It finally dawned on me…working for the man SUCKS, so at that exact moment I decided to shoot for the stars and create a product with no previous experience, a lot of foolishness and a simple little idea.

At some point in life you probably have had the infamous “Why didn’t I think of that” moment. I have had millions of these so one day I took action and this is a story of what happened.

People come up with ideas everyday but unfortunately most of them fall into the sea of lost dreams.

It requires a ton of commitment to go from idea to reality especially in todays hyper A.D.D. enviornment of social media, on demand TV and a trillion other distractions we face every single day.

However there comes a time when your motivation to strike it on your own is so powerful that you just make it happen!

Create something out of nothing…

I am a living & breathing example of how a regular dude with a full time job thought of an idea and ended up with a factory prototype from China with the intentions to launch a crowd funding campaign with literally zero experience in either hardware or software.

In this post I will share with you my step by step journey and illustrate how I was able to accomplish this with a little bit of hustle and an immense amount of drive.

Truth!

→Phase 1: Idea←

From sitting on the crapper to being hungover, ideas can literally come from anywhere. In my case it was an EXCITING trip to the grocery store (note the sarcasm) I just had a serious convo with my doctor who told me that I NEEDED to lower my cholesterol as it was getting dangerously high.

As a twenty something year old guy who hits the gym 3–4 times a week this was a shocker!

It had everything to do with what I was consuming and more importantly my misconception of what I thought was considered healthy.

At this point, my mind was fixated on 1 thing…reading the nutritional content on every freaking food product I was about to buy which really is a pain in the ass!

This instinctual reaction didn’t help me much but it lead me to an idea.

I questioned why people fixate so much on hitting the gym and solely focus on physical activity when factually speaking, 75–80% of a healthy lifestyle boils down to what you eat.

With that in mind, I was driven to create a super simple way for people to cut through the B.S. of “healthy” packaging labels, which in reality are wolf in sheep clothing unless you analyze every single line on food labels.

→Phase 2: Research←

Google Is Your Best Friend

So with a strong sense of urgency of trying to find a better way, I started to Google solutions to see if there was something out there that fit the following criteria:

Could easily track what I ate (no guessing portions, the same way you wouldn’t guess at how many miles you run) Provide nutritional data Discreet & portable to transition from the kitchen, gym and office.

Here is what I found:

A ton of apps that tracked what you ate but didn’t quite give you the exact portion sizes to what you actually consumed. Physical kitchen scales that provided nutritional breakdowns but were ugly, bulky and meant only for the kitchen. When I couldn’t find anything under the portability & discreet category thats when alarm bells started go off.

I continued my research to other platforms such as Alibaba.com, Amazon and a few others in order to be 100% sure that there wasn't a gaping hole in my research which could come back to haunt me.

→Phase 3: Trial, Error and a lil’ hustle←

After a ton more research I was convinced that I had a decent idea, and due to the internet of things trend, I knew having a portable, sleek and connected nutritional smart scale would catch the interest of a few people.

And besides I would be a customer myself so I wanted to design something that someone could use everyday without looking super techy or like I was dieting.

So I had the idea, but no skills to make it happen whatsoever!

I needed to recruit someone who could share the same vision and have the right skillset.

I googled prototyping in my city and found a community workshop where a few creative and hands on “workshop” people congregated, if anything I could surely find someone who might be able to point me in the right direction.

Before eagerly jumping into my car and driving there, I needed a rough sketch of what I was trying to convey, so I quickly hopped on Elance.com and for 10 bucks I was able to find someone to do a super quick sketch to illustrate the basic concept.

Start of the dream. The basic render for $10

It was extremely basic but got the point across. After going to the community workshop a few times, I wasn’t having much luck. Most people were too focused on their own projects or had advice that was way over my head. So I decided to take matter into my own hands and bought a standard kitchen smart scale and took it to the workshop with nothing but a screwdriver and started taking it apart to see the inner workings.

Curiosity

The moment I started to do this, people became interested in

what I was doing and naturally asked me

Hey that’s a pretty cool scale, what’s it for…drug dealing?!

After some interesting comments and dumb jokes I told them the story and that is how I ended up finding my first recruit.

He was completing his PHD in software engineering and was intrigued about the concept and offered to help on the software side.

Now this was all great but I originally needed help on the hardware, but what the hell I figured 2 heads are better than 1.

→Phase 3.5: The First Version of Many←

Now that I had a partner in crime we tried to meet at least once a week during the evenings or weekends to chip away and brainstorm at taking the next step of creating a prototype.

We both were working full time but our goal was to hack something together and perhaps crowdfund in order to validate the market.

When In Doubt…Outsource!

Our next step was to 3D print our idea but we soon realized we needed more skills so we jumped on Elance again to setup a meeting in town with a guy who had design and CAD skills.

We needed some technical drawings in order to 3D print our initial model as well as a slick renders to impress anyone we pitched.

The initial design cost us $125 bucks each, but after the 1st revision we convinced our new found friend to be part of the project. We welcomed him with open arms and about 3 iterations later we had our first pro renders.