Sunnyside - Mindful Drinking - SMS-based alcohol tracking to improve your health & wellness

Hey everyone! Nick here, founder of Cutback Coach. A bit about me: I grew up in a household with 2 recovering alcoholics (now 30+ years sober!), so when I started drinking in high school, I had a lot of help in recognizing my own proclivities and tendencies around alcohol. I’ve spent the last 15 years building awareness around my habits, through many ups and downs. In exploring apps and services in the alcohol health space, I found a large concentration of products focused on helping problem drinkers get sober, but very few options for those who enjoy drinking and have no desire to quit, but who could nonetheless benefit from increased awareness about the role alcohol plays in their overall health and wellness. Cutback Coach is my attempt to fill this gap. My mission is to help **anyone who regularly drinks** — whether just a little or kind of a lot — to optimize their drinking to achieve quality of life benefits like sleeping better, losing weight, waking up with more energy, and saving money. I want to make tracking drinks as common and socially accepted as tracking calories and steps. And just like you don't need to be extremely out of shape to benefit from tracking diet and exercise, I believe you don't need to be a "problem drinker" to benefit from increased awareness about your alcohol consumption. Cutback Coach is a simple, behavioral psychology-backed system for planning and tracking your drinking. Instead of another app, we've started with **SMS as our core delivery mechanism**, so we meet you where you are in the text inbox. I believe text is the perfect channel for habit forming products that require frequent engagement, given the reduced friction to participation the channel enables. I invite you to check out the product and let me know what you think. You'll be surprised how small changes to your drinking can have a big impact on your overall health and wellness. **And the best part? Product Hunters can get started with a free 15 day trial!** I'd love to hear what you think. Check it out and drop a comment below!

I've been using Cutback Coach for a few months now and it's helped me noticeably cut back on my drinking. The SMS notifications cut through the noise, and are a quick, easy way for me to log how much alcohol I've had the previous day, without having to open up an app. Once I got into the routine, it became easy to take just a few seconds and a natural part of my morning. Look forward to seeing analytics sometime down the road - will be interesting to see how much I've had over the course of the summer and to see that line continue to trend down. Maybe at some point, you could also connect to smart scales, Apple watch, etc. to combine drinking data with other health tracking. For anyone looking to manage their alcohol intake, I highly recommend giving this a shot (no pun intended).

Really interesting use of SMS to help with something people face daily. How far do you see the 2-way SMS functionality progressing? Excited to try this!

This product totally surprised me (in a good way)! I'm a health conscious person but never thought too carefully about alcohol consumption, despite tracking my steps, sleep and different areas of women's health. I love the feeling of having deeper levels of understanding (and thus, control) over this. I find myself looking forward to checking in on how I'm doing over the week, and making small changes for optimization, which really seem to make all the difference on a weekly basis. The friendly, non-judgmental nature of the app is perfect in quarantine times when you might find yourself having a few more glasses on a weeknight. :)

Such as important cause for the too-many people fighting drinking. Good luck, Nick!

a terrific tool to help folks stay mindful about drinking habits! having the ability to interface with the product directly through SMS makes the whole experience seem much more like a friend checking in with you and holding you accountable rather than being policed by an app on your phone. Can't wait to see this one grow!

I've been using this product for the past few weeks and have loved it! The power of tracking my habit not only made me more informed of my alcohol intake, but also helped me cut down on it (even though I didn't think I needed to). Great job Nick!!

I'm not a big drinker, but I'm interested in understanding how alcohol affects my health. Is this possible?

Very cool! This feels less like an app, and more like a buddy checking in on you, which I think adds to the feeling of accountability. The SMS component is clever, and fits so nicely into how everyone interacts with their phones anyway. Winner!

Nick, this is a great idea and incredibly helpful to raise awareness. If there's a book recommendation that I've found helpful is Dr. Gabor Maté "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction". The case studies might be helpful.