Just before Christmas, Jacksonville periodontist Brian Young launched a new iPhone app for those who want to lose weight called Tracknburn, and at first the app was a slow started but once Christmas was done the Tracknburn app started moving and sold in excess of 1,700 copies the day after.
Tracknburn for the iPhone, iPod Touch and Apple iPad enables users to keep track of the food they eat and the exercise they do to burn off weight. The Tracknburn app will figure out how many calories the user needs after they enter their info along with their weight loss goal.
According to an article over on the Miami Herald, in under one month 13,000 iOS users have downloaded the Tracknburn application which Young invested roughly $50,000 in to get off the ground, which means he needs to shift about 25,000 copies before turning a profit.
However, Young says it wasn’t about making money…“It was 100 percent nothing to do with money. I went into it with the idea that if I break even, I’m happy. I just wanted to do it as a hobby.”
Tracknburn isn’t the first app Young has come up with, back in 2009 he came up with a couple of apps for tracking calories and carbohydrates, creating the databases on his own computer and getting pros to turn it into an application but the pros told him he needed to redo it due to requiring a three dimensional database.
Young said, “I’m learning. But I wasted a lot of money. It’s one thing to have an idea, but you need to make sure you can make money, too.”
Now Young farms out the programming to a programmer in Bulgaria, the graphics to a Texas artist, the database to a fellow in Pittsburgh and other work to a website developer in Sarasota.
However, fuelled by the success of Tracknburn, Young intends to bring back the Calorie Tracker and Carb Tracker iOS apps but other than that apparently he done wit h creating iPhone apps and has promised his wife he wont make any more.
To be honest at around a $50,000 investment an app, I think Young’s wife is right, time to stop making them. The Tracknburn app for iOS devices is available to download from iTunes at a price of $3.99.
