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MyFitnessPal · B2C · calorie tracking app

Buy a viral food-scanning app for its knack for pulling in new users

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What they did

MyFitnessPal acquired Cal AI not for its tech but for its top-of-funnel skill (Zach and team are strong distributors), aiming to keep new users coming in and eventually graduate them to MyFitnessPal's fuller feature set. Guest's reading, prompted by the host.

In their words

Josh Peleg - $172M of App Building Advice in 50 Minutes

Play from 39:35
39:07

Joseph ChoiThat's like a good strategic one, where it's like a yeah, very specific metric, which is, you know, you're trying to graduate these users to become these other type of users. Would you do you think that um Cal AI and MyFitnessPal is likely a a similar strategic, where they're trying to get like younger users, like kind of eventually graduating into the My- MyFitnessPal level of product?

39:35

Josh PelegYeah, I think I hadn't thought about it in that framing. I think you're right, because the kind of viral effect of the food scanning is one element that MyFitnessPal has, but they have a whole suite of other capabilities that they probably want consumers to level up to. The other thing I would add is that they weren't buying tech. MyFitnessPal was not buying the tech of Cal AI. I think they were also buying the funnel. Zach and the team are incredibly good distributors, and they understand top of the funnel really, really well in a way that MyFitnessPal doesn't. And so I think the real value there was was buying their ability to attract new users, and keep new blood coming into Cal AI, which hopefully they can graduate to MyFitnessPal.

40:12

Joseph ChoiIs that a niche that BlueThrone doesn't look at as much, where you guys care more about retention versus some other acquirers might care more about the distribution engine?

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Tags: strategic-acquisition, funnel-extension