Weight Loss Drug Reality Check: Not the “Easy Way Out” with Aja Beckett

“That's the thing that's maybe getting lost in some of the fear mongering around it is that, it's not the easy way out. It doesn't mean that you don't have to do the work. It means that when you do the work, the work actually makes the difference.” —Aja Beckett

Food noise can sit in the back of the mind all day, from planning the next meal at breakfast to carrying quiet shame after every snack. In a culture that moralizes weight and labels bodies as failures, real medical treatment for obesity often gets buried under hot takes about shortcuts and cheating. This conversation brings the lived reality of GLP-1 medication into the light, with honesty about both relief and responsibility.

Aja Beckett shares decades of struggling with obesity, endless diets, and that constant mental hum around food, then walks through how starting a GLP-1 weight loss drug shifted cravings, energy, and hope. Her experience led to building Shotsy, a companion app that tracks doses, side effects, and progress for people on GLP-1 medications.

Press play to hear how this new class of medications is reshaping daily life, mindset, and digital tools around obesity care, including:

• What GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy actually do in the body
• The difference between “food noise” and genuine hunger
• Why weight loss drugs are not a lazy shortcut or moral failure
• How mental health, cravings, and compulsive behaviors often change on GLP-1s
• The cost, access, and safety concerns around weight loss injections and pills
• How a GLP-1 tracking app grew from one person’s spreadsheet into a fast-growing product
• What long-term obesity treatment and maintenance can realistically look like

Connect with Heather:
Website
LinkedIn
Instagram
Facebook
YouTube

Episode Highlights:
01:11 Meet Aja Beckett: Founder of Shotsy & GLP‑1 Success Story
04:43 Discovering Ozempic & a Difficult Doctor’s Visit
07:35 Beyond Weight Loss: GLP‑1, Mental Health & Addictive Behaviors
10:43 Losing 90 Pounds: From Obesity to Healthy BMI
13:30 Do You Still Have to Eat Healthy & Work Out on GLP‑1?
16:21 When the Food Noise Stops: First Days on GLP‑1
19:37 Super Bowl Snacks, Portion Control & Balanced Indulgence
22:12 Body Dysmorphia in Bigger & Smaller Bodies
26:00 Safety vs Affordability: Regulation, Shortages & DIY Risks
32:09 Introducing Shotsy: The GLP‑1 Companion App Idea
39:50 Why Tools Like Shotsy Matter for Accountability & Tracking
42:21 GLP‑1 Isn’t the “Easy Way Out”: Doing the Work & Seeing Results

Resources:
💲Discount
CLEARSTEM
Get a 15% discount when you shop at: clearstem.com
Use Heather’s Code: SFVXPHXB
🔗Link: https://clearstem.com/SFVXPHXB

Connect with Aja: 

 Aja is an iOS engineer and GLP-1 user turned founder, combining personal experience with top-tier tech expertise. She has worked with major organizations like Apple, CNN, TED, and The Athletic / The New York Times. She previously built Civil, a platform recognized by WIRED, The Guardian, and TechCrunch. Today, she leads Shotsy, using community-driven design and data insights to help people manage their GLP-1 treatment journey. 

Website
Shotsy App

Transcript

Hey ladies, it's your host, Heather Nelson, welcoming you to another season of Life Conversations With A Twist. This is a space where we dive into stories of remarkable women who've conquered challenges and emerged stronger. Join me each week as we unravel tales of resilience, triumph and empowerment. These narratives aren't just stories. These are stories of inspiration, and I'm so honored to have the space to share them with you. Plus, I will be sharing my own personal stories of inspiration as I navigate starting my own business and achieving my own goals. So whether you're driving in the car or out moving your body, get ready for heartwarming stories and empowering conversations together. Let's raise a virtual toast to empowerment, because here at Life Conversations With A Twist, every story has the power to inspire. Cheers, ladies. 

Heather Nelson: Hello everyone. Welcome to this week's Life Conversations With A Twist. I have the honor of having Aja on. We just met, and this topic that we're going to talk about today is something that I know nothing about. Of course, I hear all the things about this drug and what it's doing, and helping people in their health. But to have a full conversation with someone who has experience with it, who's used it and is doing a lot more for it, I'm really excited to dive into this conversation, so welcome to the podcast.

Aja Beckett: Thank you so much. It's so great to be here.

Heather Nelson: Tell the listeners a little bit about who you are. I always say, like age, just so people can get an idea where you sit in life, your family and all that stuff. 

