The immediate inspiration for creating a calorie tracker website came from frustrations my girlfriend had with the Nutrition Tracker on eDiets.com. This tool is implemented in Flash, and because of that, or perhaps because she accessed it from a Mac laptop, or for some combination of those reasons and heavy load or design flaws, it was often unusably slow. I figured writing a calorie tracker that worked better/faster/simpler for her might save the iBook from getting tossed across the room. I actually had written one in Excel a year ago when I was dieting, but it was not exactly friendly to novice Excel users. Coincidentally I happened to be doing some work for a friend on his network of ad supported websites and had been thinking it was an interesting business. This seems like a natural candidate--diet and weightloss are the subjects of massive amounts of advertising, and a calorie tracker is something users will visit every day--the ultimate in "sticky" content. While I knew from the start that this wasn't an original idea just how unoriginal it is was made abundantly clear by the number of domain name ideas I had to try before I found one that wasn't taken. Two factors led me to believe that it was still worth trying:

1. websites are now extremely cheap businesses to run, so there's little financial risk, and
2. it sounded like fun :-)

There are also aspects of this project that tie into an idea I've been mulling for a software company since the late 90s, which I'll discuss in detail in an upcoming post.