Later this week, weight loss community Diet Television will announce it’s shortened its name to DietTv.com and raised a $2 million series A. The round was led by MentorTech Ventures.
The site consists of dieting resources and a social network. Their resources include a diet directory, videos, and articles. The diet directory consists of all sorts of diets rated by users and analyzed by professional nutritionists for various factors like ease of implementation, speed of weight loss and allowable alcohol consumption.
You can use their diet and exercise finder to construct the right weight loss program for yourself. Just tell the program what you’re willing to give up and it spits back the best plans to lose weight.
There is an accompanying social network where users can connect with other dieters, share goals and diets. Each user writes down their experiences and tracks their progress in a diet diary. A network seems useful because in an industry full of snake oil salesmen, you’d be more likely to trust a fellow dieter.
DietTv is part of the growing number of social health sites online which include: Wellsphere, Trianeo, DailyStrength, OurHealthCircle, RevolutionHealth, and many others. The formula is pretty straight forward: find people with a common problem and link them together for support.
just start playing WoW. you will be so busy pwning noobs that you wont even think about food
Sometimes I wonder if a John Doe would come up with the same idea and develop the same site, would he be able to get this $2MM funding.
How much did it help that the CEO of DietTV has the following credential?
“Chief Executive Officer Ken Seiff is a native New Yorker and former junk food addict. Diet Television was the first start-up incubated by Seiff’s privately held investment company Glowcast Ventures. In addition to investments in a variety of innovative start-ups, Glowcast has consulted and/or partnered with a number of leading companies such as Amazon, Tribeca Films, Lacoste and American Idol.
Formerly, Ken was Founder and CEO of leading online retailer Bluefly, Inc. (NASDAQ Small Cap: BFLY), which experiences continued success with its model of selling designer clothing online at discounted prices. “
Jimmy, chances are if this guy didn’t have credentials then chances of it getting funding would be next to 0. VC’s are the most risk averse people. If you are a 1st time enterprenuer who didn’t graduate from stanford, work at paypal, or have a childhood friend whose a VC then forget about it. You can show VC’s the cure to cancer and they still won’t fund you. Its all about NEPOTISM.
VC’s are useless people for the most part.
@#3
Whew….. it wasn’t my intention to bring up this “charged” response … but you point has some validity. I wouldn’t venture that far to wrap a blanket on all VCs though.
True, perhaps I was too harsh. But you get my point. You won’t get funded easily EVEN IF you have a full fleshed out product that works beautifully. They’ll ask you questions about business model, management team, etc, can’t google do this?(yes, they can do everything tards) that they wouldn’t ask the childhood friend of vc who has a ‘brilliant’ idea for a social video site.
But you are right, I’m over generalizing. There are some good ones out there who give new guys a chance. Its just hard to get their attention.
Eh….saw this demoed at NY Tech Meetup…very weak indeed…too much of a hassle to record everything you eat throughout the day.
myfitnesspal.com already does a fine job of the diet tracking community thing but without all the web 2.0 & buzwords… where’s the fire for diet tv?
Does diettelvision really only get 8-15k uniques?
http://www.quantcast.com/diettelevision.com
http://siteanalytics.compete.c.....vision.com
…actually most of those other sites you mentioned don’t get much traffic (and typo on traineo spelling).
Innovators in their field always seem to start with a BANG. This is the first Web 2.0 Diet community that I have heard of so far
small typo - ‘Traineo’ not ‘Traneo’
Did anyone try out GymAmerica.com?
I was very impressed with this site when it launched in November. Not surprised at all by this relatively modest funding. They’ve got an experienced team, a full featured site and a good vision. Makes good sense to me. I won’t be surprised if a year or two from now we read about them getting acquired for a good multiple of what they raised. Congrats to them for raising it.
I guess this could turn out to be something… but yeah raising VC is totally dependent on who you know.
Ken Seiff is a proven player and a former fat guy; Id bet 4 cheeststeaks on him (with double cheese)
i think the biggest site in this vertical is mdjunction.com, I’m not sure but it looks this way.
I guess the key for the unknown entrepreneurs is to build out your idea and go about it for as long as possible bootstrapping it. If VC money is not needed, then probably it’s best not to pursue it.
A site like this is not too exciting for me, but you must know that they’re targetting shitload of fat americans, which are willing to spend money trying to loose that weight. There’s also all the people that want to stay healthy.
I saw this guy presenting at meetup.com, I was bored with his presentation, good for him. I don’t know, it didn’t get me excited at all, but I’m a geek.
STOP EATING! stop eating!
2M bucks isn’t that much if they think some solid people are gonna make it happen.
The reason this idea sounds dumb to most of us is that we don’t think about the huge amounts of money people spend on diet products, and the $ diet companies spend to find fatties. This site is hardly altruistic, it’s trying to herd (pardon the expression) a very valuable demo: fat ppl with computers and free time. Free Time: the customer probably has a middleclass job and income.
The middle tail.
The rich aren’t fat and the poor stay fat.
If this site can grab even 2% of that market they’ll be able to pay back their VCs and retire in the caymans.
I saw this site back in November 2006. It was just ok them and now it seems even worse. They should probably leave their money in their pockets. In this space the bigboys are http://www.sparkpeople.com and http://www.fatsecret.com
Diet Television Trims Name
i was expecting DT or at least DieTV.
Anyone know if they bought that domain name recently, It looks like it changed hands in July. I would love to know what they paid for it if anyone knows.
The fundamental problem with these type of systems is that the vast majority of people learn about nutrition from McDonalds commercials and heavily biased advertising campaigns (Atkins, South Beach… you name it).
There is so much biased and just plain wrong information out there about nutrition (let along fitness) that putting a group of like minded people who have weight issues (due to lack of nutritional education and emotional issues) just ends up creating a self-perpetuating wheel of communal yo-yo dieting. This benefits the site but not the membership in the long run. I am still trying to figure out a way to filtering the crap from the gold.
Jon
founder of myfoodcount.com - the ‘nets only free and anonymous health monitoring system