Aja Beckett: My name is Aja. I am the Founder of Shotsy, which is the number one companion app for people who are taking GLP-1 medications like me. I am 44 years old, which still kind of surprises me. When you get into your 40s, it's like, really? I'm an iOS Engineer, and I've just been working on all sorts of tech products for the last 10, 15 years. I'm also very much one of the, I think, success stories for these new GLP-1 medications, so I'm excited to talk about it. 

Heather Nelson: Take us on the journey. Take us back to little Aja when you were growing up. And obviously, you're in the tech world, so that's why I'm curious to know a little bit about how you got into that. If that's something that you've always been passionate about, or kind of fell on your lap, so I want to hear all about that.

Aja Beckett: I've got this long history of being very technical, very nerdy, always being very interested in building things. I didn't know that coding was something that I wanted to get into until later in life. I didn't actually start programming until I was in my 30s. And I also didn't know that entrepreneurship was something that I was interested in until my 30s. But even prior, I didn't know that was a thing you could do. But prior to that, I was always building something, usually with my hands. My grandpa was kind of the same way. He used to give me boxes of electronic equipment to wire together and teach me how to use it. Then I was into woodworking, and just loved building. I love creating. And eventually, that led me to starting to build apps. I also really want to try to find a way to be independent. I think I was really drawn to the App Store and all the different things that you can build for people, and all the different problems you can try to solve there. Then simultaneously, I'm also a person who has always struggled with obesity my entire adult life. 

Since I was a young teenager, I started to really gain weight and not be able to take it off. And I think I've tried every fad diet over the years. I've done Weight Watchers and calorie counting. And, oh, my gosh, keto, and mindful eating, just all the things. I was usually able to lose some weight. Sometimes even a substantial amount of weight, but I was never able to keep it, keep it off, and it was just always a struggle, always exhausting. If anybody's listening and has experienced this kind of white knuckle willpower that was required non stop. And eventually, I couldn't keep it up. And the way it would come back on, usually, more than I had even started with, and that was the cycle that I was on. I think by the end of 2023, I had kind of accepted it like this is just how it's going to be for me. I'm just going to stop trying to do anything about it because nothing's going to work. If anything was going to work, it would have worked by now. I was at a pretty low point, I think, with health. And I was also kind of struggling trying to be an entrepreneur, and things were not going particularly well for me three years ago, two and a half years ago. And then I met with my doctor, and actually had a really miserable appointment with her because I had heard about ozempic. This was back when there were starting to be a lot of stories in the news about this new miracle weight loss drug that all the celebrities were taking. I was like, okay, what's this? Is this for real? And I asked her about it. And honestly, she said no because I couldn't afford it. She's like, your health plan won't cover it. It's not covered, and I know you don't have the money for it. So she's like, I'm not gonna, in good faith, prescribe this to you because I know you're gonna try to put it on a credit card, and I won't let you do that. But she did figure out that I also had Hashimotos and put me on a thyroid medication that really helped kind of clear up a couple of other issues I was having.

Heather Nelson: I was jotting down notes because I have so many questions for you. I said when we started, obviously, I've only heard what's on the news. I haven't had a one on one conversation with somebody who used it. I think there's a lot of taboo and a lot of things that people are saying, so I have lots of questions. And since you are somebody who has gone down this journey, you'll probably be able to answer them for me. So how old were you when you started GLP? Is GLP the same as ozempic? 

Aja Beckett: GLP-1 is kind of the generic term for the category of drugs. So yeah, ozempic is one of them. Wegovy. And then there's Mounjaro and Zepbound are also the same thing. And then there's sort of the generic version or names for the medications themselves. And then there's a whole lot of new ones that are awaiting FDA approval. So it's about to be, I think, a much larger selection, but GLP-1 is kind of how we've all decided to name the category.

Heather Nelson: Basically like a weight loss medication.

Aja Beckett: It was originally intended to treat diabetes, and weight loss was sort of an unexpected side effect of it. But even now that we have the versions like Wegovy and  Zepbound that are specifically authorized for weight management, we're also seeing that it looks like they are going to have a lot of other impacts on mental and physical health beyond just weight. And so there's a lot of interest, and a lot of studies are being done especially with the new class of Zepbound and some of the newer ones that add more factors to the medication. We're seeing that there might be the possibility of being able to reduce other unwanted compulsive behaviors so people are interested in seeing if it will reduce alcohol dependency, cigarette usage and other drugs that people struggle to control. Even things like compulsive shopping and gambling seems to be affected by it. It really seems to interrupt the dopamine cycle in ways that are still being studied. And then other impacts on sleep apnea, heart health, inflammation, longevity, it really does seem to have a wide ranging impact beyond just the weight loss.

