on this new fancy handheld device called the iPhone' and he built the very first version of Lose It, put it up on the App Store. The email inbox started getting flooded with people saying 'this app is amazing it's helping me lose weight' — kind of realized like oh I have a product, I have a company here.”

Excel-tracking founder shipped v1 — inbox flooded with testimonials proved demand

Lose It! founder JJ Allaire scratched his own itch by replacing an Excel calorie tracker with an iPhone app at the dawn of the App Store. The contact email he was forced to provide for submission immediately filled with unsolicited 'I'm losing weight' testimonials — that's how he realized he had a product worth building a company around.