I’ve been working on my side project for 7 years.
Hello IH! Longtime lurker, first time poster. I’ve been following IH for a while now, so I thought I would finally introduce myself and start to actually participate.
My name is Nate and I’ve been working on my side-project Kulinarian.com for the past seven years (or maybe eight years, I’m not exactly sure when I started working on it). Kulinarian.com is a recipe website where chefs can create their own recipes, as well as search for other chefs’ recipes. Also, recipe bloggers use the Kulinarian “plugin” to host recipe cards on their own food and cooking websites.
The site does not generate any real income, and it’s growing very slowly. I have several thousand users, and a couple hundred food websites use my plugin. Currently the site has over 7k recipes, and that number is steadily growing.
Seven+ years sounds like an insanely long time to be working on a side-project that has barely grown, especially when you compare my story to other indie hacker stories. But I’ve stuck with Kulinarian for the long haul because it’s been a passion project from the very start. The original purpose of the site was for me to learn all aspects of web development, and I’ve definitely learned a lot along the way.
The site does not look that impressive, so what exactly have I been working on this whole time? Well nearly every aspect of the site has been rewritten multiple times. I tried creating my own css framework, js framework, ORM, the original backend was in codeigniter, but now it’s laravel 4.2. So I’ve spent a lot of time writing useless code. But again, I’ve learned a lot.
The last three years of my career have been very busy, so I have neglected the site. However, I have my nights and weekends back, so I’m currently re-building the entire site again because the existing code base is really not usable and extremely difficult to modify. This time I’m not reinventing the wheel and using React and Django, which will allow me to finally add new functionality.
Anyways, I’m looking forward to making some connections on IH.
Cheers,
Nate
Hi Nate! Thanks for sharing! Just curious - have you considered starting a newsletter? So for example, you could send members '7 interesting recipes to try this week' kind of emails and monetize with that? Same thing applies for phone apps that leverage your existing data. Good luck! :)
Hey Tim, thanks for the feedback. Yes, I have thought about a newsletter, but I’m concerned that I don’t have enough time to dedicate to writing a newsletter, especially a newsletter that is worth reading compared to the countless other cooking and recipe publications. But it is something I would like to add to the service at some point.
You could automate the newsletter though - as in write a Python script or something to automatically pick 7 random recipes from your database and send it to your subscribers. You don't have to manually do it. I use a similar approach for TripFate (https://tripfate.com).
That’s a good idea and I could see doing something like that. I definitely try to automate as much as possible. Nice product by the way, it looks great
I like these stories..seems closer to reality. Providing value consistently over a long period of time. Passion projects are awesome... You do have a lot of users though...
Thanks! I feel very fortunate to be working on a project I’m genuinely excited and passionate about, it makes a huge difference in your ability to stay focused and get through the lows.
Hey great work Nate, I also went down the road of writing a custom framework... for almost everything in our products LOL!
Terrible choice as an indie hacker, but some of the most fun I've had as a developer!
7 years is impressive, keep up the good work!
Thanks. When I was writing them I thought my frameworks were awesome, but going back into the code is just painful and comical. Fortunately it’s only me that has to deal with this mess.