In the first two chapters of this series, I shared how the idea for Cratox AI began and why we believe the future of nutrition is hyper-personalized.
Today I want to lift the curtain a little more and talk about how we actually build our product.
Because the way we work is not traditional. Not even close.
A lot of companies today say they're "AI-powered."
But for most, AI is something they add somewhere along the way. A feature. A module. A nice-to-have.
With Cratox, AI is baked into the core. It’s the engine that drives our thinking, not a feature we decided to plug in later. Everything we build, every workflow we design, and every decision we make starts with the same simple question:
What can AI do today that wasn't possible before? And how far can we push it?
We experiment constantly:
If there's a frontier, we want to reach it. If there's a limit, we want to test it. If there's an opportunity for innovation, we want to squeeze every drop out of it.
One of the most valuable assets we have today isn't a server, or a model, or even the app itself.
It's Alex's original home-built prototype.
Yes, the one he built in Cursor and Replit before Cratox AI even existed as a company.
Most prototypes are thrown away. This one became a test lab.
We use it to:
It's raw, messy, and incredibly powerful.
That prototype still guides our innovation rhythm today. It lets us constantly push AI until we understand what it can truly do, and what it can't do yet.
And once we know, the polished version goes into the real app.
From the outside, 8 people might not sound like much.
But the intensity, passion, and alignment we have internally is what makes progress feel exponential.
Every person on the team:
Having this team in-house, fully aligned, fully hands-on, makes all the difference.
You can't outsource passion. You can't outsource instinct. And you can't outsource the energy that comes from people who live the problem they're solving.
Just last week, we all met in the office for a team work session. Brainstorming, testing the app, reviewing insights, the usual creative chaos.
And as we were reviewing progress data, Bogdan, our senior iOS developer, made a simple but brilliant observation:
"Why are we forcing daily progress when life isn't daily? What if we focused on weekly patterns instead?"
And that sparked a new direction. Because he was right.
Daily charts look noisy. They fluctuate. Life happens: weekends, late dinners, missed workouts, good sleep days, bad sleep days.
But weekly patterns reveal:
Weekly data helps you answer questions like:
And that is ultimately what matters.
Nutrition is not about being perfect every day. It's about getting a little better every week.
This is the type of insight that only emerges when you have a real team, in a real room, looking at a real product they care about deeply.
The way we build Cratox AI isn't about fast feature shipping. It's about fast learning.
We push AI until it breaks. We refine until it works. We tear down what doesn't feel right. We rebuild. We iterate. We evolve.
Every day, the product gets smarter. Every week, the system gets more precise. Every month, the insights get richer.
We don't just build features. We build understanding.
And that approach becomes more powerful every single day.
In the next chapters of this series, we'll talk about:
Thank you for following our journey so far. We're building something for the long term, and every insight, every conversation, every breakthrough brings us one step closer.
Cristian
Founder & CEO of Cratox AI. Passionate about leveraging artificial intelligence to revolutionize how people track nutrition and achieve their health goals. Building the future of personalized wellness technology.