Heather Nelson: That's actually something that I had written down. It was hormones. You said you're 44. I'm 43. It's so interesting that you and I are talking today because starting last week, I stepped on a scale and was like, something's got to give. And I'm going through a surrogacy journey so I've been on hormones after hormones, after hormones since May, and I've definitely gained weight and don't feel myself. I literally was like, I need to make a change. I need to do the things right. This was obviously never anything on my mind. I'm trying to do it more holistically and eating healthier, and eating the right times a day, and eating more protein, and doing all the things. You're saying that it will help with hormones.

Aja Beckett: The thing is if you have a system that works for you, then great. If diet, exercise and mindful eating, if these approaches are effective for you, then fantastic. I think where it really comes into play for somebody like me is I did all those things and it wasn't enough. I knew what I needed to do and I did it, and still my body and brain, everything was fighting against me. And so even something like mindful eating or being more holistic about my health is possible for me on a GLP-1 in a way that it wasn't before. Because before, even if I was doing all the right things, it just wasn't getting through. My system was fighting it so much that it just was not sustainable at all. And now, I think because of the, not just the physical impacts of the medication, but also the mental health, I'm taking Zepbound, which is a little bit more advanced, and then the original sort of ozempic class because it layers in these additional sort of mental health benefits. I kind of want the right things in a way that I didn't before. The right choices, or these healthier choices. That's my first choice now in a way that it was always kind of a struggle before.

Heather Nelson: It's almost like telling your body to almost crave those things. Like craving sugar, fats, alcohol and all the things. But what you're saying is that it could almost be something where it's almost like a mental thing. Or your body's saying, no, eat healthier things, healthier choices.

Aja Beckett: Mindful eating actually works for me now. Because before, mindful eating was, if I really listened to what my body was telling me, it was Doritos. That's what I was being told. And now, I'm having zero interest in junk food. It just doesn't do anything for me anymore. It's fine. It's fine. But I don't care about it. What I really love is plain water and fruit. A burrito bowl salad kind of meal, I'm like, oh, that's so good. Get some quinoa in there. 

Heather Nelson: I love it. So many questions for you. So when did you start taking the drug? 

Aja Beckett: It was January of 2024.

Heather Nelson: And then how much weight have you lost?

Aja Beckett: I've lost 90 pounds. I've gone from obesity class one, 34 to actually, don't know, but I'm in the middle of the healthy range now.

Heather Nelson: I know it's so crazy when you step on this. I have the weight thing where it tells you your BMI and I'm overweight. In your mind, you think of overweight as somebody that really looks very overweight. And I don't think that I look overweight. It's so crazy how just that BMI can change where you sit in that range and being obese, and then having that mindset of like, I am obese. It's just such a mental thing.

Aja Beckett: Yeah, it's been a real journey. I think part of receiving effective treatment for this condition is that it has helped me come to terms with the fact that I have this condition. And even though you can't see it in me anymore, I do still have obesity. And if I stop taking the medication that's treating it, the symptoms will return. It's being well managed right now on a GLP-1, but it doesn't cure the condition that I have. 

Heather Nelson: That was one of the questions I had because I think that's one of the biggest fears for people who are thinking about taking it but don't. That if they stop taking it, all this weight is going to come back. 

Aja Beckett: With any other way of managing your weight, if you stop doing the thing, then it will reverse. But I, as somebody who has been through that cycle many, many times, this feels very different. This feels very manageable. Especially because I take a dose maybe weekly, maybe even longer now that I'm in maintenance. It's not a difficult challenge. I don't feel the same thing. No, I hardly ever think about it. It's easy to travel. Especially now that I'm in maintenance, if I miss a couple of days or even a week, it's fine. Sometimes, I'll even skip a week just because I'm on vacation and I don't want to have to think about it. It's a refrigerated medication, so it's nice to just leave it at home. I have a chronic condition that requires long term management, and eventually, they might come up with medications that are longer lasting. But for now, I'm just grateful to have an effective treatment.

Heather Nelson: Absolutely. When you're on it, do you have to eat healthy? I know you said mentally like you want to. But that might not be the case for everybody. So is it something like a drug that you also have to take in aligning with working out and eating healthy? Or can you continue your crappy lifestyle of eating and take it like, I think there's a lot of people who have a stigma of thinking like, this is the easy way out of working out and eating healthy. But I'm curious to know, do you have to do that when you're taking the drug?

