The story of our startup Dia-Life - the service of adherence to diets and compensation for diabetes

Good day, Habr!

I would like to talk about a startup that the two of us and our colleague have been developing over the past two years.

Dia-Life is an online service for supporters of healthy food and for people suffering from diabetes, which allows you to most simply and comfortably follow a diet, create your own individual food system and compensate for diabetes, providing all the necessary techniques for this, setting goals and convenient tools. to achieve them.

First of all, this service was created for myself - this story began after in 2007 I was diagnosed with diabetes. Since then, I have come a long way: from searching for various offline and online solutions for such diaries, from my own crutches in MS Excel, to developing Dia-Life.
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Next, under the cut, I will try to talk about what came of all this and what will happen next.

Target audience and the essence of the problem that a startup solves

Target audience in RuNet:
According to the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM), 8% of Russians follow a diet, and 4% of Russians follow the recommendations of a doctor in nutrition. (The All-Russian VCIOM survey was conducted on April 4-5, 2009. The statistical error does not exceed 3.4%.) Total, with an Internet penetration rate of 43%, the volume of presence of the target audience of dieters in Runet: 4.8 million people.

As of January 1, 2011, more than 3.4 million people with diabetes are officially registered in the state register of Russia. In fact, their number is 2-3 times more than that recorded, since more than 50 percent of people with diabetes are undiagnosed, according to WHO. Total, with an Internet penetration rate of 43%, the volume of presence of the target audience with diabetes in Runet: 4.2 million people and 1.46 million of them are officially registered diabetic patients.

The situation in the world is even worse: According to the International Diabetes Federation (IDF), in 2011 the number of people with diabetes in the world was about 366 million. According to the forecasts of the International Diabetic Federation (IDF), by 2030 the number of diabetic patients in the world will reach 522 million.



WHO calls noncommunicable diseases, including obesity and diabetes, the main danger for world medicine. In fact, we are already dealing with a socially significant disease that also spreads throughout the epidemic. And with a disease that is incurable, and if it is not treated and not compensated, it leads to the death of the patient. All that can be done is to compensate from the moment of diagnosing the disease to the very end of life. This is achieved by the obligatory observance of specialized dietotherapy, insulin therapy in type 1 diabetes and drug therapy in type 2 diabetes, combined therapies are also possible.

In the usual everyday life and in our modern realities, it is almost impossible to provide the proper level of compensation on our own. I still remember with a shudder my “exercises” with a paper diary of self-control and a book full of tables with HE products. The same applies to compliance with the diet, not a single calorie calculator was convenient enough to use, did not allow to make dishes and rations, the product database was full of conflicting duplicates and "garbage". About complex services for diets and diabetics - then I did not even dream.

How Dia-Life solves these problems and what are the benefits of the service

In drawing up the concept and architecture of the project, in the first place, I was guided by the maximum user convenience and the minimum time spent on working with the service. The minimum time for mastering the interface and the minimum time for daily work with the service. The bar was - ideally, no more than 3-5 minutes a day to enter data.



To achieve these objectives, several conceptual decisions were made:
- The concept of a complete integrated service - a complete and self-sufficient solution to the user's problems, that is, to follow the diet and / or compensate for diabetes - it’s enough to use only the Dia-Life service
- Hierarchy on the basis of the constructor, which allowed us to simplify and speed up data entry: primary products -> from which compound dishes are made (soup, roast, dumplings, pie) -> rations are made from meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner) -> from rations and meals are made up diet (in fact - the power system)
- A serious, and most importantly reliable, large database of primary products - based on an annually updated official database of products from the United States Institute of Nutrition. At the moment, about 8000 official complete data on products. This is a serious difference from duplicates and other "garbage" from competitors.
- The initial benchmark for creating the best product on the market: in terms of usability, convenience of functionality and manufacturability of solutions.





The service already allows the user to be as efficient as possible: set goals and achieve them, monitor weight changes and calorie consumption, monitor BMI parameters (body mass index) and metabolism (according to Muffin-Geor), monitor diabetes compensation efficiency, help calculate insulin doses, lead diary medication and injections of insulin, allows you to create your own system of nutrition and allows you to follow a diet from a catalog of ready-made, makes an assessment of the individual effectiveness of diets, can generate visual reports for Observed doctor.









And all this is just the beginning!

How it all began, used technologies and some history

Almost all of 2008, I tried to find a convenient software product that would replace me with a paper diary and a book with a table of products with XE, there were also attempts to do all this in MS Excel. But, unfortunately, I found nothing suitable for myself, the problems were mostly with poor functionality and terrible usability. In the same 2008, while working as a project manager in the usability of the company, I received the first understanding of how such a service should be and how important usability is for users.
In 2009, the detailed concept and documentation of the project was worked out, and our team of two people was formed at the same time. We registered the domain in September 2009, and the start of the first prototype online occurred in January 2010, the beta version of the service in September 2010. Then there was a pause and a long work "on the uncle" in a large telecom company, and it was only in November 2011 that my colleague and I left and started working in Full-Time mode.



