Telegram bot and mini‑app · Nutrition · 2026
A food diary inside Telegram, designed from scratch and tested on a closed beta
PlanPan logs a meal from a text, a photo or a voice message and counts calories and macros. I designed the mini‑app and the conversations in the chat from scratch, set up product analytics, ran the beta and interviewed the testers. My partner built the backend.
We opened 20 seats on 21 August and soon had to add more.
17 of the first 21 testers.
From the first message to a saved meal.
A food diary that lives where people already chat
Most calorie trackers are separate apps with long forms. In PlanPan you send what you ate as a message and the bot does the counting. The mini‑app holds the diary, trends, recipes and settings.
- Contribution
- Product design, Chat scenarios, Analytics, User interviews, Brand
- Duration
- Since August 2026
Design first, then analytics, a beta and interviews
The app and the chat, from scratch
I designed the mini‑app and the scenarios in the chat itself: onboarding, logging a meal by text, photo or voice, reminders and the bot's replies. Onboarding asks for weight and height with a picker wheel, shows your calorie target first and only then asks about reminders. The defaults are 08:00, 13:00 and 19:00, and snacks stay quiet.
What can this bot do?
Hi! I count calories from a photo or a plain message. Write "chicken breast 150 g, rice 200 g" or send a photo of your plate, and a couple of seconds later you get the calories and macros. There is an app too: a food diary, a barcode scanner, a water tracker, and daily targets worked out for you.
/start 08:40
Hi! To count calories and macros for you I need your targets: how many calories and how much protein a day are right for you.
Six questions, half a minute. 08:40
oatmeal with banana and a latte 08:42
🌅 Breakfast · 08:42
• Oatmeal with banana ≈ — 250 g
320 kcal · P 9 · F 6 · C 58
• Latte ≈ — 300 g
120 kcal · P 5 · F 6 · C 10
Total 440 kcal · P 14 · F 12 · C 68
1,560 kcal left today
440 of 2,000 kcal (22%)
Analytics before the beta
Before anyone outside the team saw the bot, I set up PostHog events for each step: the first message, setting a goal, starting a meal, saving it, failing or giving up, water and barcode scans. So we could see where people stopped on the way to their first saved meal.
PlanPan
- Started the bot
- Started a meal
- Saved a meal
A closed beta
We opened 20 seats on 21 August and soon had to add more. By 4 September 27 people had joined, and 17 of the first 21 logged a meal.
Interviews: why the numbers looked like that
The analytics alone were confusing. Water logging looked dead, manual entry had zero uses, and most people stopped after the first days. The interviews explained it. One tester muted the bot after hourly water reminders, another found the default water target out of reach. Zero manual entries didn't mean nobody needed it: people simply typed their meals into the chat. One tester logged less than she ate on purpose, for peace of mind, and hated feeling judged. And what people wanted wasn't a counter. They wanted to know what to cook to hit their protein, in ten minutes, with the kitchen they have.
- Water logging looked dead
- A tester muted the bot after hourly water reminders. Another found the daily water target out of reach.
- Manual entry: zero uses
- People typed their meals into the chat instead.
- Logged calories looked low
- One tester logged less than she ate on purpose, for peace of mind.
“What should I cook to get my protein in, in ten minutes, with an air fryer?”
From counting calories to planning the week
So we moved PlanPan from counting towards recipes and weekly meal plans: recipes that fit your calorie and protein targets, step‑by‑step cooking, and a plan for the week. A shared recipe opens as a teaser card, and the full recipe lives in PlanPan.
Videos for the channel
I make the creatives for our Telegram channel. The first ones I edited by hand. Then I built a Claude skill that puts real app screens into a phone and edits the video in After Effects in our style. This release video for recipes was made with it.
Follow the project on Telegram →
Happy to walk through the parts that did not fit here. Let's get on a call.