I spent weeks building a food decision tool instead of something useful
Real talk: I had every opportunity to build something that matters. A SaaS, a productivity tool, anything with a business model.
Instead I built justdecideforme.com.
It’s a tool that decides what to eat for you. You enter two foods, move some sliders (taste, health, speed, hunger), a 3-second countdown runs, and the algorithm speaks. There’s also a battle mode where you can challenge friends to vote on pizza vs sushi – backed by Supabase with IP-based deduplication so people can’t vote twice. And yes, one of the sliders measures “astrological compatibility” with your food. It does absolutely nothing. People move it anyway.
The stack, since IH people ask:
Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS – no frameworks. Supabase for real-time voting. Cloudflare Pages for hosting. Total running cost: $0. I also added 20 programmatic SEO pages for food debates (pizza-vs-burger, ramen-vs-pho etc.) that auto-create battle records in Supabase on first visit.
What I’m genuinely unsure about:
- Is battle mode the right viral mechanic, or is it too much friction?
- The “useless slider” gets mentioned a lot when people share it – is that a feature worth leaning into more?
- Does this concept work beyond food? (drinks, movies, travel destinations?)
Is it useful? Debatable. Is it fun? I think so. Will it make me rich? Please don’t answer that.
Would love any feedback – brutal or otherwise.
it's fun! I like the idea. whether the battle is a good viral mechanic...I don't know. perhaps. Obviously for a specific targeted audience yes.
The useless slider is random, right? Saw it was eye of the universe or energy or something like that. I would actually lean into people liking it and use one - so it seems consistent and important :) (the astrology one for example, people will use it)
One thing does feel counter-intuitive: the sliders. Moving it to the right grows the left colour, so obviously gives more importance to the left choice. But my intuition is, oh I want to give more weight to the one on the right, so I pull right.
Glad you liked the overall idea! Thank you for the feedback!
I really appreciate you calling out the sliders – you’re absolutely right. It could be counter-intuitive right now. I think I got too used to how it works internally, but from a user perspective, pulling right should naturally favor the right option. I’ll work on fixing that so it aligns better with instinct.