Ishaq’s balanced-plate
The problem
Most nutrition apps aimed at teenagers are built around counting calories, which is not an appropriate or healthy framing for a young person and risks turning eating into something to track and worry about rather than something ordinary.
The solution
Balanced Plate deliberately avoids calories and weight entirely, and instead just checks off which of the five main food groups, fruit, vegetables, grains, protein and dairy, you have eaten something from today, with a gentle suggestion when one is missing.
Monetisation service
Free for personal use. A £1.99/month family plan lets a parent see a simple weekly food-group summary for younger children, with no calorie or weight data shown anywhere in the app.
Minimum projected ARR
Ishaq’s story
Ishaq wanted to build something about healthy eating, but was clear from the start that he did not want to build a calorie counter, since that felt like the wrong thing to put in front of people his own age. Balanced Plate is his answer: track food groups, not numbers.
In the Make It a Real App phase, Ishaq designed the whole app around one simple daily question, which food groups have you covered today, with a friendly nudge naming exactly what is missing rather than any score, streak pressure, or weight tracking. He used AI to help build the checklist screens while keeping that no-calories rule as a strict boundary throughout.
The hardest part was resisting the pull to add more tracking features, like meal photos or portion sizes, once he realised how easy they would be to build. He kept the app to five simple checkboxes because that was the actual problem he set out to solve.
What Ishaq’s parent thinks
“TBC”
— Shahed Ahmed