SuppleMENTAL Nutrition App Looks to GoFundMe in Preparation for Launch

After self-publishing "The Book of Supplement Secrets: A Beginner’s Guide to Nutritional Supplements" and "The Supplement Guide: An Unbiased Review of the Best and Worst Sports Supplements," author Tim Mielke started to think about an easier way for consumers to learn about supplements.

“All of the sudden it just hit me: what if there was an app and you could just scan a label, and it could tell you everything you needed to know about the product?” He asked.

This led him to start his company SuppleMENTAL, which is preparing to launch an app that will make learning about the ingredients used in supplements easy.

To create the app, Mielke teamed up with his friend Greg Buns, who had worked in IT for as long as he’d known him. However, Buns didn’t know how to create an app. To do this, Buns brought on his friend and co-worker Nick Moore.

The information from Mielke’s books provides some of the information in the SuppleMENTAL app, but his team regularly enters new information into the system as more discoveries are made about supplements. The app, which is almost complete, currently has 70,000 products in the database.

Mielke says the SuppleMENTAL app will be free for users to download and use. The startup plans to make revenue through affiliate sales on sites such as Amazon and other supplement retailers.

While the team is still building the app, Mielke said SuppleMENTAL is looking to gain capital to complete the project through their newly launched GoFund Me campaign. He hopes capital raised through GoFund Me will allow the company to hire another developer and an additional employee for data entry.

Mielke knows there is a market for the SuppleMENTAL app based on his previous experience working in the supplement industry.

“I was constantly seeing the same thing from people, asking, ‘What is this?’ and, ‘How should I take this?’" He said. “No matter where I worked, it was the same questions from people. So I thought about a universal way to teach people about all this stuff.”

Before starting SuppleMENTAL, Mielke amassed extensive experience in the supplement industry. He started taking supplements himself when he began lifting weights at 14. As a bodybuilding competitor, Mielke used his knowledge of supplements to help others get ready for contests.

He started working as a store clerk at GNC and Great Earth Vitamins, reading about various herbs and other beneficial ingredients as much as he could during his shifts. He also worked in shipping and receiving at i-Supplements.com and Beverly International, where did extra work writing blog posts, product descriptions and press releases and helping with new product development. Mielke also wrote articles, press releases and product descriptions as a freelancer for various companies and publications in the supplement industry.

In addition to giving him expert knowledge of supplements, Mielke said his experience working in the supplement industry also showed him that he wanted to be an entrepreneur, as the typical nine-to-five workday did not suit him. He said he’d rather work hard doing what he wants to do.

“We haven't made a dime off of SuppleMENTAL yet, but I love working on it and seeing how it's grown,” Mielke said. “A few years ago, it was just me with a laptop and no clue how to write code. Now I have an Alpha version of the app on my phone, and every time I get frustrated, I open the app up and say, ‘That's ours. We created that and it's going to be huge.’ “

While he knew a lot about supplements, Mielke didn’t know much about being an entrepreneur until joining UpTech’s fifth cohort in order to develop SuppleMENTAL. UpTech helped the startup come up with a more solid business plan, while the team also learned about setting up a business, making things a priority in said business and how to talk to potential employees.

Mielke said he hopes SuppleMENTAL can launch the app in August and that it will attract 100,000 users within the first six months of launching. The app’s potential users are both men and women of all ages, but the biggest potential users are men from age 25-45 who take supplements for athletic or bodybuilding purposes. Consumers shopping for multivitamins are also a large potential population of users.

“Just because supplements are not FDA regulated doesn’t mean that they can’t help you,” Mielke said. “If you do you research, you can find out how to properly take certain things. Most people don’t do the research, so that’s why we’re here.”