Living The Red Life - Growing Diet Doctor to Over 500k Daily Website Hits w/Dr Andreas Eenfeldt

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

This interview explores innovation in health technology, focusing on the creation of user-friendly tools that simplify nutrition tracking and health monitoring for the average person. The speaker discusses the traditional complexity of tracking nutrition and calories, noting that existing apps are generally tailored for fitness enthusiasts rather than regular users. By leveraging artificial intelligence, their new app aims to make food tracking faster and more accessible, reducing the time commitment to under ten seconds per day and providing real-time feedback. This ease of use could bridge the gap for those seeking effective health management without the tedious effort often required by current solutions.Additionally, the conversation touches on broader themes in innovation and entrepreneurship. The speaker shares insights into recognizing and adapting to shifts in consumer needs and the importance of following one’s convictions. Reflecting on the development of their prior venture, Diet Doctor, they discuss the challenges of pivoting from established models to embrace new technology. By focusing on user experience and continuous improvement, they aim to make impactful, lasting changes in the health tech space, making sophisticated tools accessible to everyone, not just niche audiences.CHAPTER TITLES02:20 - Why Simplifying Health Data Matters for the Average Person04:12 - The Power of Intuitive Technology for Health Monitoring07:45 - Transforming Nutrition Tracking Through Artificial Intelligence11:55 - Making Food Tracking Easy: From Minutes to Seconds16:23 - Reducing Complexity: How AI Simplifies Health Choices17:10 - Why the Current Apps Miss the Mark for Everyday Users19:00 - Revolutionizing Health Tech: The Shift from MyFitnessPal20:29 - Advice for Innovators: How to Rethink Your Business Approach22:51 - Reflections on Success and Challenges in Building Health ToolsConnect with Andreas:Founder - dietdoctor.comFounder - Hava.co X - Dr.E (DrEenfeldt)Connect with Rudy Mawer:LinkedInInstagramFacebookTwitter

My name is Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast. I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. What's up guys? Welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. Today we're going to dive into the world of health, but not in the way you think. Actually how to innovate and stay ahead of the marketplace. We're here with Andreas, the founder of dietdoctor.com.

You may or may not know about this site and community. I do from my health days. It became one of the biggest websites on the planet all around, you know, obviously healthy eating and you know, Andreas is a famous low carb authority in that sort of area. And DietDoctor.com became very successful, grew to 60 staff, over 500,000 active users per day. Let me say that one more time, over half a million active users per day and over 80,000 members.

So we're going to dive into, you know, growing that business. But most importantly, how to continually innovate because in the world of business, as many of you know, it never ends. You can never stop. Even when you reach success, you've got to always be thinking what's next. And that's what we're diving into today.

So, Andreas, welcome to the show. Thank you. Great to be here. So a lot to unpack. I'm sure a lot of people wanna know how the heck did you get half a million people on your website every day? That's very impressive and over 80,000 paying members.

So maybe before we dive into the innovation part of the main episode, do you mind giving a couple of minutes background on how you grew Diet Docs so successfully? Yeah, I think it's a similar thing really. We were quite early. I mean, you may know keto became a big hype, low-carb keto became a big hype around, you know, 2018, 19, 20. But we had already been doing that for more than 10 years when that hype hit, right? And we were number one in the world. We were quite successful with SEO so that we were

ranking at the top of many of these top keywords for keto. And then, you know, when people became super interested in it and searched for it, they found us first. So that's basically it, right? You be early, don't chase the trend when it happens. Try to think about what's going to be the big thing in the future. And the best way to do that, of course, is to really be an expert in some topic, you're obsessed about some topic and see something before others. Yeah. And you were very content driven, right?

So you were focused on adding value education based before selling and that was your big kind of. Yeah. I think that the thing we did was to make low carbon keto simple in a more effective way than other people packaging it in a better way, making it more accessible, more easy to use, more enjoyable. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think, you know, we're here to talk about how to innovate, stay ahead. And, you know, obviously some of the biggest brands in the world, we were talking offline, they're constantly doing this, people like Elon Musk. I know that you've got a new venture where you're starting to do this. So why do you, you know, let's break down the innovation side. Cause I think a lot of entrepreneurs I meet, they don't believe in themselves enough to like do something new. They just do what is already known, but what they don't understand, like we're saying is that's kind of the whole blue ocean, red ocean, right? If you're doing

something that's already super well known and creating products that are already similar, you're fighting in this red ocean. But if you are brave enough and confident enough to step forward and step out and innovate and you pull it off, you get into this blue ocean, which means where there's less competition and you're new, which is, you know, something you've done. Yeah, a hundred percent totally agree. And I think that I would like to take it even one step further. Like what's the point even of trying to do the same thing that

everybody else is doing? Like you're just going to be, you're not adding any real value, right? You're just building me to products or me to companies. So I think it's far more exciting. I think that is true for almost any entrepreneur. If you have a topic that you're super interested in, super into, can you anticipate where the world is going? Can you build that before it becomes popular?

