Can you introduce yourself and share a bit about what you were doing before Persikas?
I am Mantas Liekis, a co-founder of Persikas. I've never really worked a traditional job - I started as a professional athlete. During my sports career, I completed three degrees in food technology, nutrition, and business.
After finishing my second degree, I had already started working online with clients, running online weight loss challenges, and writing my first books about weight loss.
What is Persikas and what problem does it solve? Why did you decide to build this specific product?
Persikas helps people lose weight by eating delicious meals. My co-founder Modestas and I wanted to replace apps like MyFitnessPal by simplifying meal planning without requiring users to count macros.
We saw an opportunity in the market: many dietitians were selling fixed meal plans. We wanted to give our clients more flexibility, allowing them to modify their meal plans while also providing a clear grocery list to make shopping easier.
What does a typical day look like for you as a founder?
I usually wake up, make some coffee, and start posting online. Then I move on to sending emails, dealing with customers, and having meetings with my team or new prospects.
You start the day posting online - what does that look like? Is content a big part of how Persikas grows?
We have scripts for how we should create posts and videos. I reupload the videos to a few different accounts and then create around 15 different posts for social media to gain followers across several different markets. I do it twice a day, so each day I upload around 50 posts, and the whole company uploads around 75 posts per day. The volume is quite high, but it works, so we keep pushing it.
What has been your biggest challenge so far?
Finding the right people to join and grow with the company.
That's something almost every founder says, but the reasons are always different. What specifically makes it hard in your case?
So far, the specific role hasn't really mattered - whether it's marketing, development, or operations, we've found people to be incompetent, lazy, and unable to follow guidance or structure. It's disappointing, people lack discipline, even when we offer nearly double the market rate for the same role. I'm speaking specifically about Lithuanians here; so far, we've had good experiences with other nationalities, such as Ukrainians and Latvians.
How do you currently collect and manage feedback from your users?
We collect feedback from several sources. Some users comment on our Facebook pages, others communicate with us through Facebook groups, and sometimes we call customers or connect with them via email.
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With feedback coming in from so many different places, how do you make sure nothing important slips through?
We manually collect data from Facebook groups and comment sections into Google Docs, while other feedback is stored within our app. After gathering the data, we analyze the most common problems, list them, and then work to solve each one step by step.
How do you decide what features to build next and put on your roadmap?
We ask our customers what they want, and based on their feedback, we decide as a team what to focus on next.
When customers ask for very different things, we look at overlap - if multiple users request the same feature, we evaluate it; if we determine that it will increase our LTV, we prioritize it. We aim to make data-driven decisions, calculating the time and cost required to develop each new function.
What are the top 3 tools or apps your team uses every day?
Slack, ChatGPT, Lovable.
How do you use AI in your daily work or inside your product?
We use tools like ChatGPT for drafting text and gathering information, while AI-based coding tools help us build faster. We also use Midjourney for images and Lovable in our workflow. And Gemini for translations.
What has been your biggest mistake or learning so far?
I've learned that many people don't execute what needs to be done, often because they lack the necessary knowledge.
Out of more than 70 students at my university, I am the only one who created a venture. Everyone else lacked the knowledge and self-confidence to move forward with their ideas, or to pivot when they weren't making any sales. In this AI era, you only need a day or two to test your ideas and see if it is worth pursuing.
What is one piece of advice you would give to someone starting a startup today?
Try to make your first sale as soon as possible.
What is the next big goal for Persikas?
Our goal for this year is to expand into five new markets. We plan to enter the Scandinavian and Polish markets next - it involves localization: creating new pages, ad accounts, and ads, as well as translating the app. We chose these markets because our goal is to become the leading weight loss app in the Baltic and Scandinavian regions.
Good luck!
Thank you to Mantas for sharing his time and insights with us. You can learn more about Persikas at persikas.com.
