The FareWell team came to Carbon Five with a big goal — change the way people eat, but building a platform to support sustainable behavior change is no easy feat. In addition to changing a customer's diet, the most effective programs include meal planning, coaching, tracking and a support community. FareWell had a robust challenge, and we had to balance our learnings approach with a quick and efficient path to market.
We set about creating the foundation of a mobile web platform with high production value that would support iterative development and testing using React and Ruby on Rails. Our team helped the founders break a big vision down into concrete product decisions, in part by figuring out how to validate FareWell’s thesis by separately testing components. The testing told us that the product appealed to healthy eaters but not yet to the broader target audience. We made some iterative tweaks, and sooner FareWell was running regular weight-loss programs with increasingly large cohorts — making its value proposition more appetizing with each pass.
FareWell just rolled out its pilot program to more than 100 target users and announced a healthy $8M funding round. Carbon Five is currently working with the FareWell team on their first native app.