Technically, over the past 9 months, the service has been rewritten completely from scratch, taking into account modern realities and the latest trends in web development, and we have grown professionally over this time. However, the main technologies used initially have not changed: the Yii Framework platform, a lot of client-side JavaScript and JS frameworks JQuery, Raphael, nyroModal. To reduce the load, caching is used, the Browser localStorage technology is used where possible, and in general we tried to shift all the calculations from server-side to the client's browser as much as possible.

Though there are only two of us, but in the work we still use the internal dev-blog, it turned out to be very convenient.



Contrary to the opinion of some of our friends, about the fact that we used ready-made templates - we have our own design and layout, and the icons in the vector were also drawn by ourselves.

A competitor review, a strange coincidence or a borrowed idea?

There are quite a lot of services in the Russian market with functionality and audience partially overlapping with ours (these are different degrees of complexity: calorie calculators, insulin dose calculators, electronic self-monitoring diaries, etc.), but direct competitors with a comprehensive online service and less close functionality - only two.

The first is the oldest (1991) German offline software product “SiDiary - electronic diabetes diary”, which has a representative office in Russia, which recently released an online version. It has a heavily overloaded unobvious interface and functionality from the 90s, which, incidentally, did not get any better in the online version. Translation errors (“Volume drunk”, “Kilometers” and other blunders), almost three dozen fields (!) When entering data in the diary and other “charms” are attached. It is still quite popular, but still the time of such "dinosaurs" leaves.

The second - “NormaSahar” appeared quite recently, in February 2012. He is a protege from GlavStart (the first investment they received from GlavStart in September 2011) - habrahabr.ru/company/glavstart/blog/142168

And this is one strange coincidence, judge for yourself:
- May 2011, we correspond with our startup from GlavStart (all correspondence with them is kept in the GMail archive) and send them, on request, a project summary with a business plan, a presentation, a detailed roadmap and a link to the working prototype of the project





- Then, they publish information about our startup on their website Wanted.VC and in their blog on Habrahabr (May 2011) - link http://liveweb.archive.org/http://habrahabr.ru/company/ glavstart / blog / 119857 /
- And later, in September 2011, they invest in NormaSahar, and we suddenly disappear from their site (but maybe this is just a coincidence)
- Later, in February 2012, NormaSahar starts, which closely resembles the roadmap of our service (I note that we sent quite detailed information with a roadmap, with the architecture and description of the planned functionality, which then coincided with the concept and functionality with which it appeared in February 2012 "NormaSahar").

I'm afraid to guess, but maybe it’s about what startups are most often afraid of, and what they are always trying to dissuade them about - borrowing our idea, moreover, it seems that those who did it had detailed information on the project. One thing is not clear, why such a large company like GlavStart went for it?

Here, only the market can put everything in its place, and for our part we will do everything so that our original product was the best on the market, and not a borrowed clone.

What's next?

As a result, we have a developing competitive product and first satisfied users. Looking back, I can say that I am mostly satisfied with what we did and how. We have quite a lot of plans - we will constantly improve the functionality of the service and increase its value to users.

The next stage, on which we are now working hard, is primarily mobile applications (with the ability to work offline) and the functionality of remote medical consultations from specialized doctors and the possibility of remote monitoring by the doctor of their patients with diabetes (this is what we planned in the concept back in 2009). This will give the necessary comfort to diabetics and help to slightly unload the creepy queues to endocrinologists at polyclinics (and almost the entire queue is the usual scheduled visits to patients and just consult and "talk").
For fans of healthy nutrition and diets - we want to give nutritionists the opportunity to create individual diets and nutrition systems for users, taking into account food preferences. In the end - "Proper nutrition - a healthy life!".

What is the purpose of our publication on Habré?

Our users are quite "silent" public, get feedback from them or criticism - a rather rare event. And even when this happens, they are usually happy with everything and they are “satisfied with everything”. :)
The purpose of this publication is to try to get criticism and "spanking" our product. Any reasonable opinions are interesting: on design, on interface solutions, promotion methods, etc. All that will help us to become better!

I also believe that the number of dieters, as well as diabetics, is so large that there are probably several people who you can help with by recommending our useful service. Hub users can send me a registered user of Dia-Life e-mail in habrakopet - and I will give him an eternal Premium status.

In conclusion, I want to say thanks to everyone who read to the end. The text was more than I thought, but I hope that you have not wasted your time, although this is not a success story yet, because our story has just begun.

Thanks for attention!

PS Links for those interested:
Dia-Life - dia-life.ru
Dia-Life on Facebook - www.facebook.com/groups/107619755967951
Dia-Life in VKontakte - vk.com/club20459629
Dia-Life on Twitter - twitter.com/dialife