LeCheese

Mobile App for Cheese Lovers

No Employees
Founders Code
Solo Founder
Food & Drink

I love cheese (like every other human being), but there was no place to learn more about each cheese, rate the cheeses I liked (or disliked), and save the ones I still want to try.

September 18, 2019 Translated App to Portuguese

LeCheese is now available in Portuguese! 🇧🇷🇵🇹

To accomplish this, I had to translate almost 6 million characters. Here's how I did it:

Phase 1 - App Content

First, I had to go over the entire source and replace every text with a function. This was by far the most time-consuming task. These two libraries were very helpful: i18n-js and expo-localization.

Phase 2 - Database Content

Then I had to make sure that every single item in my database was translated. Today I'm using Firebase's Firestore, so I had to loop through all documents and use Google's AutoML Translation API to translate them.

Phase 3 - User Generated Content

On LeCheese users can leave a review about cheese, so I needed to create a foundation that could automatically translate user-generated content. To solve this I wrote a Cloud Function that executes the translation every there's a new database entry.

Phase 4 - App Store Content

Finally, I was ready to publish to the Google Play and App Store. This involved pretty much translating the promotional text and taking new screenshots in different devices.

This whole process took me a week to finish, but I learned a lot and I'm super happy to make the app more accessible for other people.

How about you? How's your experience with translation?

July 23, 2019 Joined YC's Startup School

A couple of months ago I started watching a lot of Y Combinator videos and really enjoyed the content they were producing. When I heard about their free Startup School program I decided to join and see what is all about.

The program is still ongoing, but I'm loving it so far. My favorite part about it is that every week we need to send status updates. They ask what is your primary metric and how much it changed from one week to the other.

This simple question helps you frame your entire action plan and prioritize what really matters.

Anyways, excited to keep talking to other solo founders and hearing their stories.

June 2019 Reached 2,000 app downloads

Today we reached another nice milestone. In total, we have 1,227 downloads coming from App Store and 773 coming from Play Store.

One of the things I learned is that my target audience is mostly iOS users. I didn't expect such a big gap between App Store and Play Store. That's an interesting insight.

May 3, 2019 Added Affiliate Links

Many people said that they loved the app, but wished it was easier to know the price of a specific cheese or where to buy it.

I've never done anything with Affiliate Marketing before, but I decided to give it a try using Amazon Associates.

I'm pretty sure this is not going to be the Business Model that will drive this app, however, I wanted to use this as an experiment.

March 23, 2019 Reached 1,000 app downloads

Today we reached our first milestone - one thousand app downloads!

In total, there have been 644 downloads coming from App Store and 356 coming from Play Store.

Even though this is not a huge number, it's better than zero. This is something I should always remember, 1 > 0.

February 24, 2019 Launched Landing Page

My focus has been completely in the mobile app, but I thought it would be important to have some web presence.

I didn't want to spend too much time building it, so I just bought a WebFlow theme. Doing this was very against my engineering mind, however I need to focus on the app first.

January 22, 2019 Finished MVP

It took 3 weeks, but I'm done building the MVP for LeCheese. It has been fun to play with React Native every night after work and every weekend.

Even though I'm comfortable writing JavaScript, this is the first time I use RN and build a native app. There's a lot of differences between developing for the web and developing for mobile, which is both scary and exciting!

January 2, 2019 Came up with the idea

I remember coming back home with my wife after going to the supermarket. We sat at the dining table and decided to open a bottle of wine and eat some cheese we just bought.

We had several wine bottles at home, so I decided to scan them using Vivino in order to discover which was the best wine we had. After that, I wanted to do the same with the cheeses I bought.

I was pretty sure that there was an app for this, but when I opened the app store I realized that there was nothing decent.

Next day I woke up and started this project :)

About

I love cheese (like every other human being), but there was no place to learn more about each cheese, rate the cheeses I liked (or disliked), and save the ones I still want to try.