Nusagi- Georgian App for Sustainable Diet and Achieving Fitness Goals

Can you tell us the story of Nusagi, its mission, and how it’s grown since its launch?

The story began with a real-life problem, I decided to lose some weight, after extensive research on the subject I found out that calorie deficit was the only real way to lose weight, basically, every successful diet uses it, they just mask them with some wisely rationed meals.

So I downloaded the best calorie counting app on the market and began my weight loss journey.

What I’ve noticed was that the progress would be just as I’ve planned if I were to eat the food that had labels, but as soon as I would start eating complex foods such as home-cooked dishes or eat at the restaurants the weight would stop or I’d even gain weight, this was crashing my motivation.

After some research, I’ve found out that the same size Pizza pepperoni might have 1000+ calories difference in different restaurants, and all the data in calorie counting apps are logged by the users themselves, which makes app creators' lives easy, but users get wrong data about the calories.

So my team and I who had previous experience in building apps decided to build an app that would help people like me to eat their favorite food at home or in restaurants and to calculate exact calories in them.

Our main mission was to build an app that would make dieting Safe Simple and Sustainable and our main marketing channel would be our users who would achieve their fitness goals. 

In order to calculate exact calories for a specific dish in a restaurant, we calculate each ingredient in the dish, in some cases, we burn the dish in a calorie-meter to determine the calories. 

We ended up creating more than what we’ve planned, and after a year and half, we have a complex platform which we launched in November and already have 3000+ users and growing rapidly, without spending any significant funds on marketing. 

What differentiates Nusagi from your local and international competitors? What is your unique element?

The main difference between Nusagi and all other companies is that we built a platform that encompasses all food-related services into one app (Precise calorie counting, restaurant, and grocery Delivery, Recipes, cashless payments in restaurants, user reviews, and much more…)

We didn’t just put it all in one app, we made a logical chain between all of the services so if a user uses one of our services they’ll most likely end up using all of them.

Our goal is to make an app that will seamlessly integrate into the lives of our users, and it will be more help than a hassle.

What is the typical profile of your customers?

Our data shows that our users are mostly women 65%,  Age: 23-45

Well educated on CICO diet principles, love to cook delicious meals at home, want to eat their favorite food, and control their calories in order to achieve their fitness goals.

How has the food/bev industry in general been changing in recent years in Georgia and how do you have an impact on it?

In recent years the food/bev industry has changed a lot, I think mainly because of the large delivery companies which have entered the Georgian market. This gave a whole new sales channel to restaurants and also helped create multiple small Georgian delivery companies that try to compete with large global companies.

if not for the small local delivery companies we would not have our delivery service at all, because we don’t own the delivery company we outsource our orders to local companies.

Your company was founded in Tbilisi. What is your opinion on the environment for creating a company there? 

Tbilisi is a great place to test and validate a startup to find product-market fit, small but strong startup community, western thinking users, low and easy to understand the tax system, cheap compared to the other major cities.

What does the future hold for Nusagi? 

One wise person said that the apps that will be on our phones first page will shape the world, well we’re aiming to make Nusagi one of those apps.

Today when you need a cab you automatically take out your phone and find Uber or Lyft app there, we want to be the same but for all the food-related services.

Do you foresee international business expansion? If so, in what region?

We have already identified Los Angeles CA, as our next destination, The city has more restaurants than any other US city, and we’ve already started negotiations with our future partners, Of course, covid delayed some of our plans, but we think that by mid-2021 we will start our operations there as well.