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Capitan — AI powered shopping list: Never forget anything at the store
Capitan is a first smart grocery shopping list app to help you save time, make smart suggestions and sync your family’s requests whenever you are located within or near the stores.
A smooth, breezy interface allows you to easily create and share shopping lists with friends or family in a matter of seconds.
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@romanzadyrako oh yes, we've even had people in the beta that wanted to use the app for managing shopping routines for their restaurants, so industrial and office routines are something we will try to nail in the future, for now we are primarily targeting household shopping routines :)
Hi all :)
I’m a founder of Capitan, the grocery list app that helps people spend less time on shopping.
We are trying to solve a very annoying problem - nobody, and I mean nobody, likes making extra trips to the store to buy items they forgot (and nobody likes being yelled at for forgetting something stupid like milk).
Although an artificial intelligence team working on a shopping list app might sound like overkill, the idea was born from sheer necessity: bootstrapping a startup while living together in a shared apartment makes it frustratingly hard to collaborate on shopping routines. All it takes is just a bit of customer development (which we did for almost 2 months) to learn that the same issue seems to resonate for a huge demographic throughout the US.
After months of beta testing with over than 1000 users we've made a number of tweaks and it looks like now, finally (!) we have a shopping list done right. The app is smart; it learns your habits. The more you use the app, the more intuitive the reminders and suggestions become - such as letting you know that you normally buy milk at a certain store, or that you’re running low on a specific ingredient at home that you frequently buy and haven’t bought recently.
Feel free to ask us anything - my team and I will be delighted to answer your questions throughout the day, thanks! ^_^
Hi @arturkiulian, congrats on the launch! I tried out the app, nice clear interface (and great on-boarding experience!. Had a 'list' of questions I've been thinking about since using the app:
1. After adding something to the list, I was expecting I'll be able to select a store and it'll display the aisle(s) for each. I wasn't sure what to do once I setup the list. I am guessing it triggers automatically based on my location? Or I just open the app once I am at a store and it'll magically tell me where to find what (and for lazy people like myself, perhaps the most optimum route instead of chasing things down one aisle and walking halfway across the store to another only to come back to the original one for another item :D)
2. Any plans for adding non-grocery stores (like Home Depot / Lowes) - it'll be amazing to be able to find things there! Easy to get lost there.
3. Is there a list (no pun intended) somewhere that I missed to see what stores are supported right now?
4. Thoughts on Image recognition to add things to the list? Snap a pic and it gets added to your list.
5. Thoughts on adding Pricing at some point?
6. I often find myself emailing a 'list' to myself, any plans to allow emailing a list somewhere and getting it imported into the app?
Thanks!
@sarthakgrover @arturkiulian Hi Sarthak, sorry for the confusion that is probably caused by our previous press but we've decided not to proceed with in-store directions due to the low interest from both people and stores for that, we've decided to focus on simpler but more effective things such as smart reminders and seamless collaboration.
>5. Thoughts on adding Pricing at some point?
Yes, for sure :)
Image recognition is also in the "must have" ideas in the funnel, just haven't had a chance to scratch that!
>6. I often find myself emailing a 'list' to myself, any plans to allow emailing a list somewhere and getting it imported into the app?
Sounds useful indeed, we will think about this one, thanks for suggestion! ^_^
@arturkiulian Great to hear that. Goodluck, I'll be trying this out some more (love the collaboration bit so far!)
I was very interested in trying this app. My family uses Grocery Gadget and we like it but it just makes some basic functions a bit too difficult.
I downloaded Capitan and started to set it up. I was very disappointed to see that you wanted Facebook access for logins. I don't have/use/want Facebook so I don't use any app that require it. However, I see that I can also add people without Facebook! Oh, I need to give you access to my entire address book just to add my wife? No.
I have to admit, the app looks interesting and useful; but I'll never know. Your decision on logins and adding users is perplexing. I always hope that nobody I know allows apps like this to access their address book because I don't want my info in the hands of a company I don't know and/or don't do business with.
It looks like you had plenty of time to code a different login scheme or at least allow users to add someone via their email address with using the address book. Why did you make this decision?
@fbara Thanks for checking it out Frank! You've probably noticed that we try to make it super easy for users to start doing groceries via our app and don't ask for any log in information, we've decided to add social login to make it quicker and easier for users to sync their lists and provide their address book for quicker sharing experience. Even though you can skip both options and just share a list directly through email, but that's not an ideal flow we've designed :)
Your comments about data absolutely make sense, we will be working on improving this aspect of the app and leaving more space for privacy conscious people with email logins only, thanks for making that clear to us!