Because again, that's when you really provide unique value, right? You're building something different, something that people are not asking for yet. And of course that's much harder to do and I'm not sure I can do it again, but we have a good thing going, I think. But if you fail, you're going to flame out, right? But if you succeed, it could be fantastic. Yeah, I think it's a, I mean, it's a bit of a risk reward too though. Right? Like risk reward. Like if you play it safe and create products that are already doing well

unknown and you're good at marketing and stuff, you can do okay with that. Make a few million and it is going to be tough. So you've got to like work harder than everyone else. But, but I think if you innovate, you know, that's where you start getting into those takeoff businesses, right? Where they might not work because you are testing something new, but you get those massive breakthroughs in your business career. And one thing I've always found as a, you know, entrepreneur, I grew my latest

company to about 25 million in revenue in three years is, yeah, I like to have a mix, right? Like I want some more stable stuff that's going to pay the bills that I know I can do well with and it's got traction. And then I'm like in my back pocket creating the next big thing that can take me to that next big level. Um, so yeah, I like, you know, me personally, I liked to have a mix. Uh, so I'm like, you know, Paul- You're much smarter, much smarter than me, obviously.

I like the all in style, but- I think people are different too, because people like Elon Musk and maybe by the sounds of yourself, like you're really an inventor and a creator, right? Well, like that's your baby. Well, I think it comes from the fact that I'm just so obsessed about this topic that I'm working in that I just when I see something that should exist in the world and it doesn't, I really, really want to build it. And I don't want to spend, you know, 60% of my energy on old stuff

and only a small portion of this new thing. I want to do 90% at least or 110 maybe, create the future as quickly as possible. But that's much more risky, of course. I don't know. It may not be a good idea in most cases. Well, I also think it depends where you are in your life, right? Like if you have a business and it's doing well, then you have to maybe keep that ticking over while you move on to the next thing. But if you're maybe, if you exited a business or you are moving into a business or you're in a phase of your life where you can maybe take that pause to go to that next level or create that new thing, I think it's also dependent on the phase.

Well, what advice would you give to, you know, entrepreneurs that are like thinking about launching something new or something big, but they're too scared to do it? That's a good question. I am very influenced right now by Jensen Huang of Nvidia. He said something really interesting in some interviews I listened to about that they started building their AI chips more than a decade ago, way before it became a big thing, way before a lot of people were asking for it. So this

cost them obviously a lot of money and effort for a very uncertain thing. They're basically building a product and creating a market for it at the same time and for a long time there is not all that much revenue, there's not all that much signs of obvious success. So how do you keep going in that situation? How do you know if you're just chasing something that's never gonna work or if you should keep going? And he was talking about early indicators of future success.

So they were really looking for that, including like, can they find a few people who really, really want what they're building? If they can find some people who truly love it, then probably in the future, there will be many, many more once this becomes more apparent for more people. And then of course, does it make sense from first principles, does it make sense from sort of,

should this thing, once it's working, are there foundational reasons why it should be better than what exists today? And in that case, I think it's clear that there were plenty of good reasons for that. So, yeah, we can talk about what we're up to if you want to. Yeah, I would love to. Just before that, I do want to pull it back to Diet Doctor too, because, you know, when I asked you like what made that successful, you know, you said it was SEO, content creation, but it's like, it was thousands of blogs and websites

doing low-carb content, right? So this still kind of boils down to what you're saying here about the innovation and it's like you were there first, right? Or one of the first to really establish yourself in the marketplace probably because you have that. We were early and by the time when we were creating our English language website, we started in Swedish and made it the biggest Swedish one that were built in English. At that time, maybe 2011, 12, 13, there wasn't much around. Like we were very early on that. I think it's a huge advantage.

If you start before other people and you work harder and it's hard for people to catch up, right? Yeah, yeah. As I did my first ketogenic diet 15 years ago. So you had to like find- You were early. Yeah, yeah. Well, I came from the sports science world and fitness world. So, but you had to find the information back then on forums, like, you know, books and stuff. And I ended up becoming a researcher and some of the studies in my lab

in Tampa at the University of Tampa were on the ketogenic diet and work with people like Dom DiAgostino and stuff, some of the top researchers. But it's, yeah, I think, you know, to your point, like the ability to see that early, like even if someone else is great at content creation, at the, oh, it's partly the right place, right time. So, obviously that helped with dietdoctor.com. And then now, I would love to share this new innovation that you're going through, the next version of this in your business life.

