Gnocchi
The world's most collaborative grocery list and cooking app
I've moved Gnocchi into a larger and growing portfolio of local-first apps and tools I'm calling Biscuits.
Biscuits is live on the web at https://biscuits.club.
It's one unified account for access to sync and collaboration features across every app I make.
The transition was technically challenging in a number of ways. Scaling up my platform from 1 app to N alone was hard! But also managing annoyances like migrating domains without breaking local-first features. Local-first, as a paradigm, is particularly sensitive to the URL origin changing.
I'm looking forward to having a great platform to build more apps on, though.
My wife was getting annoyed with the update prompt modal I was using to get users to update to the latest code. On PWAs, updates can be a little tricky, but I've outgrown my MVP approach, so it's time to do something more user-friendly.
My solution is to automatically update (which requires a page reload) during user navigation if an update is available. Navigation is already an interrupting action, and updates are relatively quick, so this feels like a great transparent way to keep the app updated (which is important for sync to work correctly) without frustrating users.
Finally got around to adding what feels like table stakes these days: a proper dark mode. The app syncs to your device's preference by default, but you can choose to override it. I'm a light mode weirdo (astigmatism), so this is one of the first features I've made which isn't designed for me!
https://www.producthunt.com/products/gnocchi-club
I didn't expect a cooking app with 0 LLMs to get any traction on Product Hunt, so it's all good. It was a useful exercise in what it takes to gear up for a launch and the mechanics of it all. At the end of the day, it resulted in 0 paid subscribers, but I'm glad I did it.
-
1
Love me some Gnoccis, I'll check it out! What would you do differently next time?
-
1
I dunno, I'm not sure I'd bother with Product Hunt again for something like this. It was helpful as a forcing function to improve my onboarding flows and homepage, but otherwise the effort to list it didn't yield much.
I still need to figure out how to differentiate Gnocchi from the myriad of other grocery/cooking apps, but first I want to consider whether I really need to. It costs so little to keep running, and it works so well for me personally every week, that I wouldn't consider it a failure to just sit happily at 1 or 2 active users forever.
PH feels like it's geared toward a different mindset, and if I go too much in that direction I may ruin a good thing.
-
A big problem with grocery shopping for me is getting to the store and not having any ideas on what to buy. I often have some sort of list, but it's probably incomplete. I leave feeling like I forgot something important and I'll have to go back to the store tomorrow.
Recommendations in Gnocchi are designed to help with that. It analyzes usage entirely on-device, determines purchasing patterns over time, and then surfaces foods on the cadence you normally buy them on. For example, I tend to buy a clove of garlic about every month (I really thought it was more! Which actually led to me buying too much garlic before).
I'm really pleased with this feature and I'm glad I could do it entirely client-side, both to reduce server costs and increase user privacy.
Comment