@ruslannaz Yes, inside the box the app is a combination of machine learning algorithms, years of experience in applied location-based and predictive analytics along with the crowdsourcing of data, the more you use it - the better time saver it can be for you and your household ;)
It looks very interesting and it definitely would help me a lot.
How effective would it be if the shopper is the only one with the app though?
@mordzuber Thanks! App would still learn about your shopping routines and would suggest frequently bought items and remind you to grab items when you are near the store ;)
@ajimix Please do, we would REALLY appreciate the feedback in any case ;)
You can easily contact us through "Contact us" button within the settings of the app, thanks!
@ajimix oh wow, sorry for that, could you please send us a screenshot over support [at] getcapitan.com? thanks!
@arturkiulian Seems to be a common problem with some iPhone users but not related with your app → https://www.reddit.com/r/jailbre...
Awesome awesome stuff, I love the location aware features. This is fairly similar to the direction we're going with Denarri, but for buying electronics. It's not enough to simply allow people to search for things, what's going to dominate is the experience that learns your users preferences over time, so they accomplish their goals as quickly, efficiently, and intuitively as possible. You guys are clearly focused on that, great work :)
@ghobs91 Thanks Andrew, glad you share our vision, we indeed try to focus on learnings over time to improve user experience, we are not yet there to call it the perfect solution but it's definitely the best out there in our niche :)
This looks awesome! Our team just moved in to an apartment together and we've been finding it hard to keep track of stuff we need to buy at the store. We'll give this a shot. It's interesting to see most of the beta users commenting are more family/female-oriented though - was it a conscious decision to target that particular segment, or just happened to turn out that way?
@carylyne I would say it's both haha, there's definitely a segment interested in our solution and they were really into helping us out with the beta :)
My wife and I currently use Trello for this, but the addition of the AI suggestions and geo-location are very interesting. We'll definitely give it a go over the next few weeks.
I'm interested in how you're doing the location "tracking". I take it that you were asked to insert the "disclaimer" in your App Store description due to the fact that you're using CoreLocation in the background, but I presume that you're using CLRegion monitoring which is relatively easy on the battery because the OS is only waking the app when the device nears a preset geographical region - therefore, the OS uses the battery at pretty much the same rate whether there's one app using region monitoring or 10. The disclaimer therefore seems a little over cautious and probably a little too scary for some people.
@siburb Thanks!
> I take it that you were asked to insert the "disclaimer" in your App Store description
You've got it right, we've been rejected 4 times before we inserted this just because app store review is being crazy sometimes :)
Love the name, just wanted to know how this was different from the android cards that Google gives when you create lists on notes, those are more geolocation based but I'm guessing what this does is learn from frequency of product buying to recommend when a certain item on my list is about to get over right?
@syedahmedz Thanks! And yes, you guessed it right! We are more specialized on actual shopping process and buying specific items rather just notes as google cards
Looks cool and all but after giving access rigths it can't find my wife who is in my Facebook and in my iOS contacts... Makes it quite useless for me
@llumiaho You can always share lists directly to her email, just type it in the input field ;)
It looks like a good app. However, couple of big bugs stopped me from finding it useful right in the beginning. 1. I couldn't share the list with my roommates. Think there is some issue in the app pulling my phone contacts list. Their name not showing up. 2. For testing purpose, I added a friend to a list, but now I couldnt remove him. The delete icon appears, but doesnt work. Once its fixed, I am looking forward to use the app. Thanks!
@babu_ck oh wow, sorry to hear that, can you please message me through the settings section with the app? we will to fix it for you :)
Great app - clear on-boarding and UX/UI is simple and beautiful.
Had to type out "Cheez Its" and "Captain Crunch" the first time. Is the pattern recognition AI only at a local user or do you also centralize all the data? I can see you building a strong network effect with the data.
@artur the suggested list items are pretty funny and I like the type filtering. It would be great if the initial suggested list was generated by my prior items as it would be easier to add them by tapping instead of typing it out. Maybe I need to use it longer.
@borisism Thanks, glad you dig the suggested items feature, it learns as you use it so after few times of adding "Potatoes" it will show them up first ;)
Hi! Quick feedback: Just went through the onboarding, and the app doesn't find my wife, the person I most often FB with, and who's starred in my contacts db. When I type in her email address, nothing happens and I get a blank group.
I'm always thinking about stuff to buy while i'm on my computer working. Is there a way to add an item or review my list from my mac ?
@hopkinschris Thanks Christopher, we are working on this next, including import of the recipes and other lists from popular platforms ;)
Is there anything specific you would like to import? We love creative ideas!
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