By Matthew Musolino

There are thousands of apps on the market for people to use that track their health progress. With the medium completely saturated with different platforms, The Difference App has created a system that takes the stress out of user managment.

“There’s a lot of people who want to lose weight, and they get frustrated by stepping on the scale,” said CEO Peter Conroy.

Conroy had a long and varied career before creating his own app. Starting out on Wall Street as a generalist, eventually becoming a specialist in investment-grade corporate bonds, then as a part of the Strategy department. After years of working in finance, Conroy decided that he had reached his goals within that field.

“When I left finance, I promised  myself that I would only work on things that really interested me,” Conroy said. Since leaving corporate America, Conroy has been an entrepreneur in a number of different businesses. From running a coffee shop, landscape design, and video streaming.

While reflecting during the pandemic, Conroy reached out to his fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi  Fraternity Incorporated, to create a health and wellness committee at his local chapter in Harlem, New York. He organized blood drives, charity walks to fight breast cancer, and events to raise awareness about prostate cancer, mental health, and diabetes. “The work that I did was really, really, satisfying,” Conroy said.

Conroy pushed his interest in health and wellness further when he needed to deal with his own weight problems. He decided to use a weight loss app, but was not impressed by what was available. Being an academically and professionally trained mathematician, he decided to build his own model.

The original process for the app took place directly on an excel spread sheet, with Conroy calculating his progress manually. “For 60 days, every day I would track whenever I had to eat,” Conroy said. “And total that up as total calories in, and then my total calories out…. And then I would calculate calories burned while active. I was going to the gym. So I would take total calories out minus total calories out, and that would give me the difference.”

Conroy wanted to push the app forward so he hired a graphic designer and multiple programmers to achieve the look and functions he was looking for.

The app resembles his original desktop system but on a more advanced level. Once a customer signs on, they enter their height and current and target weight. For daily logs, the user records what they consumed in the “Calls In” section and how much they exercised in the “Calls out” section. After the information is in, the app calculates the users’ caloric deficit.

The app has an increasingly positive reputation, with a 4.9/5 rating on both Apple and Google  app stores. “The onboarding process was not intimidating at all,” Phillip Luster, a member of Conroy’s fraternity, said. Luster mentioned how he had been struggling to get over a hurdle and reduce his weight under 200 pounds. Since using the app, he has been able to reach his fitness goals.

The Difference is continuing to evolve and its development is run by a team of software engineers trying to make refinements. Troy Delillo, a lead developer, has been part of making adjustments and updates.

Delillo, a graduate from Binghamton University with a degree in Computer science, focuses on bug-fixing, which is the code the app runs on.

According to Delillo, tickets are bugs and features that need to be fixed or removed. “Based on experience with databases, websites, or app development, grab these “tickets” to try and improve the app,” Delillo said. Currently, an aspect Delillo and the rest of the development team are working on is the subscription screen.

“I think our biggest technical hurdle so far was the outdated nature of some of the apps dependencies, Delillo said. “I've spent the last two months making it so the app can be re-released on the app store, and to do that I needed to have it build on more recent versions of things like Xcode. Put simply, we needed to run some updates on our house's foundation.”

Conroy addressed these technical problems head-on-bringing in a new Chief Technology Officer, Kelvin Sparks. Sparks is a former Quantitative developer and instructor of data analytics.

“I am helping the CEO drive product development as well,” Sparks said. “I am looking to help the CEO deliver a solid bug free product that will drive user adoption and attract venture capital.”

Sparks plans for a wearable device for users to automatically track data instead of having to enter it manually.

The Difference is pushing towards an app update which will improve the speed at which it functions, smoother algorithms, and easier use for customers. A key feature that Conroy is looking forward to adding is AI picture visualization, which allows users to log and track their meals quicker than typing it into the system. The update will occur sometime in September.

One of Conroy’s Kappa Alpha Psi chapter members was diagnosed with prostate cancer. After hearing the news, he organized an awareness event. There was a doctor who led the event who went on to treat the cancer patient. He is currently in remission. Conroy attributes this as one of the key inspirations for starting The Difference.