MENTHA

MENTHA is your AI health coach - the app that turns the data you already have into action. Most apps just track. Mentha coaches.

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Inspiration

Everyone tells you to track your health. Almost no one tells you what to do about it.

We live in Central Asia, where millions of people own a smartwatch or fitness band but have no idea what their heart rate, sleep, or recovery data actually means. The powerful coaching apps (Oura, Whoop, Ultrahuman) are built for a Western audience, priced for it, and speak none of our languages. The result: an entire region full of wearable owners drowning in data with no coach.

We built Mentha to close that gap: an AI health coach that turns the data you already have into what you should actually do next.

What it does

Mentha is an AI health coach for anyone with a wearable, or just a phone.

  • Supercharge any wearable. Connect Apple Watch, Garmin, Fitbit, Oura, or Whoop, and Mentha reads your heart rate, HRV, sleep, and recovery, then turns the raw numbers into clear, personal guidance. No new hardware required.
  • AI nutrition, instantly. Point your camera at a meal, including local dishes most apps have never seen, and Mentha reads the calories, macros, and what it means for your goals.
  • Coaching, not just numbers. Mentha connects what you eat to how you sleep and recover, then gives you a daily plan. Less data, more direction.
  • Built for our people. Coaching in Uzbek, Russian, and English, tuned to local food and local life.

How we built it

Mentha is built with React Native (Expo) for iOS and Android, Supabase for backend and auth, and PostHog for product analytics. AI meal recognition and coaching run through a vision-and-language pipeline that we tuned on Central Asian dishes the mainstream models get wrong.

For subscriptions, we integrated RevenueCat to manage our paywall, entitlements, and auto-renewing plans across iOS and Android. Instead of hand-rolling receipts, renewals, and cross-platform entitlement logic, RevenueCat handled the subscription infrastructure, so we could focus on building the coaching product. Its paywall and entitlement tools let us ship recurring billing correctly and iterate on our offering fast.

Challenges we ran into

  • Turning users into subscribers. Our audience is new to recurring subscriptions and cautious about them. Designing a paywall and an upgrade moment that feels fair and worth it, and getting auto-renewal to work cleanly across platforms, was the core problem RevenueCat helped us solve.
  • AI that understands local food. Off-the-shelf food recognition fails on regional dishes. We had to build our recognition around what people here actually eat.
  • Coaching, not dashboards. It's easy to show a chart. It's hard to turn a chart into one clear, correct instruction. Most of our product work went into that translation.
  • A full rebrand mid-build. We evolved from our original name into Mentha, a new identity and a new app, while keeping our existing users through the transition.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Shipped a working AI health coach with live auto-renewing subscriptions powered by RevenueCat.
  • Built AI meal recognition that works on local food the big apps miss.
  • Made premium health coaching accessible in local languages for a region the global players ignore.
  • Turned a passive, data-heavy experience into an active coaching loop.

What we learned

Data isn't the product; direction is. Users don't want another number; they want to know what to do. And in an underserved market, being understood (your language, your food, your context) matters more than having the most sensors. On the business side, we learned that recurring revenue is a product feature, not a billing detail, and that shipping it correctly with the right infrastructure is what separates an app from a business.

What's next for Mentha

  • Deeper coaching intelligence, correlating nutrition with wearable recovery in real time.
  • Team and city step challenges to grow through community, not ad spend.
  • A wearable of our own for the majority who don't yet have one, so everyone can be coached, not just device owners.

Mentha. Your data. Your body. Your coach.

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