Aja Beckett: The stigma is just, I think, it's wild. I think it says a lot about our culture, that weight and body image is so moralized, and that there's so much of this external stuff around it. We don't feel it, like we don't feel this way about asthma, right? And I think eventually, we'll see more of the commentary around the start to shift. If you look at the labels for these drugs, they definitely want you to be modifying your diet, adding exercise. Muscle loss is a thing so you want to be doing as much like strength training as you can. But for me, I think it probably varies. I've only taken the Zepbound medication. I've only ever had that additional, I think, mental health component that's in the second agent in the medication and so it could be different for the ozempic. But for me, it did. It immediately changed what I wanted, and so I didn't really experience a struggle where I still wanted to have the, I didn't want to eat the whole box of Girl Scout Cookies anymore. I wasn't thinking about what was in the fridge. I think prior to the medication. I thought everybody felt this way. I would be eating breakfast and thinking about lunch, and eating lunch and thinking about dinner. Thinking about snacking and just always thinking about food. And this is what they call food noise, it never stopped. There was a constant stream of obsession about what's in the kitchen and when I am going to get another.

Heather Nelson: So crazy that you say that, because I literally think about that all the time. My husband's plan for this date, and we're going to go do this, and we're going to do that, and it did not include food at all. And I was like, what are we eating? And I'm always like, in my head, okay, this is what I'm going to prepare for lunch. And I'm trying to make, obviously, better decisions. But you're right, literally what I think about all the time.

Aja Beckett: Non-stop. For me, it was just a day or two into my first dose, I suddenly felt that go away. For the first time in my entire life, it just went away, and I suddenly became a person who could forget to eat lunch, or do all these things that I'd heard people say and I thought they were lying. Because how could you possibly forget to eat lunch? How is that not your number one concern? And now I am one of those people. It was kind of bittersweet, actually, to have that experience of feeling that switch flip. Because after 30 years of being told that this is your fault. You're in a bigger body because you're, somehow, a bad person. And if you could just do X, Y and Z like everybody else, then you would be skinny or whatever to suddenly feel that switch and realize like, oh, people who are naturally slim feel like this all the time. They have no idea what it feels like to have an addiction to food or to have food noise. And if they did, they would not be so quick to judge.

Heather Nelson: That's so interesting. I actually wrote down food guilt because I think there's this stigma around like, even if you are eating healthy, and then you go out to a nice dinner and you want to splurge, and you want to have that dessert, or you want to have those french fries, or whatever it might be. Has that shifted for you?

Aja Beckett: Actually, yeah. I was actively losing weight for just over a year, and then I've been in maintenance now for, I guess it'll be a year of maintenance in the next couple months. I really need to sit down. I know that I've taken 105 shots because I have an app that tracks it.

Heather Nelson: We'll get to that for sure.

Aja Beckett: My tastes have changed. So at first when I was really actively losing weight, and when the medication was building it to higher and higher levels, I would say that I was definitely still enjoying food. When I was hungry, when it was time to eat, I really enjoyed what I was having, which was often a good salad, or a burrito bowl or something. Actually pretty healthy, because healthy food actually tastes good. I would enjoy it so much. And especially fruit like, honey crisp apples that I was obsessed with for a while. I think at one point, I had a slice of pepperoni pizza, and it just did not sit well with me. I was like, this isn't really working for me. But as I've moved into maintenance and my dose has kind of gone down and been at a lower level, I found that I'm in kind of more of what you would call normal. Yesterday was the Super Bowl. I don't know when we'll publish this, but yesterday was definitely a junk food day. I bought the bag of Doritos and the nerds gummy clusters and I would say that I enjoyed a serving of both. And I was like, okay, yeah. I was like, that was fun. Now, I don't need any more of that. So there's no more of this, I'd say I'm in a really good place now where I usually prefer to eat a healthy, balanced meal, but I can still have something that's kind of, quote unquote, unhealthy. I just don't really want very much of it. But I'll have a birthday cake or dessert at a restaurant, for sure.

Heather Nelson: I follow people who have taken the drug and completely have lost weight. You can see it visibly, but I've noticed a lot more skin, extra skin. That is like a whole nother layer, right? You're insecure because you're overweight. But now, you're skinny, but you have all this extra skin.

Aja Beckett: I think, as far as I know, a lot of the skin stuff is a genetic lottery type of thing. Like how elastic your skin is after dramatic weight loss, it's luck of the draw. I think you can try to use different products and things, or slow things down. I think I got lucky. I just have the usual stretch marks, but I know that a lot of people do end up with a lot of excess skin. There's a lot of different options for having that removed, and I think a lot of people have very successfully been able to get that trimmed off. But, yeah, I think you don't really know until you do it. Even for people who experience it, what they've told me is that they still feel so much healthier and stronger, and being able to run up the stairs, and buckle the airplane seat belt, and just all the advantages to being in a smaller body.

