The first version of Protn was a protein tracker. You typed “two eggs and a bowl of oats” and it worked out the protein in about a second. You could scan a barcode. You could add a number by hand in two taps. Your friends could see your daily total, which turns out to be an effective thing to do to a person.
By the usual standards it was good. Logging a meal took under five seconds, which is faster than any of the big trackers manage. And people still drifted off it after a few weeks, in the same shape of curve that every tracker produces.
What they actually said
When we asked, nobody said logging was too slow. What they described was something else: they would open the app at four in the afternoon, see that they were seventy grams of protein short with one meal left, and feel the day had already been decided against them. The app was excellent at reporting a failure that had happened hours earlier.
One sentence stuck with us, roughly: it tells me I got it wrong, it never tells me what to do.
That is not a flaw in the implementation. It is what a tracker is. A tracker is a measuring instrument pointed at decisions you made unaided. All of the difficulty sits in the deciding, and the instrument helps with none of it.
The actual cost is decisions, not seconds
Count the choices in an ordinary day of eating to a target. What do I have for breakfast. Is that enough protein. Do I have time. What is left for lunch given that. Is there anything in the fridge. How much of it. What does that leave for dinner. Have I gone over on fat. Repeat, hungry, every day.
Twenty-odd judgement calls a day, each one small, each one requiring you to hold a running total in your head. Logging adds five seconds per meal to that. The five seconds were never the problem. We had been optimising the cheapest part of the job.
A faster tracker is a faster way to find out you got it wrong. It is not a way to get it right.
What people who succeed at this already do
The thing that kept coming up: people who eat to a target for years, successfully, mostly do not log. They eat something close to the same handful of meals on rotation. They know what it adds up to because they worked it out once. Bodybuilders do it, shift workers do it, anyone with a difficult schedule does it.
They have not found a better tracker. They have removed the need for one, by deciding in advance and then not re-deciding.
Nobody had built the app for that. Every app in the category assumes the menu is unknown and your job is to report it afterwards. The job we wanted was the reverse: settle the menu properly, once, with the targets actually in hand — and then the daily interaction is a tick, not a search.
So we deleted it
The logging went. The barcode scanner went. The friends and the streaks went, and those were the features people complimented most, which made them hard to remove.
What replaced all of it: you tell Protn your macro targets and the foods you would happily eat on repeat. It builds a week of meals from those foods that hits those targets. You check them off. There is no way to log an arbitrary meal, because the moment you can, the deciding comes back and so does everything that follows it.
That is a real trade. If you want to know the macros of a restaurant meal, Protn is useless to you and we will say so on the homepage. What we gave up on is the belief that making measurement faster was ever going to make adherence easier.