layla17293
New member
The Product: Meal Inventor is a web app that creates recipes that satisfy your calorie and macronutrient goals, using ingredients you already have at home. (If your pantry looks like you just moved in yesterday then it will suggest what you should buy.) In addition it will make you a shopping list to make sure you have enough ingredients on-hand for the upcoming week.
A key part of the design is that nothing is set in stone, and the user can change ingredients/quantities at any time and the recipes/meal plan/shopping list will adapt. For instance if you find some tomatoes in the back of your fridge that need to be eaten today, everything will adjust around that. Or maybe ground beef is on sale, so buy that instead of what the shopping list says.
Money: Using all the features will cost $15/month or $100/year. The business will be a success for me if it nets $20k per year, with me working 20 hours per week. The main expense would be access to a nutrition database for about $3k/year, then server fees, and cheap SaaS tools.
The Market: Meal Inventor fills an empty niche in the large market of meal planning for health and fitness space. (E.g. the technacio Meal Kit Market Report predicts 10.55% annual growth between 2023 and 2028. That market size is currently estimated in the billions of dollars.)
Competition: Meal Inventor’s closest competitor is https://www.eatthismuch.com/, which provides meal plans for calorie and macronutrient goals, but completely ignores ingredients you already have on-hand. (The result is that every week you have more ingredients left over that then aren’t used the following week.)
Current Stage: I’ve completed a prototype implementation of some of the core features (https://mealinventor.com/), and am finally trying to validate the idea. This post is part of that effort.
Customer Acquisition: So far I just have an email list of 10 people, all friends of mine. My plan is:
Why Me: I’m excited about this project, and use it every day. I have the time and technical know-how to make it work well, but I’m uncertain about the marketing aspects.
A key part of the design is that nothing is set in stone, and the user can change ingredients/quantities at any time and the recipes/meal plan/shopping list will adapt. For instance if you find some tomatoes in the back of your fridge that need to be eaten today, everything will adjust around that. Or maybe ground beef is on sale, so buy that instead of what the shopping list says.
Money: Using all the features will cost $15/month or $100/year. The business will be a success for me if it nets $20k per year, with me working 20 hours per week. The main expense would be access to a nutrition database for about $3k/year, then server fees, and cheap SaaS tools.
The Market: Meal Inventor fills an empty niche in the large market of meal planning for health and fitness space. (E.g. the technacio Meal Kit Market Report predicts 10.55% annual growth between 2023 and 2028. That market size is currently estimated in the billions of dollars.)
Competition: Meal Inventor’s closest competitor is https://www.eatthismuch.com/, which provides meal plans for calorie and macronutrient goals, but completely ignores ingredients you already have on-hand. (The result is that every week you have more ingredients left over that then aren’t used the following week.)
Current Stage: I’ve completed a prototype implementation of some of the core features (https://mealinventor.com/), and am finally trying to validate the idea. This post is part of that effort.
Customer Acquisition: So far I just have an email list of 10 people, all friends of mine. My plan is:
- SEO
- Write articles. I first need to finish some FAQ type articles (how do you know how many calories/macronutrients to eat?) before I can try some that are explicitly SEO oriented.
- I’m planning to add a feature where recipes that users have made automatically show up in a recipes section of the website. This section won’t be very useful to users, but should be great when somebody performs a keyword search for “recipe with cauliflower and pickles” or whatever weird combination people end up with.
- Reply to questions on diet/health forums that Meal Inventor can naturally answer.
Why Me: I’m excited about this project, and use it every day. I have the time and technical know-how to make it work well, but I’m uncertain about the marketing aspects.