How Tom McGee Built Synopsis

Synopsis went viral before it was ready. The app started breaking under its own users. Tom McGee did the unglamorous thing. He stopped, and he rebuilt.

“We went so viral that the app was breaking down because it couldn’t handle the users that were coming in.”Tom McGee, founder of Synopsis

Synopsis is a calorie tracker, technically. You point your phone at a plate of food, and an AI model reads the macros. The category is what investors call saturated and what users call boring. McGee is trying to build something else inside it. He calls it Strava for food and fitness. A social layer on top of the diary. A place where the dietitian you follow on Instagram can actually be the dietitian who sees what you ate on Tuesday.

That is the bet. The arc to get there is the story.

The coach who became the founder

Before Synopsis, McGee spent seven years as a coach. Then he became a content creator, with a couple hundred thousand followers in health and fitness. He built on camera in the open, the way coaches do when they realize the leverage is in the audience, not the hour.

That background matters. The category is full of founders who learned about nutrition from a deck. McGee learned it from clients. When he describes what Synopsis should feel like, he describes it the way a coach would. Not a database with a camera bolted on, but a relationship the user actually shows up for.

What happened in September

The first version of Synopsis was glued together. Third-party tools, a vibe-coded shell, enough duct tape to ship. It worked. Then it went, in McGee’s word, crazy viral.

“We went so viral that the app was breaking down because it couldn’t handle the users that were coming in.”

This is the moment most founders romanticize and most engineers dread. McGee did the unglamorous thing. He stopped, and he rebuilt. In September a new stack went in. Pragmatic, off the shelf, built to hold. By spring it was holding.

“From September till now, we’ve been on this whole new tech stack. Everything’s been pretty stable. We haven’t had any issues.”

That is the founder lesson that doesn’t fit on a slide. Your moat is your uptime. The second version of Synopsis exists because the first one almost didn’t.

The independent alternative to MyFitnessPal

While Synopsis was rebuilding, the category got smaller. Cal AI, the most obvious snap-a-photo comp, sold to MyFitnessPal. The lane consolidated into a single legacy player the way every consumer health lane eventually does. Synopsis is being built to be the one that didn’t.

Synopsis is being built as the independent alternative to MyFitnessPal. One where the dietitian you follow can actually be the dietitian who sees what you ate Tuesday.

The spring release is where Synopsis stops being a calorie app. McGee is layering in a fitness component, with workout tracking alongside the meal log, and a chat-based AI coach that reads a user’s recent eating pattern and gives non-prescriptive feedback. “It shouldn’t be telling the user what’s good or bad food,” he says, “but it can probably bring some awareness of some of their eating habits.”

The real bet is social. Synopsis is being built so that coaches, dietitians, and nutrition creators can run small communities inside the app. Public groups for accountability. Private groups for paying clients. A messaging layer. A way for an influencer’s followers to actually train and eat with them, not just watch them post about it.

“It’s going to be where a lot of coaches, dietitians, they can track their meals using AI, they can log their workouts, and then their followers or clients can track as well, but also connect with them to keep them motivated.”

That is the pivot worth watching. The pure-utility lane has a winner already. The lane Synopsis is moving into, coach-led and creator-led and community-shaped, does not. If MyFitnessPal is the spreadsheet, Synopsis is trying to be the gym.