VoCal: The world's easiest calorie tracking app
Role
Founder, UX , full stack builder
Designer, Developer(agentic coder with claude code)
Self initiated
Methods
Beta testing, rapid prototyping, AI assisted design and code
Challenge
Building a voice based calorie tracking app which works for Indians like no other app.
The world’s easiest calorie tracking app.
VoCal is a voice-first nutrition tracking app that lets users log meals simply by speaking.
Instead of searching foods, weighing portions, or manually entering calories, users can say what they ate and VoCal converts it into calories, macros, reports, streaks, and personalized insights.
Ya i know!
There are already too many calorie tracking apps!!
BUT
The issue I faced is that I never eat in one sitting so taking a photo of my dish and then keeping refilling it and then taking pictures was not ideal and databases are even worse.
I wanted the resistance to tracking be almost null.
so I just built it
I am a product designer and not a coder but AI truly unlocked a lot of things for me and what followed was:
One week of design sprint in Figma.
Figma MCP plus Claude Code
Kept building, kept iterating, and the first version was out after 3 weeks into beta.
Beta testing
I kept documenting my journey on my Instagram, grew my Instagram to 20,000 followers, and had hundreds of beta testers who were posting their feedback, letting me know what is wrong, what is right, And posting it online helped get feedback from even users, and not only the beta testers.
Launch
Building was not as difficult as launching because the app got rejected two times.
I had to:
do the ASO(app store optimization)
write descriptions
make app listing images
comply with the rules
set up payment gateway, revenue tracking,
analytics
Post launch
Set up attribution on AppsFlyer
Started doing marketing and distribution because without that the app meant nothing
Continued iterating on the basis of the comments, feedback, reviews
VoCal Features
Voice logging
You just speak your meal in any of the 11 Indian languages or English and it logs it for you.
Analytics
A place to see your trend progress numbers and track your weight loss, gain, or maintain
Reports
A feature which no other app in the world has: customized weekly and monthly reports to tell you what exactly to eat, what not to eat, what is going wrong, what is right.
Streaks
Streaks to keep you on track and a leaderboard to motivate you!
Website
This app is as much of Claude code as it is mine :)
Impact
Challenge
Making a fully fledged app without knowing the technical constraints, without knowing how to code, but still making sure it works just as well and even better than every app out there
Surprise
AI is pretty good.
Insight
When designing and building it yourself, you find out about technical constraints, edge cases, states which you might have not even considered while designing, and simple things which get overlooked because of the disconnect between engineering and design.
Skills learnt
Agentic engineering, vibe coding
Fundamentals of MCP AI-assisted development and basically building
App store optimization
Attribution and analytics via MMPs and tools like post hog.
