Spru

Spru turns nutrition tracking into caring for a living companion. Log meals with AI, build healthier habits, and watch Spru grow.

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Inspiration

Spru was inspired by Tamagotchi and my own obsession with health and nutrition. I wanted to combine the emotional connection people build with a digital companion with something genuinely useful: building healthier eating habits.

What it does

Spru is a nutrition-tracking app built around a living digital companion whose mood, energy, and growth reflect how you eat and hydrate.

Instead of manually tracking everything, users can take a photo of their meal or describe what they ate. Spru uses AI to identify the food, then combines trusted nutrition databases with Nutri-Score and food processing data to assess meal quality.

Healthy habits earn XP and help Spru grow through different stages. Poor nutrition, dehydration, or losing consistency affects how Spru feels. The goal is to make nutrition tracking emotional, engaging, and something people actually want to come back to.

How we built it

I built Spru by myself using a combination of AI tools, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Claude's design capabilities.

The app itself is built with React Native and Expo, with a TypeScript backend running on Google Cloud. Gemini powers meal recognition, Firebase handles authentication, and RevenueCat powers subscriptions and entitlement management.

AI was not just a feature inside the product. It was also a major part of how the product itself was designed and built.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenges were AI token and context limits, keeping different tools aligned on a fairly large codebase, and building Spru alongside my full-time job as a Product Manager.

It often meant switching between product strategy during the day and becoming designer, developer, QA, and founder at night.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am most proud that Spru actually made it to a working V1.

Taking an idea from a Tamagotchi-inspired nutrition concept to a real mobile product, while building it independently and learning much of the technical side along the way, has been incredibly rewarding.

What we learned

Building Spru taught me a huge amount about modern software development.

The biggest lesson was seeing firsthand how AI is changing the software development lifecycle. The boundaries between product management, design, engineering, and testing are becoming much less rigid.

A single person can now go from idea to working product in a way that would have required an entire team only a few years ago.

What's next for Spru

Next, I want to make Spru feel even more alive.

One major feature will be Spru's Garden, where users can connect with friends and family, visit their gardens, and see how everyone's companions are growing.

I also want to turn Spru into a fully animated Rive character with much richer emotions, reactions, and interactions.

From there, users will be able to personalise their companion with digital items such as hats, sunglasses, and other accessories. This creates a secondary revenue stream beyond subscriptions while, more importantly, giving users another reason to become attached to and care for their digital companion.

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