How Lifesum's Outcome-Focused Approach Built Trust with 65 Million Users

When Marcus Gners, Chief Growth Officer and co-founder of Lifesum, joined the Levels Podcast, he shared a perspective that challenges how most founders think about building health and wellness products. After 13 years and 65 million downloads, his team discovered something crucial: users don't download their app because they want to track food.

"People don't use a food tracking app because they want to build a giant archive of everything they've eaten in their life," Marcus explains. "They use it because they want to have a life that's a little bit better than the one they have today."

This shift in thinking, from features to outcomes, has fundamentally shaped how Lifesum approaches product development, and it offers valuable lessons for any founder building consumer products focused on behavior change.

The Feature Trap That Technical Founders Fall Into

Many founders, particularly those with technical backgrounds, build products around capabilities rather than goals. If you're creating a food tracking app, the natural assumption is that the purpose is to track food. The feature becomes the product.

Marcus acknowledges this pattern but pushes back against it. When someone says they want to lose weight, his team doesn't stop there. They dig deeper into the why.

"If someone says I want to lose weight, it's very important to wonder to see why because it differs a lot and I think the end goal is achieving a point of eternal happiness."

Weight loss isn't the actual goal, it's a proxy. People aren't trying to become lighter to save on fuel costs or meet job requirements. They're pursuing something deeper: feeling better about themselves, having more energy, gaining confidence. The number on the scale is just a milestone along that journey.

Building With Empathy, Not Just Utility

What separates successful health apps from the ones that languish in the app store comes down to how they treat their users. Lifesum's approach centers on empathy and empowerment rather than guilt and obligation.

"Our way of approaching the customer has been pretty successful where it's like building things with empathy for the user to empower the user."

This matters because health and wellness products have historically relied on shame as a motivator. They position themselves as things you "should" use, tapping into feelings of inadequacy. But Marcus has found a different path—one that removes guilt and stigma from the equation.

The company's emphasis on design isn't just about making things look nice. It's about taking the emotional weight out of lifestyle improvement. When your app makes users feel judged for their choices, they disengage. When it helps them feel proud of small improvements, they stick around.

From App to Platform: Meeting Users Where They Actually Are

Understanding what users truly want has led Lifesum to expand beyond its core offering. About 18 months ago, Marcus realized the company had built something bigger than an app, they'd built a platform with genuine user trust.

"We have millions of users using us every month and they come to us saying, I want a better life, I want to be happier, I think nutrition is the route."

That trust became the foundation for expanding into adjacent products and services. Lifesum acquired Lycon, Germany's largest at-home biomarker testing company, and is exploring supplements and other wellness products. The strategy isn't about creating a funnel of upsells, it's about offering products that are "individually good, but collectively great."

Marcus describes their approach to nutrition as the "biggest lever" individuals have to influence their health and quality of life. But accessing proper nutrition advice has traditionally required either elite athletic performance or significant wealth. Technology allows Lifesum to democratize that access, packaging scientific knowledge through intuitive design.

"With technology, we can take this science, package it through design and make it personalized for everyone and therefore democratizing the possibility of using nutrition as a lever to level in life."

The Psychology of Sustainable Behavior Change

Health apps face a unique challenge: the feedback loop in life is slow. Make good choices today, and you might see benefits in 20 years. That's a terrible user experience.

Marcus points out that humans struggle to identify with future versions of themselves. This makes it hard to stay motivated when the payoff feels distant. Lifesum addresses this by creating more immediate gratification through design, giving users instant feedback that makes them feel good about their choices.

The company is doubling down on what they call "hyper-personalization," which focuses on closing the feedback loop between user actions and meaningful responses. Coming from a gaming background, Marcus understands that engagement requires something interesting to happen when users take action. You do something, and you need to see results that feel rewarding.

This is where many health apps fail. They reduce friction in tracking but forget to make the experience interesting. As Marcus puts it, people still go to the cinema even though they could just read a plot summary. The experience matters.

What This Means for Product Teams

For founders building B2C products focused on behavior change, Lifesum's journey offers clear takeaways:

Understand the real goal. Your users aren't hiring your product to use your features, they're hiring it to achieve an outcome. Dig past the surface-level "what" to understand the deeper "why."

Design for empowerment, not shame. Products that make users feel bad about themselves might generate short-term engagement, but they don't build lasting relationships. Remove guilt from the equation.

Think in systems, not features. Once you understand what users actually want, you can identify adjacent opportunities that serve that same goal. Platform thinking creates defensible moats.

Close the feedback loop. Long-term outcomes are important, but users need immediate signals that they're making progress. Find ways to make small wins feel meaningful.

After 13 years and 65 million users, Lifesum has learned that success in health and wellness isn't about helping users build the most up to date database of all the food they've ever eaten. It's about helping people feel proud of putting in the effort to improve their lives. That distinction makes all the difference.

Key Points

• Users don't want apps for their features, they want better lives, and features are just the means to that end
• Weight loss and health goals are proxies for deeper desires like happiness, confidence, and energy
• Building with empathy means removing guilt and shame from the user experience, not leveraging them
• Understanding true user needs opens up platform opportunities beyond your core product
• Immediate feedback and gratification matter because humans struggle to connect present actions with distant outcomes
• Design should make users feel proud of their progress, not judged for their starting point

Listen to the full conversation with Marcus Gners on the Levels Podcast to hear more about Lifesum's approach to building trust with millions of users.