Skinnyo: Create Your Own Health Challenges

Skinnyo is an app that motivates you and your friends to eat better and work out more through public and private challenges. You can use the app to track your healthy eating and weightloss progress, complain about dieting hardships, or encourage others on your team. You get weekly reminders that “nudge” you in the right direction of the goals you set and each challenge you join has a timeline where players can share tips and links.

Pet Peeve: I’m a pretty easy going website user, but l do have distinct pet peeves. Readers know a few of mine by now (websites with lists that don’t have the ability to sort data based on specific characteristics, absolute hatred for horizontal scrolling, etc.) but I will highlight one more. Most people dislike being asked the same question multiple times just as much as they dislike entering the same data multiple times. Having a “Save Details” button on every tab that doesn’t universally save the information entered for all the tabs, is annoying. I entered My Health information and clicked on another tab. Upon returning to the My Health tab, my information was lost.

 

The above makes it very clear how the business monetizes the site. It costs $10 to create a private challenge, but it is free to create public ones. It would certainly be interesting to know what percent of users have paid for a private challenge.

 

I commend the site for being very blogger friendly, even showing the code to post my weight loss chart on my blog. Health and diet bloggers rejoice on the ease of posting your own color customized chart!

 

My Diary and My Timeline does a nice job of tracking my weight and calculating my BMI, although I would really prefer to have the data from my Withings scale automatically linked to this interface.

Skinnyo is a social health platform. I’d like to see it evolve to partner with various health technologies and perhaps include more incentivized workout challenges, which I will talk about later this week.