Sai Deep Tetali
I want to build a non-judgment app for people (like me) who are trying to reduce their impact on animal cruelty by reducing factory farmed meat consumption. I'm trying to reduce my impact by eating at most one standard serving of meat per day, and making one day a week to be fully vegetarian or vegan.
To keep me honest and encourage me to continue making progress, I want to build an app similar to those that track calories or alcohol intake. You can enter how many portions of animal products you ate (including zero) and it will show a daily/weekly "cruelty score" (to be renamed!) to help you set goals & track progress. The score will be more for factory farmed meat, lower for milk, eggs, lower still for certified humane meat or animal products. It will be zero for plant products, alternate meat etc. The app would let you set goals, track progress towards them and reward you when you reach them. It will also let you share your progress with friends or on social media to encourage others to be mindful of their impact as well.
I've been in tech since 2008. I have worked at Microsoft, Google and am currently working at Meta. I built an iPad app during my grad school and was on the Android team at Google. I'm also a co-author on a book about finding malware in the Android ecosystem. I'm passionate about reducing animal cruelty.
Here's my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sai-deep-tetali-b8608310a
My Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=YaA4JEwAAAAJ&hl=en
The book I co-authored recently: https://nostarch.com/androidmalwarehandbook
$1000 to $2000. The money allows me to hire a designer as that's not my expertise
No response.
~80%
Sai Deep Tetali
3 months ago
I thought I updated here but I donât see it. The app has been released in the App Store in November. Please check it out here https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vasture/id6737757459
There are a couple of features in the pipeline currently. More updates would come based on the user feedback.
Would really appreciate any feedback, feature requests and App Store reviews.
Sai Deep Tetali
7 months ago
The basic functionality of the app including adding details about meals, ability to customize the map of different foods to their impact, aggregate stats (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) are implemented. The user experience is very barebones at this point.
The app runs on iOS and android
I hired a designer and we did a couple of iterations on the design of the app. Most of the screen designs are fleshed out. A couple more are in progress.
Finish the design of the remaining screens
Implement the new designs into the app
Once the designs are implemented, I would really appreciate if anyone whoâs interested can try the app and give me feedback. This would be an early version and might have some basic bugs and issues.
Dony Christie
12 months ago
Aren't eggs one of the worst products, moreso than meat? Also, IIRC rice farming(?) involves killing mice. I'd want to use such an app if I could subjectively set the associated cruelty scores and if I was more confident that it was accurate.
That said, this does sound like it could have a lot of potential to grow, assuming a good marketing plan.
Sai Deep Tetali
12 months ago
@Wormhole Agree with making the scores customizable. Others have asked for this feature as well. Thanks for your support!
Anton Makiievskyi
12 months ago
Adding money to reach the minimum funding bar. @saideep please post ~monthly updates on your progress if you can. It would be interesting and useful to me and others
Sai Deep Tetali
12 months ago
@AntonMakiievskyi Appreciate your support! That sounds great â I would also love to get periodic feedback from you and other interested folks on the app.
Jason
12 months ago
Could you clarify what a "designer" is? Maybe that is more obvious to people with a development background, but I don't know if you mean art, UI, or something else.
Sai Deep Tetali
12 months ago
@Jason Thatâs what I meant, someone who can design the user experience. Thank you for your support!
Alyssa Riceman
about 1 year ago
What sources will you be using to set the numbers on the cruelty score? And do you have any plans to support alternative user-set numbers in the event that users disagree with you on prioritization? For example, if users are more concerned than you are with the possibility of plant suffering, will you allow them to set numbers on plant suffering in such a way as to have those numbers then propagate through the app and be reflected in larger numbers for plant products, larger numbers for animals raised on a diet of plant products, et cetera?
Sai Deep Tetali
about 1 year ago
@Alyssa You raise great points. Part of the development work is finding systematic ways to come up with the numbers. I like the idea of making them user configurable and it would be relatively easy to implement it.