Heather Nelson: For sure. At that point, you're like, okay, I'm here. And that was one of the things I wrote down. Was there a moment for you where you looked in the mirror and you're like, I feel like myself again, or I feel like I'm in the body that I should be in.

Aja Beckett: It's absolutely wild. I remember when my reflection in the mirror started to change. Body Dysmorphia goes both ways. There's so much weird messaging in our culture about it. Unlike any other health condition, people just really moralize it, and we internalize that. The shame, guilt and everything. I think a lot of people, when they go on one of these medications, if they start to experience dramatic weight loss, there can be dysmorphia in that where they are struggling to come to terms with being in a smaller body and seeing themselves that way. For me, it was the opposite. I had never really come to terms with being in a larger body. I was always surprised if I would see a photo or a video of myself. I was like, that's not how I see myself. And I would just kind of avoid mirrors, photos and things, and just not think about it. But now, I think there was a point where I saw myself in the mirror and I was like, I look the way that I think that I look like. This is how I always saw myself. And now, I can actually see it in the mirror. That was a really powerful moment. It hasn't gone away. Two years into this, it still just blows me away. I can choose the stairs because it's easy to run up the stairs now. I take my daughter to swim meets, and it used to be that going up and down the bleachers was like something I had to think about because my balance was also really bad. And that's gotten so much better. And now, I can just hop on down the bleachers without thinking about it. Except I do remember like, this was not always the case. 

***Friends, I have such an exciting product that I need to share with you. Are you someone who hates washing their face at night? Yep, that's me. For years, I never wanted to wash my face. And finally, I found a product that actually gets me excited to wash my face every night, and that is Clear Stem. I have tried so many products over the years to find the one that I truly love, the one that makes my skin glow, the one that makes me feel good when I wash it, and the one that gets me excited to want to wash my face. I discovered Clear Stem through another podcaster, and I was like, I gotta give this a try. I instantly became obsessed. Some of my favorite products are the hydrating cleanser, which I use every night. It smells delicious. It makes my skin feel so great. Once a week, I use their Vitaminscrub, which is an exfoliating cleanser and that just has these little micro beads in it that just make your face feel so beautiful. I can just feel them get into my pores and really give my face this huge glow. And then one of my other favorite products is the Hydraberry Mask. And once you wash your face, you put a layer of this on your skin, and you go to sleep and wake up, and your face feels like butter. I get so many compliments on my skin. Now, I don't get a lot of breakouts anymore. My face feels nice, hydrated and bright, and it's all because of the Clear Stem product. What I love about them is that their products are all clean. They're good for your skin, they're good for your body, and they have so many different product lines based on the type of skin you have. So go down in the show notes, and click on the link. I'm giving 15% off to anybody who uses my code. And I promise you, once you try this, you are going to be obsessed just as much as I am. So again, go down to the show notes, click on the link, receive 15% off, and give Clear Stem a try. I promise you will not regret it.

Heather Nelson: So when you started this medication, you were seen with a doctor, and your doctor helped you get on this. I know that this drug is not easy to just get off market or not going through the system. What is your experience? And what do you recommend someone do if they are thinking about it? What route should they take?

Aja Beckett: There's a lot of complexity to this, especially if you're in the US. The American healthcare system is really, really challenging and can really sometimes work against you. I'm not in the habit of judging people for whatever they deem to be necessary for their health. I am very much on the side of science and safety. I really believe in properly inspecting and regulating medical, especially pharmaceuticals. I think it should be handled very carefully. We are in general impacting ourselves with things, and we want to make sure that they're coming from factories that are safe and clean. I know that there have been shortages, the affordability is very challenging, and so I think a lot of people are successfully working with reputable compounding pharmacies, and still working with medical providers. You have a lot of options, thanks to telehealth. I think for people who can benefit from these medications, I think they should be easy to access. I don't think there should be a lot of gatekeeping, and judgment around who should and should not. I think if it's safe for you to take it, and you would benefit from taking it, then I think that should be your choice as an adult. But I am a little concerned about people who stray really far from the safe regulated sources of this medication, and that worries me a bit like, I really hope that people make good choices. But that said, I think I totally understand that we get to kind of manage our own health, and this is a really powerful tool for managing your health. Especially in the US, I would love to see more availability, more education, more affordability so that anybody who would benefit from this would be able to take it. And I'm happy to see now that it's in pill form so that people for whom injections are kind of a non starter will hopefully now be able to to experience some of this.

Heather Nelson: And that's why when we got connected, I was like, yes, we need to have this conversation. Because, again, I haven't had this conversation with anyone. And being able to normalize it in a way that makes people feel comfortable, to want to take or explore it and kind of squash those taboos. One of the things you said when you were talking about starting this treatment is the affordability. Has it changed at all since you first started it? Because I've heard bits and pieces here that it is getting a little bit more affordable. But what are your thoughts on that?

