MacroFactor
Est. 2015Before MacroFactor was a slick app, it was Greg Nuckols' buggy spreadsheet — one he admits 'worked about 75% of the time.'
▶ MACROFACTOR · 2015
MACROFACTOR · 2026 ◀Drag the handle — MacroFactor, 2015 → 2026.
“The story of MacroFactor, like all great stories, starts with a spreadsheet.”— Greg Nuckols, co-founder of MacroFactor
The ugly part. In March 2015 Greg Nuckols released a 'Self-Correcting Macro Plan' — a single spreadsheet — as a freebie inside a $10 bundle called the Training Toolkit. By his own account it 'demonstrated the limits of my MS Excel skills': a known bug meant a few pounds of water-weight loss could swing your calorie target by 1,500 a day.
What he shipped anyway. It was rough, but the core idea — a plan that adjusted your macros based on your actual results — worked well enough that people used it for years. Then a developer messaged Nuckols out of the blue about the 'old, tattered, neglected spreadsheet,' and they rebuilt its algorithm into a real app.
Now. MacroFactor launched in 2021 and became one of the most respected nutrition apps on the market — its core logic still descended directly from that one buggy spreadsheet.