The story of our start-up Dia-Life — service of the diet and diabetes compensation

Kind time of days, Habr!

I would like to tell you about a startup that me and my colleague developed the last two years.

Dia-Life is an online service for supporters of a healthy diet and for diabetics, which allows the most easy and comfortable to follow a diet, to create its own individual power supply system and to compensate for diabetes, providing all the necessary techniques, goal setting and convenient tools to achieve them.

First and foremost, the service has created for itself — this history has begun after in 2007 I was diagnosed with diabetes. Since then I've come a long way from finding various offline and online solutions to these diaries, from their own crutches in MS Excel, prior to the development of Dia-Life.

Further, under the cut, I will try to tell about what all of this came out and what will happen next.

Target audience and the essence of the problem which is solved by a startup

Target audience in Runet:
According to all-Russia centre of studying of public opinion (VTSIOM) — 8% of Russians on a diet, and 4% of Russians are following the nutrition recommendations of the doctor. (the poll was conducted on 4-5 April 2009, the Statistical error does not exceed 3,4%.) Total, when Internet penetration rate is 43%, the amount of presence of the target audience follow a diet in Runet: 4.8 million.

In the state register of Russia, officially registered on January 1, 2011, more than 3.4 million patients with diabetes. In fact their quantity in 2-3 times more fixed, as are the undiagnosed cases more than 50 percent of patients with diabetes, according to the who. Total, when Internet penetration rate is 43%, the amount of presence of the target audience diabetes in Runet: 4.2 million people, including 1.46 million is officially registered patients with diabetes.

The situation in the world is dire: According to the International diabetes Federation (IDF) in 2011, the number of patients with diabetes in the world amounted to about 366 million people. According to the International diabetes Federation (IDF), by 2030 the number of diabetics in the world will reach 522 million.



Who called non-communicable diseases, including obesity and diabetes, the main risk for the world of medicine. In fact, we are already dealing with a socially significant disease, which is spreading in epidemic proportions. And with a disease that is incurable, and if left untreated and not to compensate for — it leads to death of the patient. All you can do is to compensate from the moment of diagnosis to the end of life. This is achieved mandatory compliance with a specialized diet therapy, insulin therapy in type 1 diabetes and medical therapy in type 2 diabetes, it's also possible to combination therapies.

In the usual daily life and our contemporary realities, to provide the proper level of compensation is almost impossible. I still shudder to recall their "exercises" with a paper diary self and a book full of tables with XE products. The same applies to dieting, no exercise was quite easy to use, is not allowed to make food and rations, base product was full of contradictory duplicates and "junk". On integrated services for diets and diabetics — I never even dreamed of.

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

In the preparation of the concept and architecture of the project in the first place, I focused on maximum user convenience and minimal time spent on working with the service. The minimum time to master the interface and the minimum time for the daily work with the service. A rod was — ideally, no more than 3-5 minutes a day on data entry.


To achieve these objectives, there have been several conceptual solutions:
— The concept of a full comprehensive service – a complete and self-sufficient solution to the problems of the user, that is, to comply with diet and\or compensation of diabetes is enough to use only the service Dia-Life
— Hierarchy on the principle of design, which helped to simplify and speed up data entry: primary products -> which are made of composite dishes (soup, roast, dumplings, pie) -> dishes are prepared rations (Breakfast, lunch, dinner) -> diets and dishes are prepared diet (in fact, system power supply)
— Serious, reliable and most importantly, a large database of primary products — based on the annually updated official base data products from the Institute of Nutrition of the United States. At the moment, about 8,000 official data on products. This is in stark contrast duplicates and other "junk" from competitors.
— Initial focus on creating the best product on the market: from the point of view of usability, convenience, functionality and technology solutions.





The service already lets the user efficiently: set goals and achieve them, monitoring the weight change and calorie consumption, monitor the parameters BMI (body mass index) and metabolism (Muffin-Jeeru), to monitor the effectiveness of diabetes compensation, helps to calculate insulin doses, keep a journal of medications and insulin injections, gives the opportunity to create a system of power and allows you to follow a diet from a catalog ready, makes the assessment of the effectiveness of individual diets, can generate visual reports for a gynecologist.









And all this is only the beginning!