Aja Beckett: Yeah. I think it's definitely improved in the last few years. When I started, you had to get single use pens from the manufacturer. The prices were really high. I started out paying $500 a month with the discount, and then I was lucky to get some insurance coverage for a while that brought it down lower, but then I quit my job so I could go full time on my new business. I've gotten back to cash pay, but there's options now with buying it directly from the manufacturer in a format that's more affordable. Especially with some of these reputable compound pharmacies, I think there are lower prices. There's a lot of competition now on the price points so I see people who seem to be paying lower monthly fees than was normal two years ago. I don't think anybody's paying $1,000 a month anymore, so that's good.

Heather Nelson: That's wild to me to even think about. One thing that I just thought about as I'm curious, you're not a doctor, but I'm curious to have a doctor on. I wonder if they're nervous about the medical field, and how their jobs are going to change in the future. Because if more people start taking this and their mental health is getting better, their heart conditions are getting worse, there's no need for people to now go to the doctor all the time for all of these things. Are they worried that it's almost not going to put them out of a job? But maybe there won't be such a demand on the health system because people have something that is able to kind of be treatable. 

Aja Beckett: I think anybody who is a doctor, who is a healthcare provider is just delighted to see their patients getting healthier. They've been struggling for so long to try to help people when they just haven't had the tools available, and all they could do is give them some advice that they knew wasn't really going to work. And so I think that they have a duty of care, like they want to see us get healthier. Now, the private equity owners of the insurance companies, are they happy about this? I don't really care. Sure, there's a lot of industries that are going to be negatively impacted by people getting healthier and not being as dependent on these addictions. But gosh, I welcome that.

Heather Nelson: Yeah, absolutely. They say we're the number one country that has the most percentage of obesity. Well, let us get  healthy. Let it be affordable for us all too. Get Healthy to have better mindsets to make better lives.

Aja Beckett: I think we'll see new industries, or we'll see a shift into building more business around health, around actual healthy behaviors. I think there will be opportunities certainly in a space where there's a great opportunity. The days of being able to get rich by selling junk food to Americans, hopefully, those days are numbered. 

Heather Nelson: I hope so too. Okay, we're going to pivot the conversation. Thank you for all of your experience and your thoughts around all of those because I actually feel very more optimistic about the future for us. And so that's great. You're a developer of apps, quite so intrigued because I wanted to start an app one time. I had this great idea. And now, everyone does it. But I'm always like, dang, I wish I could build it on my own. So you have been in this space for a while. Have you built other apps before you built your own? Can you share some of the ones that you've done before?

Aja Beckett: Yes, okay. I've had a bit of a career in media tech doing coding work for media companies, and I ended up spinning one of my ideas out into my first startup back in 2015. I've been an app developer entrepreneur for a little over 10 years now, and I would say that most of that was a series of failures. Some are better than others. But Shotsy, this is my current app. My seventh attempt, I think, at launching an app in the App Store. And previously, I had a lot of different solutions for problems. I had options for language learners. I had something for people who were studying for the citizenship exam in the US. I tried tackling a lot of different things. And I think in a lot of ways, they were successful products, but they were never successful businesses. I'm really struggling to pay rent, and struggling to figure out how to support myself with app development, so I was also freelancing, and then ended up taking a full time job at a big media company. And yeah, it's been a long string of different failed attempts.

Heather Nelson: Well, you had to fail the win.

Aja Beckett: Yeah. Lots of learning experiences.

Heather Nelson: So talk about the app that you are working on now, or that you've launched now, and what it does.

Aja Beckett: I started taking Zepbound in January of 2024, and very quickly realized that there are a lot of things that you need to keep track of. It's a new way of managing your health. There are a lot of health tracking apps available on the App Store, but there was nothing at the time that was specific for this GLP-1 experience. And I was also on one of the Reddit communities for the medication that I was taking, and I saw that other people were having the same struggles, and they were creating complicated spreadsheets and trying to keep track of their doses, their side effects, what results were they seeing, and making charts and things. But I'm an iOS developer. I'm an app developer. And for me, when I see a complicated spreadsheet, I think, oh, well, that would be better as an app. And so I had a day job, but nights and weekends on the side, I started building this app, Shotsy, for myself to kind of solve my own problems, and I ended up posting on that Reddit community asking for beta testers. I got a huge response, and ran the beta test for about a month, and then launched it, released it on the App Store, told the Reddit community about it, and it immediately took off. And honestly since then, it's really been just growing super fast through word of mouth. People tell their friends about it.

