Lena

Agreeing with the conclusion for a different reason. At 19 a month you cannot afford to spend an hour on anyone, so you have to build self serve onboarding, docs, billing edge cases, the lot, before you know whether the thing is right. At 200 you can hand hold your first ten customers personally and learn what the product should be. Higher prices buy you the right to do things that do not scale.

I had written thighs off as the unhealthy option without ever checking the numbers, which is a bit daft.

Breakfast is where I was leaving the most on the table, I have been eating toast and calling it fine. Skyr from tomorrow.

Do not skip the boring version of this. Ring five of them. Not email, ring. Ten minutes each, ask what they were doing before they found you and what they went back to. I got more from four of those calls than from six weeks of analytics.

It is nearly always the weekend, and there is nothing wrong with eating more on Saturdays, it just has to be inside the average rather than outside the spreadsheet.

Check what you are drinking too. Coffee with a lot of milk and syrup, juice, or a smoothie can be 300 calories that do essentially nothing for hunger. Swapping a morning smoothie for eggs at the same calories was the single biggest change for me and I resented it at first.

Ask one more question before you decide, which is why they picked that system. If it is an industry standard in their vertical that you had simply never encountered, a few hundred companies is a target market, not a one off. If it is homegrown or their IT lead's pet, it is bespoke work and should be priced as bespoke work.

That is the more interesting question in this whole thread. One customer dragging you toward a vertical where you are needed is a gift.

Also check whether your label is the kind that includes fibre in the carbohydrate total, because the two main labelling conventions differ on this. If your app expects one convention and your packet uses the other, your logged carbohydrate can be off by several grams per serving on high fibre foods. It matters for people counting carbohydrates closely and barely matters for everyone else.

Counterpoint, I have ground by hand for three years and it is the calmest 45 seconds of my day. Genuinely depends on the person.

On the fridge constraint, freeze days four and five on Sunday rather than leaving everything in the fridge all week. Cooked rice and chicken sitting at the back of a small fridge for five days is both a quality and a food safety question, and freezing removes both. Portion them flat in bags and they defrost overnight.

Five months part time is unremarkable and the week two stories are selection bias, those are the ones worth writing about. Every founder I know personally took between two months and two years, and the ones at the fast end usually had an audience or a former employer's problem already in hand.

The thing I would examine is not the elapsed time, it is whether you have asked anyone for money yet. Encouraging conversations with no payment usually means the ask never happened, and people will be enthusiastic indefinitely as long as it costs them nothing. Name a price out loud in the next three conversations and watch what happens to the enthusiasm. That number is your real signal, not the calendar.