Yeah. Yeah. So obviously this is a huge potential market, right? We're talking about making it simple for people to eat better, for weight loss, which a lot of people want, or to be a bit stronger, a bit leaner, improving metabolic health like diabetes, high blood pressure, etc. All these things are very connected. And a lot of companies and apps try to guide people to do this. But I would say they all kind of stink because they're super difficult to use. Even I, who I'm an expert, I find it difficult to use them.

I find it boring, dreary, time consuming, not fun. And I believe that we can build something much better. So we have basically two innovations going on. One is sort of obvious. It's sort of in the air we breathe right now, right, with AI. Truly is gonna transform probably every area of technology, including nutrition apps.

And I can see that nutrition apps, the big competitors here are moving super slow and we're moving very, I mean, as fast as we can, obviously. The other innovation is just, can we take this sort of complex? Basically, we know from many studies that from many studies that modern processed foods make people eat much more, like 500 to 800 calories extra per day compared to unprocessed foods. And there seems to be multiple reasons for this. It's not just about the carbohydrates. It's certainly not just about lack of willpower or anything.

There is something specific in processed foods that drive us to eat more, drive this obesity epidemic, etc. And from all the research that exists, it seems to be several factors, not just one. So everybody's sort of pushing their own message, their own approach, and their own work to some extent. But they become a little bit hard to do when you just pull one lever to the extreme and you don't get the maximum effectiveness. You really have to target several sort of like protein, fiber, energy, downsides, and sort of addictive properties of food, like sugar and fat combinations, like ice cream

and chocolate. But then you have this complexity, right? And then you have these apps where you have to look at all kinds of macros and protein and micronutrients and micros and it's just confusing. It's a nightmare. And that's even if you know about it, if you don't know, you're screwed. So what we have done, which is also an innovation

nobody else has done is basically just build an algorithm based on all the existing research. You can take all of this data, combine it to one scale. So how satiating is the food per calorie from, you know, ranked against other foods. So you get a ranking of all foods. And the next thing is then to combine it in an app where you can truly make this simple. So what we can do now is you can just take a picture of what you eat and in seconds you will have all the information about it.

But all the ingredients, weights of the ingredients, the macros, the calories, the protein, everything. But even more than that, you get this simplified scale, like how satiating is this food per calorie? Is it something that makes you eat more? Is it something that makes you eat less? And then you have AI guide you, like how could you do this better? Can you eat more of this food that you're already eating? Less of this food that you're already eating? Less of this food that you're already eating. Some little tweak, switch this ingredient for that. Doesn't have to be big things for a pretty substantial effect. And the really cool thing again, like making it simple to eat better, instead

of you have to be an expert and you have to spend tons of time doing very boring work to log in. of you have to be an expert and you have to spend tons of time doing very boring work to log in. I think one thing that's obvious when you say this is, and I mean, it's important for anyone listening, when we're talking about innovation, like I think people sometimes also confuse it with like, you've got to create this new obesity drug that fuels the world, right? But it's not often that it's like, how do I take things that are working?

Right. So like you're talking about the, you know, um, glycemic loads of food and how, you know, energy density plays a role in weight loss, which has been studied for many years and, and, uh, you're like, how do I simplify that? And, and, exactly. I think that's the point because this, stuff works but it's so hard nobody can do it pretty much but now with new technology we can make it simple for the first time so using

this app logging everything you eat is less than a minute and with some innovation we have coming up it's gonna be believe it or not less than a minute and with some innovation we have coming up, it's going to be, believe it or not, less than 10 seconds per day. Yeah. And that's the point of innovation is simplifying, making it faster. It doesn't always have to be these new ground breaks. Take it from, you know, minutes of, of boring work, uh, or like five, 10 minutes of boring work, even if you're an expert and you could take it down to 10 seconds for your grandmother. Now that's innovation. And then we have the

world's top AI expert guiding you, giving you feedback on what you could do different, what you could do better in seconds whenever you want 24 seven at a, as a fraction of the cost of a human or even for free. Yeah. So I think it's complete disruption. And, um, yeah, I think this is a giant market, totally undeserved because existing apps are not for normal people, not for real use, not for regular. Yeah. I mean, I came in through the fitness space and then in the bodybuilding world.