Heather Nelson: As somebody who puts something on the App Store, how do you get the word out? Obviously, you can search it, but then you hear about it, or businesses have a business and then they start an app, how do you get the word out? 

Aja Beckett: Well, more word of mouth. I guess it was just me for the first six months, but it definitely had the advantage of being the first app in the space. There was a lot of excitement just to have anything that was specifically for us, I think, especially because the community that these medications serve has generally historically been marginalized, and not particularly well served. And so I think the excitement of like, oh, this was built for us by somebody who is one of us. She gets it. I think that was immediately very exciting, and people wanted to talk about it. There wasn't really anything else for a long time on the App Store, and so that's very helpful. But what I ended up being, I think, one of the real unexpected drivers of word of mouth growth was that I made these charts where you could see your weight loss results over time, but overlaid with your dose history. So everything's color coded, and you could kind of see like, oh yeah, as I was taking this dose, I was losing this much weight. And people ended up screenshotting them and sharing them like, there's Reddit threads that are just like, share your shots each chart, or I think people were sharing them on their private Facebook groups and things, and that ended up really spreading. And it's funny because I didn't put a logo on it or anything, so I wasn't really intending for that to be viral or whatever. But people just really loved sharing their charts, and then that would lead more people to look for the app. I was looking at our web analytics, and it said that a lot of people reach us through reverse image search, and I think it's people looking for the charts. What was very unexpected was that people really, really love to be able to visualize and share that visualization of their journey. I think it's just a really succinct way of sharing kind of, this is my journey. This is what happened to me. And it's kind of unique, I think, to be able to look at it this way. 

Heather Nelson: I love it. I used to work out at Orange Theory, and it was like, as soon as my workout was over, I would look at my little chart of orange and red zones and post it because it was like one of those things. One holding myself accountable for working out to seeing the results, so what an interesting way to get followers. You're like, I'll take it. 

Aja Beckett: Again, I'm not a marketing person. I like charts. I'm a nerd. And it turns out that everybody else really likes charts too.

Heather Nelson: So funny. Is it a membership thing where people pay like a monthly subscription?

Aja Beckett: It's freemium, and so 95% of the features are totally free. You know that charts totally free, always will be. Most people use the app for free forever without paying for it. It was really important to me, again, as a member of this community, I didn't want this to be another sort of predatory business thing. But there are just two features that are premium features, and you can upgrade it if you want, and then that helps really support the continued development of the app to let us hire engineers that aren't just me, which I think is good for all of us.

Heather Nelson: Well, I was just about to ask you, if you don't mind sharing, how does one person who starts an app make money? And I would assume that it was the subscription. But if you don't have that style of app, how do you make money?

Aja Beckett: Shotsy had the optional subscription from day one. It was self-sustaining from day one. I could have quit my job right away because the response was so incredible, and people were so supportive of upgrading. A high enough percentage of people choose the premium subscription that it can support itself. But if you don't have that, if you don't have a product that some people are willing to pay for, then it gets harder. I know a lot of people try an ad supported model. That's not my favorite, especially as somebody who's worked for a lot of media companies. Media companies, I think, that's a challenging business model. I much prefer to have a direct, straightforward relationship with our user, our customer. The better we make the product, the more people pay. It's just a very positive relationship to have with everybody. We're not trying to go behind anybody's back or do anything shady. We make something that people want to pay for. They pay for it, and we're able to do more of that. So it's kind of a win-win ad model. It can work, but it's a lot more challenging, and not something that I particularly enjoy doing. And then beyond that, I don't know. I think you could try to do other types of partnerships, but I've never really been able to understand those. 

Heather Nelson: You mentioned Reddit, and people talk about red all this. What is Reddit? I've heard of it, but I've never used it.

Aja Beckett: If you remember discussion forums on the early internet, or kind of these discussion communities, Reddit is kind of, I think, one of the last remaining sort of anonymous public forums. I have mixed feelings about it, because there's a lot of parts of Reddit that are just absolutely awful. But there is a community for everybody, and it ended up being a popular place for people taking GLP-1 to form differently, they're called SubReddits, when you kind of have a specific community for a specific topic, and you can find people to discuss whatever. And GLP-1 communities ended up getting quite large quite quickly. So there's hundreds of thousands of people in there, and I found it to be a really helpful resource because I got my prescription from my doctor. But of course, there's long gaps between visits, and she wasn't available to answer day to day questions. And so it was really helpful to be able to read other people's stories and experience, and ask questions from people who were further along. I even posted at one point. I was like, I'm at Wrigley Field. Am I gonna regret having a hot dog? What do you think? And it was nice to have other people who are like, oh, I think you could do it. Don't worry about it.