How it all began, technology and a bit of history

Almost the whole 2008 year, I tried to find a convenient software product that replaced my paper diary and a book with a table of products with HAE, was also trying to do all this in MS Excel. But, unfortunately, anything I found, the problems were mostly with the poor functionality and terrible usability. In 2008, while working as a project lead in usability, the company I got my first understanding of what should be such a service and how important is usability for users.
In the following 2009 were studied detailed concept and documentation of the project, and our team of two people was formed at the same time. Domain we registered in September 2009 and the launch of the first online prototype occurred in January 2010, a beta version of the service in September 2010. Then there was a pause and a long work "on the uncle" in a big Telecom company, and in November 2011 a colleague and I left and started service in Full-Time.



Technically, for the last 9 months, the service has been completely rewritten from scratch, taking into account modern realities and the latest trends in web development, and in that time we have grown as a professional. However, the key initially used the technology has not changed: Yii Framework, many client-side JavaScript and JS frameworks JQuery, Raphael, nyroModal. To reduce the load uses caching technology Browser localStorage where possible, and generally we tried to shift all the calculations server side to the client browser.

Though just the two of us, but we still used an internal dev-blog, it has been very useful.


Contrary to some of our friends about what we used templates — design and layout have their own, and icons in vector also drew on their own.

overview of the competitors, a strange coincidence or a borrowed idea?

Services in the market of Russia, with the functionality and audience of partially overlapping with ours, quite a lot (this is a different degree of complexity: calculators calorie calculators doses of insulin, e-diaries of self-control, etc.), but direct competitors with a comprehensive online service and less close functionality — only two.

The first is the oldest (1991) German offline software "SiDiary — an electronic diabetes diary", having representation in Russia, which recently released online version. It is heavily congested non-obvious interface and functionality comes from the 90-ies, which however did not become better in the online version. Translation errors ("Volume consumed", "Kilometers" and other mistakes), almost three dozen fields (!) when entering data into the diary and other "charms" — are included. He's still quite popular, but such "dinosaurs" leaves.

The second — "Normasahar" appeared recently, in February 2012. He is a protege from Glowstart (the first investments they made from Glowstart in September 2011) — habrahabr.ru/company/glavstart/blog/142168

And there is one strange coincidence, judge for yourself:
In may 2011, we corresponded about our startup with Glowstart (all correspondence with them has been preserved in the archive of GMail) and send them, at their request, a summary of the project with business plan, presentation, detailed a roadmap and a link to a working prototype.





— Then, information about our startup they publish on your site Wanted.VC in his blog on Habrahabr (may 2011) — link to 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 it's just a coincidence)
Later, in February 2012 launched a Normasahar that closely is similar to a roadmap of our service (note that we have sent quite detailed information with the roadmap, architecture and description of the planned functionality, which then coincided with the concept and functionality than appeared in the February 2012 "Normasahar").

I'm afraid to assume, but perhaps we are talking about what most often afraid of the start-up people, and why they are always trying to reason about borrowing our idea, moreover, it seems that those who did this were detailed information on the project. Only one thing remains unclear, why such a large company as Glowstart did it?

Here only the market can put everything in its place, and we will do everything that our original product was the best on the market, and not an imported clone.

What next?

In the end, we have developing a competitive product and the first satisfied users. Looking back, I can say that most are pleased that we did. Plans have quite a lot – we will continually improve the functionality of the service and increase its value to users.

The next step, which we are now working hard in the first place are mobile apps (work offline) and the functionality of remote medical consultations from specialized doctors and allows remote monitoring by a doctor for his patients with diabetes (that's what we have planned in the concept back in 2009). This will give the necessary comfort for diabetics and will help to relieve a terrible turn to endocrinologists in hospitals (and virtually all the place — is regular planned visits to patients and to consult and "to speak").

What is the purpose of our publication on habré?

Our users are quite "silent" audience, get their opinion or criticism is a rather rare event. And even when that happens, they usually all happy and "satisfied with everything". :)
The purpose of this publication is an attempt to get criticism and "spanking" of our product. Interested in any informed opinions: the design, front-end solutions, methods of promotion etc. anything that will help us become better!

I also believe that the number follow a diet and sugar diabetics is so large that near you for sure, there are some people who you can help — by recommending our useful service. Abaolutely send me chapapote e-mail registered user Dia-Life — and I will provide for him eternal Premium status.

In conclusion, I want to say thanks to everyone who read to the end. The text turned out longer than I thought, but I hope that you are not wasting your time, though, and it is not success story, because our story has just begun.

Thank you for your attention!

PS the Link for those interested:
Dia-Life — dia-life.ru
Dia-Life to Facebook — www.facebook.com/groups/107619755967951
Dia-Life in Vkontakte — vk.com/club20459629
Dia-Life Twitter — twitter.com/dialife

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru