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Dragons Den Would Be Entrepreneur Gains Investment for Diet Mobile App
Rebecca Appleton • 3 September 2019
This week you may or may not have seen budding entrepreneur Ben Smith present to the show’s famed panel of judges his pitch for investment in his latest diet app. Ben had pitched £70,000 for a 10% stake in his in-development fitness brand called The Fine Diet.
The offering is a technology powered diet calculation app which provides recipes and food swaps whilst keeping the user’s daily intake at a ‘calorie deficit’, one of the key proven processes required for weight loss. Despite boasting that the technology was innovative and intelligent, the 37-year-old from North Wales came under a fair bit of fire from the dragons over concerns that his app was essentially very similar to others on the market.
In honesty is would be naïve to ignore that the health and fitness market whilst growing is already heavily saturated in many areas. Not least of all weight loss. It’s also far from the first time a brand has tried to incorporate weight loss management via calorie tracking into an app. The app stores are entirely full of these types of functional apps.
Defiant in the face of the concerns of the dragons, Ben then dropped a bombshell. Explaining that he had in fact been part of the founding of ‘The Body Coach’ brand which had subsequently shot Joe Wicks to becoming a household name in the UK. The Body Coach is a well-recognised brand and its main face and co-founder, Joe Wicks has gone on to make significant money as a health personality and author. In was in fact Wicks 15-minute meals series of books that lead him to outsell Delia Smith and Jamie Oliver for the Christmas best seller of 2018.
Ben went on to tell his own personal story of weight loss explaining that due to ‘severe eating disorders’ his journey has seen him lose as much as 10 stone on two separate occasions. While this is naturally inspiring and shows that the businessman has a personal stake and understanding in his concept, does that really inspire additional confidence in his ability to deliver such an ambitious project?
Ben eventually gave up 25% of his business for the original requested stake to a single dragon. The program showed that additional accreditation was given to Ben and his project via his personal connection to the 2014 success of a separate brand and his own personal involvement in industry as a consumer. While these elements would naturally inspire additional confidence in the founder, they do not outweigh or really answer the initial significant concerns of the investors regarding both the uniqueness of the product and the overall saturation of the marketplace they would need to compete in.
Would you have invested in Ben?
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