Heather Nelson: I'll have to check it out. I keep hearing about it, but I'm like, what is it? But there's so many apps. I'm like, I can't even handle another app.

Aja Beckett: It's a whole thing.

Heather Nelson: I love that you're doing the app that you're doing. I think it is super helpful. I have different apps for different things just to keep me on track and hold me accountable, and I'm a sucker for a checklist. So being able to have something to check off or to track progress, I think, is amazing. So I think that's super cool. What's next for you? You've developed this app, and I'm sure there's probably more features and stuff you can add. But what's next in your journey?

Aja Beckett: I find myself after 10 years of being a struggling solo entrepreneur, indie developer. I now have a team, and I am learning the ropes on trying to build a team, manage a team, learn some leadership that has not really been in my vocabulary to this point, so it's a great opportunity for growth. And I think I'm shifting. I think I continue to be a person who loves to build and create, but I'm shifting from building apps with code into building a team of people, and it's a really interesting different way of getting to flex that interest, I guess.

Heather Nelson: I think it's super cool. I'm always intrigued, this is why I have my podcast to hear the stories of people sitting in one place in their journey or in their life, and discovering something, or learning something, or going through something to be on the other side. And so what a cool place to be. But yeah, being a developer behind the scenes to being in leadership and leading a team, I could imagine, is a huge shift for you.

Aja Beckett: Yeah. I love to learn, I love to grow, and this is just a great new opportunity to get outside of my comfort zone.

Heather Nelson: I love that. Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you want to address about GLP and the program?

Aja Beckett: I always love talking about it. I think I like to be able to contribute more positivity around it. I'm really not a fan of the fear mongering that I know is out there. And I think it's really a conversation to have with your doctor, or a health care provider because if you feel like you've been struggling with this for a long time or kind of related things, then I think it can be a really helpful tool. But again, it's not for everybody, so I hope nobody feels like they're being pressured. I just feel very grateful to be able to finally access effective treatment for something that I've struggled with for a long time.

Heather Nelson: Yep. I love that. And again, you're the voice of it. You're the one that's experienced it, the one that's gone through it, the one whose life has changed because of it. And I think it's an absolute story, and I love that you're speaking about it. But again, I was like, I need her on my podcast, and I need to learn all the things I want to learn more. And I don't want to have an image about it. We're over here working our butts off, trying to lose weight, and these people just take a shot once a week, and they're skinny. You know what I mean? But yeah, it totally makes sense that it's more of a mental thing. And I love that. That's what I'm excited about. To see how that changes for people is not just the physical, but the mental, because I think that that's what we're all struggling with right now.

Aja Beckett: Yeah. I think that's the thing that's maybe getting lost in some of the fear mongering around it is that it's not the easy way out. It doesn't mean that you don't have to do the work. It means that when you do the work, the work actually makes the difference instead of what you know. Previously. I would do the work, and nothing would change. And now, I do the work, I want to do the work, and it actually gets through to my system in a way that just was not possible before. So it's not like I'm sitting on the couch eating Bon Bons and it just magically comes off. No, I'm eating less, I'm moving more, and it's actually making a difference for the first time in my life.

Heather Nelson: One question, I just thought about. We talked about hormones, but I feel like, especially that we're in the age of perimenopause, in that there are so many weight gain, fatigue and all of that, have you felt that that drug has helped with your perimenopause symptoms?

Aja Beckett: Yeah. I'm probably not the best resource on this because I'm not quite there yet, but I know that a lot of people are talking about this. I would love to hear more from somebody who's really in the middle of combining both of these experiences because I know it's going to be big. But it feels like we're also in the early days of finally doing the research on menopause, HRT and everything, so I'm hoping that we just continue to see so much more knowledge, awareness and education around all of these different conditions that primarily affect women.

Heather Nelson: Please help us 40, 50 year olds out.

Aja Beckett: I know. We are also needing medical care.

Heather Nelson: Aja, thank you so much for being here. This is a great conversation. I'm so glad that there's people out there that are changing our perceptions of this drug, and it's such a cool thing to see you go through the journey and the things that have positively affected your life, so thank you again for being here. I can't wait to see what's next for you.

Aja Beckett: Thank you so much. It was such a joy getting to talk with you. I really appreciate the time, so thank you.

Heather Nelson: Thank you.

I hope today's episode resonated with you. And if it did, don't keep it to yourself. Spread inspiration. Share this episode on your socials, and tag me. And if there's anyone in your life who can use a dose of encouragement, pass it along. Looking forward to continuing this journey of inspiration with you. Until next time, stay empowered and connected.