How to Deliver (or Not)

My wife and I started a diet over a year ago.

It was hugely successful. It was with #GOLO.

And before I continue, I have to be honest, GOLO is not a diet, it’s a lifestyle choice. You aren’t paying money for meals to be delivered every day to you, or that you have to attend seminars, or keep track of what you eat, etc. Those are expensive. Not only the food, but, in many cases today, you also have to purchase equipment as well as attend various weekly or monthly seminars to “talk” about how your diet is going.

GOLO is changing your eating habits. You see on their TV ads about how much food they eat. And I agree with it. I eat more now than I ever did before I started GOLO.

To wrap up about how I consider GOLO to not be a diet but more about a lifestyle choice, I have to say two things:

A) I lost 60 pounds in the first six months;

B) GOLO is about changing how much of one thing you eat. For example, before I started GOLO, I would eat a huge plate of spaghetti, some sauce, and some meat on top of that. Now, I eat a huge plate of sauce (all natural, made up of tomatoes, peppers, etc.), some chicken or meat, and no more than a cup of spaghetti. In other words, instead of me eating 4 or more cups of carbs (spaghetti), I don’t eat more than 1 cup. Instead of me eating 1 cup of sauce (store bought), I now eat 2 cups of sauce, all made by me, with only natural ingredients. No bread. Lots of vegetables (in this case, it’s tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, etc.).

In other words, my wife and I no longer eat anything that has been processed — no canned goods.

GOLO works. But, you have to change your lifestyle.

Now, let’s talk about GOLO and it’s marketing.

They have awesome groups on all the social media sites, all curated by GOLO employee’s, answering questions and offering encouragement.

They have a website, that is sub-par, at best.

And that’s what I want to address here.

To set expectations about what I’m going to write, I must first say that GOLO is cheap (the actual service they provide). It’s $60 every two months IF you want to purchase their all-natural supplement. That’s per person.

That is really not a lot of money for a company to take in. Depending on the churn rate — and we all know that diets are the hardest thing to get someone to commit to and stay on, so I would assume their churn is 80% or higher (it’s so cheap, it’s easy to get out of).

Keep that in mind as I can think that that is the only reason I’m writing about this and what’s to come.

Their website is horrible. Specifically, where their recipes are provided.

My wife and I lost all our weight by following their recipes. Which were somewhat easy to understand and follow, depending on which you chose.

Here’s why I’m targeting this area and how they are truly dropping the ball on what is an easy fix, but, requires some money (which is the only reason I can think that they are not fixing it).

1. Their recipes field does not work on a phone or pad. Meaning, if you are going to cook something tonight using their recipes, you either have to have a computer in your kitchen or be able to print out the recipe so you can follow it. (I have tried on three different generation I-Pads, I-Phone, & Galaxy phone — none allow me to search and find recipes).
2. When searching for a recipe on their site, you must type in exactly what you are looking for. If you type in “Chicken”, you get hundreds of results. If you type in “Chicken & Broccoli”, you get a couple dozen but if you type in “Chicken and Broccoli”, you get a completely different set of recipes. If you type in “Brocoli” (sp), you get an error. If you type in “Chiken” (sp), you get an error. Not only do you have to remember the exact name of the recipe (if you don’t mind searching through hundreds of recipes to find it again), you must also spell each word correctly.
3. The recipes are not done uniformly. That’s because they obviously don’t have a “set” pattern of entering the recipes. Meaning in one recipe, it may say “put six chicken breasts in the pan and cook until brown and done”, another may say “put six chicken breasts in a pan and cook for 8 minutes or until done” and then another may say “put six chicken breasts in pan until internal temp reaches 165 degrees”. As someone who has cooked meals for all my life, I know how to cook chicken, or beef, or pasta, or eggs, or whatever. But many people don’t know, and it definitely causes confusion (if not food sickness).
4. As a side note to #3, you can tell when the recipe has been submitted and placed directly on their site by a “civilian”, i.e., not an employee of GOLO. They use language, spelling, typo’s, grammar, etc. that wouldn’t be found in a recipe site or book.

#GOLO is a great diet or meal plan. It requires a different way of thinking (let me make that instead of buying a can of it). It works.

It just sucks that you can’t use their recipes easily without having access to a computer that is located in your kitchen. Imagine how frustrated people are? You can’t access what is most needed from your mobile device. A total miss from their marketing/communications/design teams.

The above are simple fixes, and in all my experience of designing and building websites, not that expensive to fix (unless they really aren’t making as much money as they want to fix these really simple errors).

Have a search field that allows errors, that allows different way to search (i.e. “&” or “and”), and for goodness sake, test the site on different platforms so everyone can use it.

Fortunately, I have a smart fridge in my kitchen and am able to pull up the internet on it, allowing me to pull up a recipe there — after minutes of scrolling through the recipes to find the one I want. Of course, I bookmark them, but now I have three folders (breakfast/lunch/dinner) with dozens and dozens of recipes in each one. It would be faster if I could just type in the search field the ingredients and pull up the recipe, but that seems too hard for them to provide (and of course, if I could do it on my I-Pad, it would be awesome!).

In closing, diets are hard. Following a diet is hard. But making it difficult to follow the most basic tenants of a diet, the recipe, is unforgivable. It’s called UX (user experience) — and when it’s not followed, it will cost more in the long run and is very difficult to recover from.