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Quick Chat with Dianna Allen of Budget Meal Planner

Episode #104

Dianna Allen (@diannamallen) is the creator of Budget Meal Planner. In just two months, she's gone from having an idea to getting thousands of signups, articles on Lifehacker, and three #1 milestone posts on Indie Hackers. In this episode Dianna shares the story behind how she came up with her idea, validated it, and got her first users, and we break down what's made it so successful so far.

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    Well done Dianna! Wow you're on indie hackers podcast! This is amazing, you're killing it! Budget Meal Planner is a success! So happy for you, congratulations!!!!

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    My Main Takeaways:

    • Always work on side-projects: Dianna always worked on side-projects that were useful or interesting to her.
    • Leverage communities: Dianna is part of various food-related subreddits. She used these subreddits to validate her idea by sharing her Budget Meal Planner mailing list it. In less than a few hours she got over 200 signups.
    • Start small: Dianna started with just a simple newsletter, this enabled her to move fast.
    • Don’t do everything yourself: Even though Dianna can build websites, she chose to use Wix, a drag and drop website-builder tool, to build her website because it was faster.
    • Use deadlines to motivate you.
    • Be helpful: Dianna started Budget Meal Planner because she wanted to be helpful, with the hopes of eventually monetizing it later.
    • Believe in yourself: Dianna almost didn’t launch her Budget Meal Planner product to Product Hunt, because it was a just mailing list and she thought it wasn’t as cool as the mobile apps, websites, and software typically released on Product Hunt. But people encouraged her to post it, so she did, and it ended up getting over 500 upvotes and became the number 1 product of the day on Product Hunt.
    • Share what you build, and build an audience: Dianna would tweet about her progress with her Budget Meal Planner mailing list on Twitter, and this grew her audience.
    • Put yourself out there and allow yourself to get lucky: Since Dianna put her Budget Meal Planner out there, it was seen by a huge blog called Lifehacker, who then wrote an article about it, driving even more traffic to Budget Meal Planner.
    • Advice for beginners: Pick an idea, and validate it quickly.