Product
Sep 16, 2025
Passion project: private cookbook
Another pet project, taking care of everything from design to development. Quick prototype in v0, then built a mini web-app using Next.js, Tailwind, Shadcn & Supabase. MVP built in 1 day.
Role
Product
👀 Overview
What it is: A minimalist recipe app for my girlfriend and I. Built to quickly import, organize, and search recipes with zero clutter.
Why it matters: Recipes were scattered across websites, cookbooks, and paid apps. Ads made the free sites painful to use, paper was impractical, and shopping lists were tedious. We needed one clean, ad-free space tailored just for us.
🎯 Objectives
Primary: Have a central, easy-to-use recipe hub that we both actually enjoy using.
Secondary: Practice building a real full-stack app (React + Supabase) with tagging, search, and bulk import.
Additional: Add practical quality-of-life features (copy ingredients in one click, basic auth, tagging system).
📊 Success metrics
Usage: Replace all scattered sources → 80%+ of our cooking comes from this app.
Time: MVP ready in <1 week.
👯 Audience & messaging
Persona: Myself & my girlfriend (home cooks):
(1) want a single place for all recipes;
(2) value speed & simplicity;
(3) dislike ads, subscriptions, and clutter.
Key message: “Our recipes, organized. Clean, free, and made just for us.”
🧐 Design inspiration & style
Like: minimalist UX from Notion & cooking blogs without distractions.
Avoid: ads, pop-ups, subscription walls, endless scrolling stories.
📆 MVP scope & timeline
MVP – 1 day:
(1) Build bulk import (ingredients + steps);
(2) Add tagging & search;
(3) Implement basic Supabase backend;
(4) Add ingredient copy-to-clipboard.
V1 – +1/2 days:
(1) Deploy on Vercel;
(2) Add lightweight auth (just us);
(3) Improve mobile UI for shopping list use;
(4) Polish tag-based filtering & search.
🧑🎓 Outcome & learnings
We now use the app daily to plan meals and shopping. Bulk import cut recipe setup time to seconds. Tagging and quick ingredient export made cooking & shopping simpler. I got hands-on with Supabase auth, backend logic, and React search/filter patterns — and built something genuinely useful for our daily life.
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