Cico is a calorie-tracking app built around a single number: calories in minus calories out, updating in real time as you log meals and move. I've been overweight my entire life. I've used most of the calorie apps and started over on a Monday more times than I can count, running the same loop every time - eat well Monday, eat well Tuesday, have a hard Wednesday, write off the rest of the week, start again the next Monday. Cico is, in part, my attempt to design an app for the person I keep being.
Matt Capizzi and Josh had worked together for four years at Zenrez, a fitness booking startup Matt co-founded that was later acquired by Block. In June of 2025, Matt reached out to Josh with an idea for a calorie app. Josh and I were already building together at Tortuga Labs, our consumer app studio, and Matt came in as the product founder with a clear, specific opinion about how a calorie app could be different. We partnered up and started in July, with me leading design and a good part of the product strategy.
Features
The whole app reduces to one number, the score, shown in real time on a Today screen as you log food and as your activity syncs. Logging is meant to be nearly effortless - you describe a meal by voice or text, or scan a barcode, and Apple Health handles the calories-out side automatically. Around that core number are three surfaces: Today, where the live score lives; History, for the shape of your days over time; and Challenges, the main engagement loop, where you pick a target and the app tracks cumulative progress toward it over a short burst of three to ten days rather than grading you each day.
Underlying thesis
The calorie-app category looks the same wherever you go: pastel palettes, daily pass-or-fail judgments, cheerful pings, and a logging experience that feels like a chore tax. Matt wasn't trying to build a better MyFitnessPal, and neither were we. The internal shorthand became "what if Nike made a calorie app" - calm, factual, anti-cheerful, a product that respects the user enough not to clap for them. The bet underneath it is that a real audience doesn't want points and confetti. They want the math to make sense and the shame loop to stop, and they'll stay with an app that gives them that instead of judging them.
Strategic decisions
- One number, not a dashboard. Most calorie apps hand you a wall of metrics. Cico reduces to a single score - calories in minus calories out - and makes that the entire interface. Negative means a deficit, positive means a surplus, and that's the whole mental model. Everything else on the screen supports the number rather than competing with it.
- Momentum, not perfection. This is the philosophy the product is built on. The score is continuous and color-coded instead of a daily green check or red X, and Challenges track a cumulative total rather than a daily pass-or-fail. A bad Wednesday doesn't kill the week; you can recover it with a strong day later. There's always a path forward, which is the exact thing missing for the version of me who used to write off the week on a Wednesday.
- Match Apple's numbers exactly. For people on an Apple Watch, Cico shows the same calories-out figure Apple Health reports, with no "smarter" internal calculation laid over it. The reasoning is trust: the moment our number disagrees with Apple's, people assume we're wrong and stop believing the app. Mirroring Apple exactly is less clever than asserting a better number, and far more trustworthy.
Learnings
The clearest lesson came from something we shipped and then pulled. Early on we built a system of badges and achievements - the Duolingo move, gamify your way to retention. The data was honest with us: users didn't drill into them, didn't share them, and didn't come back for them. So we took them out. The lesson wasn't that gamification never works. It was that our users weren't there for points.
The thing we're working on now is Maintenance Mode, the second-act problem most calorie apps don't really solve: what happens the day someone hits their goal weight. The whole app today assumes lower is better, because for someone losing weight a deficit is the win. Maintenance Mode flips that to "closer to zero is better," with a zero-centered chart and a tighter color system, so the app stays the right tool the day after you hit your number instead of quietly punishing you for being done. It's a bet on our own users: if Cico works for someone, we don't want them to graduate out of it.
Download Cico on the App Store.
