Meal Planner App

Last week, I outgrew the dev-free database for my Heroku account. This is a fun problem to have because it means my customers are really getting a lot of use out of my app!

For context, Heroku allows you to run an instance of a Postgres database for free as long as it’s less than 10,000 rows of data (or like 5 or 10 GB). I recently got notified that I’m approaching that limit, and that I need to upgrade my database to the next level.

My app is a meal planner, so the more meals customers add, the more recipes and ingredients are being created. So for each meal a customer adds, they may be creating about 10-25 rows of data in my database. On average, customers are adding between 10-25 meals upon signing up for my app.

This is a good sign of engagement, and because my MRR is continuing to grow, I’m happy to pay the $9/mo for the next database tier. That will allow me another 10x growth before upgrading again. And beyond that, the next tier will allow me another 10x growth.

Things are looking up for the Meal Planner App! I’m excited to see where this goes!

Last week, I outgrew the dev-free database for my Heroku account. This is a fun problem to have because it means my customers are really getting a lot of use out of my app!

For context, Heroku allows you to run an instance of a Postgres database for free as long as it’s less than 10,000 rows of data (or like 5 or 10 GB). I recently got notified that I’m approaching that limit, and that I need to upgrade my database to the next level.

My app is a meal planner, so the more meals customers add, the more recipes and ingredients are being created. So for each meal a customer adds, they may be creating about 10-25 rows of data in my database. On average, customers are adding between 10-25 meals upon signing up for my app.

This is a good sign of engagement, and because my MRR is continuing to grow, I’m happy to pay the $9/mo for the next database tier. That will allow me another 10x growth before upgrading again. And beyond that, the next tier will allow me another 10x growth.

Things are looking up for the Meal Planner App! I’m excited to see where this goes!

After a couple of months into my free trial, I’m happy to announce I’ve reached $150 MRR!

I reached that number with what I like to call “guerrilla marketing”, so there’s plenty of room for growth. My new goal is to 10X that by the end of the year.

My marketing channel so far has been centered around Facebook groups. I’m going to leverage paid ads and SEO to take me to where I want to be.

While getting my early customers is still a struggle, I have generated enough organic search and organic social traffic to exceed 1,000 unique visitors to my site this week. Typically I’ve been getting in the mid 300’s/week.

A couple key factors is that Google is starting to match my site with the keyword “meal planner app” — huge win! And I’m consistently posting on over a dozen food, recipe, and meal planning Facebook groups at least once a week.

This kind of traffic can help me identify where people are falling off in the funnel and know what steps need attention.

When I noticed that some customers were dropping off onboarding immediately prior to adding payment information, I knew I needed a way to capture these leads and reach out to them.

I could use feedback from them, asking why they didn’t complete the subscription process, and I could also add an incentive for completing the signup process.

That’s exactly why I needed a sophisticated CRM, and the Hubspot free tier meets my needs completely.

I began adding contacts to my list using their API at the time of signup, which is still the only time I collect contact information.

Then, I used my admin portal in my app to generate a CSV that I import into Hubspot that dynamically places my contacts into one of three lists — Incomplete Signup, No Meals Added, and No Meals Scheduled. These three lists represent the actions I would like my customers to take next, pushing them further into my app, and hopefully driving retention.

The CSV is still partially automated, and I intend to fully automate it, once it proves to be valuable. I still have a long list of features to build, blogs to write, and problems to solve. I have to optimize my time where it’ll make the most impact. Having a solid CRM is a step in the right direction!

On February 18, I saw my first free trial customer convert to a paying customer!

That felt awesome!!!

The very next day, she used my “help” form to tell me she wants to cancel her plan.

Even though I don’t consider her my true “first paying customer”, I built in some simple customer insights into an admin portal, and I can tell that I have a handful of engaged customers.

Plus, with my strategy for sharing my ow meal plans to Facebook communities, I’m seeing around 20 new leads every week, just from people asking me what app I use for meal planning. Of those 20, only about 5 end up completing the signup process, but they’re starting to compound.

It took almost 10 months to build, but I’m proud of what I’ve done.

I like to say I built this app 20 minutes at a time. As a full-time engineer, a husband, and a father of two toddlers, 20 minutes here and there was about all I could find.

Oddly enough, the inspiration for building this app was also the hurdle that kept me from building it. For most of the year, I would come home from work as my wife was starting work. We’d trade off the parenting duties, and I’d begin to cook dinner for the family. After cooking, cleaning, and putting the kids to bed, I could only squeeze in 20 min of coding here and there before I needed to crash.

Being busy parents is hard work, and meal planning is time consuming. We want to eat healthy, easy, cheap meals, and to do so consistently requires a lot of planning.

So I started chipping away at it as often as I could find 20 min here and there. On average, it was about an hour a week. Progress was slow, but luckily I picked a tech stack that allowed me to get early wins and get unstuck quickly when I ran into hurdles.

10 months later, I’m ready to show what I built.

It’s a long-running experiment. I’m going to give it a fighting chance by spinning up a marketing plan.

I hope to give an update soon sharing that I got my first customer.