This profile is part of the Sacramento Business Journal's Inno Under 25 feature.
Sacramento Inno Under 25 recognizes entrepreneurs, innovators, founders and scientists in the Sacramento regional business ecosystem.
These talented young people are trailblazers who have seen opportunities, created new products or started their own companies at an age when many people are still trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up. The candidates are all under 25 by the end of this year, and they live or work in local counties.
Justin Mickle, 23
Co-founder of NutraCompass LLC
Justin Mickle has been a self-described gym rat for years, and he graduated with a degree in nutrition and kinesiology at California State University Sacramento. Those interests all coincide with NutraCompass, a nutrition consulting app and calculator for gyms to help them get their clients more engaged and successful in their fitness journeys, co-created by Luke Bonaparte.
Mickle said when he was younger, he struggled for years with his weight. In an effort to not be overweight for his whole life, he started hitting the gym about nine years ago. He got into it, and he found himself working out all the time, but he had no idea what he was doing, he said. “I thought I was doomed to be fat for my whole life.”
Then, one year in high school, a friend of his came back from summer vacation in really good physical condition.
“He had been a superchunk like me, and I noticed that people were treating him differently,” Mickle said. “It motivated me. It lit a fire under me.”
Mickle continued to work out all the time, and even began teaching courses and leading workouts, but he still wasn’t exactly sure what he was doing. Then he went to Sac State to study kinesiology, the study of human body movement, and eventually changed his studies to focus on nutrition.
It was the nutrition piece that he had been missing, he said. That was the kernel of NutraCompass, which calculates calories in, calories burned and logs workouts, and it also considers the nutrients that are part of that caloric mix.
There are many calorie calculators, but “most of them don’t touch the nutrition component,” he said. Mickle also considered the business side of an app.
“If I made a nutrition app, I could drop it in the app store, and it would go nowhere. But if I attach it to a gym’s site, that would get traction,” he said. And that is the model for NutraCompass. He is selling the app to independent gyms to offer to their customers.
With better nutrition and tracking, customers could get better results, and that kind of success could motivate them to stay at the gym. The app launches in June, with an administrative dashboard coming later this year. The app also helps the user meet goals, whether that is to gain weight, lose weight, add muscle or increase endurance. The company is pre-revenue, he said.
