Building Your Kitchen Pal, my first publicly available app (Part 1)
By: Ryan Zakariudakis
Tags: First Post, Virtual Assistant, Side Project, Apps, Cooking

Hey users, nice to meet you

It took me longer than you would expect, to realise that not everyone thought about their cooking and eating, in general, the same way.

I found that I was making the assumption that everyone would be thinking about cooking at around the same time relative to when they were going to eat every day. ie. you may think about dinner every day on your way home.

This was wrong of course😅

I have now managed to put everyone into a little box that makes sense to me (at least for now until I realise I’ve made more mistakes)

The planners

They think about cooking a day or more ahead The last-minute decision-makers

They think about cooking shortly before they need to cook. For example on the way home from work Its time to eat, what can I do with this carrot chefs

They think about cooking only when they need to cook. For example, when they get home from work they take a look at what ingredients they have. The creative cooks

They think about cooking as an experience or event. They want to challenge themselves to create something really special or different.

This exercise helped me identify which kind of user(s) I was keeping in mind when building new features. I have decided that I would be able to provide the most value to the planners and the last-minute decision-makers. The creatives will also get some inspiration out of the app however those who want to find a recipe at the point they are about to start cooking will get frustrated with the suggestions I provide them

I’ve recently read the $100 Startup and found it a really interesting read. One of the key messages I took from it was that you should not get sidetracked from your key message by listening to and acting on all feedback. You should definitely listen to all feedback, but make it a conscious decision to disregard some feedback.

Designing User Interfaces as a non-designer

With me being someone who doesn’t have many of the traditional creative skills one might normally be aware of I found building the actual app (and website) really challenging.

I have some general intuition for what does and doesn’t work, but I found myself getting frustrated because my instincts seemed to always lean towards rather boring & not so user-friendly interfaces.

I found myself relying a lot on what everyone close to me was saying whenever I proudly showed off something I made and got the “what does it do” face 😖. I started to take extra time to really think about who would be using this, I really focused hard on trying to make this recipe discovery experience as smooth as possible. This has been one of the more rewarding aspects of building Your Kitchen Pal as I’ve felt myself learning and growing a lot, and the feedback I’m getting is more and more sophisticated. This is a massive jump from the early days when I’d proudly show off a house without windows and doors.

my design progression

Post-it notes and keeping focused

There came a time where I had been working on this idea in my spare time for a pretty long time (6 months)and I started to lose focus and motivation.

I had to sort myself out or this would be just another project with promise that fell by the wayside.

So I thought let me manage myself.

So I set up an account on taigo.io. I started doing some planning, I mapped out the immediate work I still wanted to do. Then I started to move onto the short term/impending work. Then I thought of things that would come even further down the line (further ahead than today even).

That whole process was incredibly powerful and I recommend it to anyone running a project on their own or in their spare time.

It really helped me to get a picture of what progress I’d made and where I still had to go, it took a load off of my mind and felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I could just start following my plan and tackle each milestone one task at a time.

I don’t think I would have managed to keep pushing forward if I didn’t have this tool to help me.

my kanban board

Pay me, maybe?

So, I’ve put a heck of a lot of work into this. And a lot of it is driven by a passion for cooking and passion for code. But eventually, I would love to just get some extra money on the side to help me keep working on this and to pay for the running of the system.

It wasn’t even a decision really, but I knew I was not going to be ruining my hard work by sticking adverts everywhere in my app. Call me stubborn, but I simply will not do it. I cannot appreciate any site or app I use if it’s got adverts, and I don’t want anyone feeling that way about anything I create.

I wasn’t left with many options after that. Ultimately I was deciding between a once-off purchase or subscriptions (monthly or yearly). I did a bunch of research and decided that a monthly subscription would be best (there is some great content on this in the $100 Startup).

I’ve not yet actually implemented any premium feature subscriptions, but it’s going to be one of my top priorities going forward. I’m running out of free Google Cloud credits (courtesy of Actions on Google, more on this later), so it would be really helpful if I could start having this project pay for itself!

Right now I’m happy to keep this project free for my users, and am committed to not removing any features that users currently have access to for free once I offer a premium service. The dream is that I can offer enough value that people will not even think twice about giving over some of their hard-earned money every month for a subscription.