And, you know, I use my fitness pal when it first launched and everyone was tracking, but, and it worked great for like bodybuilders and really obsessed people, but normal people, which is the 99% of the market, they want education. Right. Yeah. My fitness pal is better than a spreadsheet on pen and paper. Sure. But you know, that's not really what we're going for. It's a time in Chironia. Yeah. And I mean, and what's kind of crazy actually, it's just recently,

I stopped tracking food and stuff for many, for about, you know, almost a decade when I got out of the health space, but I'm training for an Ironman right now. So I'm, I'm way more tighter on all my nutrition because of the energy needs for hours of training a day. And I don't even use my fitness power anymore. Now I literally take a, um, a photo of like the, um, the ingredients, the recipe, because I have a chef that makes all my food. So I take a photo of the recipe, I put it in chat GPT, and I ask it for the calories and macros, and it calculates it all.

So it's like- Yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, I can do that. It's the good thing, but I think you should try our Hava app because it'll get the thing, much more convenient. You're going to save so much time and you could even use the basic version for free. So I mean, sure you can copy paste stuff into ChachiBT, but now it's still taking 10 times longer and you're getting the results in a much more

inconvenient way. So yeah. But it's just crazy how, you know, technology's already shifted and I'm, you know, really just getting back. No, the AI is amazing. And I mean, this was impossible a year ago. Like the technology couldn't do it well enough. The existing products were crap.

Now it's as good as, you know an average human at this. Sometimes better, sometimes it makes a few stupid mistakes. But I'm feeling very confident that by this time next year, it's going to be at least as good as the world's top human. And one year after that, most likely it's going to be completely superhuman. No human will ever be able to beat it again. And that's what's happened every time, right? With chess and everything. It's just how it goes. Yeah. It can train like, you know, on insane amounts of data. So it's basically going to be like a human who did nothing but this stuff for a hundred million lifetimes, you know? stuff for a hundred million lifetimes, you know? You can't beat it. Yeah. So, a couple of quick questions to wrap up the show. If someone's looking at their current business, their current authors, they're listening today and they're saying, wow, this episode has

made me think that I can innovate more realistically than I thought was inventing the new rocket ship. How do they look at their current business? How would you advise them? They looked at what they're currently doing and start thinking of ways to innovate. Yeah, I would just encourage people to think about the things that they are passionate about and that they know more about than almost anybody.

What can they see there around the corner that should be coming up? And if they see something, I think, yeah, yeah, have the courage to go in that direction. Yeah, I think it's much better than chasing what everybody else is chasing. It's just either way, it's going to be an adventure, right? Whether you succeed or not. Love it. At least have a chance to build something really valuable for people. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. You can, you make a bigger impact too often with these things. So last couple of questions I have for you. I would love to know, you know, you've been in business a very long time. You built, you know, the main brands, you know, great levels. But business is in all sunshine and rainbow. So what is your biggest struggle or failure and then also your proudest moment in business? Yeah, struggle and failure. I think you always wish, there are many things of course, but you always wish you'd done things faster and as such, right?

So I think it's this sort of transition from diet doctor and low carb to this new and innovative thing. I wish I could have done it faster and smoother and predicted the future a little bit more. I got a little bit too stuck for too long in something that had been working for us and I should have been able to be faster in predicting where things are moving. And I think it became a bit more painful than it had to be there.

And what was the other one? The proudest moment? Well, I hope it's yet to come. Proudest moment or biggest success so far in business of some sort. Yeah. I mean, I think that the thing that propelled us to success is, we already touched on that, being early, following your conviction and building Dietochtl long before it became popular. And now again, I hope to do that again, but much bigger and better. Yeah, great, love it. All right, so that's a wrap on all the questions around innovation. If someone does want to check out this new venture, do you mind just repeating one more time?

We will put it in the show notes. If they're wanting to test it out or they're wanting to learn more about it, they can find it. Oh, they can just go to our website. It's called the hover.co. So H A V A dot C O. Great. Love it. And guys, I hope today inspired you to innovate. I hope today, um, really motivated you to understand innovation. Doesn't have to be creating a new rocket ship that can fly to Mars and stuff, right?

And I think that's where so many entrepreneurs get caught up is they there's a zero or a hundred. But most of the time, innovation can be taking a concept that's working well and just, you know, tweaking it and creating a system that's maybe easier to use or more user friendly that can really separate you and create that blue ocean for you. So buddy, thank you for coming on today. It was awesome to hear your take on innovation and why you think it's so important and what you're up to in the health space. And guys, as always, keep watching. Bye!