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.
Honestly, the "useless" projects are often where the best product instincts come from. The fact that people move the astrological compatibility slider even though it does nothing is a genuinely interesting UX insight — people engage with things that feel playful and personal, even when they know it's silly. That's the kind of behavioral observation you can't get from reading startup advice posts.
The $0 hosting stack is also underrated. When we started building our SaaS (AI ad creative tool), one of the best decisions was keeping infra costs near zero in the early days so we could experiment without the pressure of burning money. You learn so much more when you're free to build weird things without a revenue clock ticking.
To answer your question about battle mode — I think the friction is worth it if sharing is the goal. The best viral loops I've seen aren't "share this tool," they're "settle this argument with me." That's basically what food battles are. I'd lean into the social/debate angle hard.
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.
Honestly, "does it remove a tiny daily friction?" is a legitimate product question and yours answers yes. The zero-cost stack and programmatic SEO setup show you actually know what you're doing — this isn't a throwaway build, it's a real deployment with a real architecture. The brutal feedback you might get: the value prop needs to be clearer above the fold. "What do you want to eat?" gets to the point faster than explaining the sliders. But shipping is shipping — good work getting it out.