Relaunching The Scientific Meal Planner as a freemium service (with a uniquely generous affiliate program!)

Hey everyone!

I've just launched a premium version of my formerly 100% free web app, The Scientific Meal Planner. Originally I had tried to run it on a patronage model, but I'd peaked at like $80/month in patronage, so I decided I needed to actually run it like a business.

9 Months ago I launched the free version on product hunt and was #3 for the day (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/the-scientific-meal-planner). I'll be relaunching it there on Saturday, as there's lots of new features since then that make it a radically better product (calorie control system, replace recipe system, favorites system, snack system).

I fully recognize that marketing is not my strong suite, and I've hatched a plan to try and address that. I've created an affiliate program for recipe authors that I think is uniquely generous. Every subscription they drive, they'll get half of the revenue, forever. It's 7.99/mo total, so that's ~4/mo per user subscribed. In addition even non referred revenue gets split with recipe creators such that a full 50% of all premium revenue goes into their pockets. In this way I hope I can essentially recruit an army partners to market it for me and benefit us both. I've currently got 8 recipe partners onboard, and their promotional efforts will be going online in the coming weeks.

In the mean time I'm taking a break from a year of feature development and focusing the next 2-3 months entirely on marketing and improving my skills in that department.

At that point I will reassess and see if I'm making enough progress to keep at it.