from Hacker News

Show HN: Tinder, but to decide what to eat

by kiru_io on 11/3/24, 8:56 PM with 222 comments

• by juliushuijnk on 11/4/24, 7:52 PM

  I work for a startup that provides meal plans. This and competing apps let you set requirements (kcal, intolerances, etc), also includes breakfast, etc. These apps are aimed at people that want to eat healthy and are looking for some inspiration.

  You seem to go with user generated content, so the inspiration part is out, the health part is out, but you focus very much on the problem of forming a choice just for diner.

  I do think this way your audience is huge, but the added value is a bit limited.

  So you can decide to slowly move towards those other apps. Or, perhaps move away from it somehow. Maybe it's a generic tool to help you grow and maitain your relationship with your partner by providing tools that deal with each other preferences and choices within that relationship. Both practical and more emotional. But I guess I'm now more brainstorming :).

  You can also just keep it small and have fun tinkering in a way that works for you. I read a comment:

  > There are servers needed for the app to work, right? So I guess subscription makes sense?

  Perhaps you don't really need servers. Keep the data just local on the app. Let people use regular chat for getting to a compromise. That way you could ask a one time fee of $5. It could be a (very) small passive income that doesn't require you much work, no moderation, no security risks.

  Either way, good luck!

• by woodylondon on 11/4/24, 1:11 PM

  I like the idea and face the same challenge. I’ve just installed it and, from my first impressions, it seemed a bit basic. Here’s what I expected:

  Hundreds of recipes that I could swipe left and right through, allowing me to build up a typical selection of what I would usually eat. Instead, I was presented with only three choices, none of which I would generally consider.

  A simple way to send the code to my wife — via imessage, Telegram, etc. Instead, I had to tell her in person! :)

  This presents the perfect opportunity to delve into shopping lists where the wife wants something healthy, and the I crave a burger. I can think of quite a few features you could add if the app develops further.

  Also, like the comment below about having a stranger over for dinner (not for dating purposes), it could involve a couple or someone visiting a new country who would appreciate a local showing them around and perhaps covering the dinner cost. Once the app learns your food preferences and interests, that could be quite exciting! There might already be an app that does this; I’m not sure. Swiping left and right on both food likes / dislikes and also general interests.

• by nirui on 11/4/24, 1:28 AM

  If it's a recipe focused app, then maybe it should not be a "swipe daily" thing, as what's in the fridge right not maybe not matching what's on the phone, and it takes time and effort to buy and store food.

  You probably need a food purchasing to-do list feature, and allow user to plan ahead of purchase.

  But overall, it's a very nice idea with many potentials.

  When I was little, the feeling of anticipating a good dinner always keeps me excited the entire day. Maybe this app can bring that feeling back.

• by emsign on 11/4/24, 10:41 AM

  Why not both? See what others around you want to eat, swipe together, meet up with a stranger in a restaurant and eat together. Maybe get to know them, maybe not.

• by lenerdenator on 11/4/24, 1:58 PM

  Man, if it has the same success rate as Tinder did for me, I'm gonna starve.

• by raylad on 11/4/24, 7:52 AM

  The app is unusable to me because you have to pick three out of only four initial options, none of which appeal to me actually. Another problem is that the initial options don’t list ingredients, so it’s unclear whether they contain anything that the user may not want to eat.

• by kassner on 11/4/24, 6:17 AM

  I solved this problem with a different approach: computer tells you what to cook, period. It allows some variation given you might not have all the ingredients at home, but that’s about it. I made a AGPL project out of it, been using it for a year now, and it has been surprisingly helpful.

  https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2023/09/21/what-to-cook-launch... https://github.com/kassner/whattocook

• by CrazyStat on 11/3/24, 10:58 PM

  This is a cool idea.

  Unfortunately I’m not going to pay $20/year to make deciding on dinner slightly easier. Sorry. I understand why people want subscriptions for recurring revenue. But I hate having dozens and dozens of subscriptions for niche services.

  If this was like a $10 one time purchase I might go for it.

• by WaylonKenning on 11/4/24, 12:28 AM

  For a marketing app like this, really the people paying should be the restaurants. They pay a bit of money, they appear a bit more often, and a bit more at the beginning of the list of dishes displayed. Cool idea and makes a lot of sense!

  Also should consider what was selected last time - a bit of a predictive algorithm would be useful to start providing towards my likes a bit quicker.

• by hatmanstack on 11/8/24, 2:34 PM

  This sounded fun and I wanted to try it, so I built a web version. It's open-source built with React Native. The code is here https://github.com/HatmanStack/savorswipe or it's hosted here https://www.savorswipe.fun You can easily add recipes to the swipe list by snapping a photo of ingredients and directions then adding the photo to the app.

• by jayd16 on 11/4/24, 12:24 AM

  Why is it not called Dinnr?

• by passwordoops on 11/4/24, 12:50 AM

  Neat idea, but I have to echo the negative sentiment on the subscription. I get there are costs associated to running an app, but this is not a problem-solution I would pay for. Hopefully you do find a demographic who will.

  Good luck!

• by sqeaky on 11/4/24, 3:07 AM

  Isn't this taking something that should be relationship building and outsourcing to an app? How long can a relationship last when people refuse to settle the littlest of disagreements like rasonable adults?

• by strken on 11/3/24, 10:37 PM

  This is not limited to the app under discussion, but how well do iOS emulators and compatibility layers for Android phones work? Are they anywhere close to as good as, say, Proton and Wine?

• by ieuanking on 11/4/24, 3:49 PM

  As someone who loves to cook I really like this idea, I think it would be really helpful if there was some kind of social element -- like seeing how many people cooked a meal, or reviews from others not just from your immediate family circle. I always wanna know what other people think about dishes prior to cooking, NYT cookbook does this really well with their comment section (which I always check before cooking)

• by misstercool on 11/6/24, 3:38 AM

  I felt generate recipe repositories is quite a friction, not sure how many user would like to go through this process. But if you have nearby restaurant pictures, swipe right for matches seems a better use case. People don't need to populate the content, and you can let them define a zipcode to narrow down the options.

• by lucasllinasm on 11/3/24, 11:55 PM

  Is there a way with which you could expand the number of recipes available?

  You have a set of ingredients at home (or easily purchaseable)—an evolution of this app could have you tell the app "look, I want recipes that use any of these 45 different ingredients, what recipes have we never tried?" And it has access to some big database of possibilities.

• by marmaduke on 11/4/24, 2:08 PM

  Just brainstorming here, but as a parent and someone who subscribed to a weekly CSA, it’d be a big boost to be able to take a picture of what I’ve got and get some ideas about recipes, especially if I could say, I’ve only got about 15 minutes to make dinner for kids. I guess that doesn’t really fit the Tinder model..

• by excalibur on 11/4/24, 5:02 AM

  Does this only work for two people? Some of us have significantly larger households. Not that we're on iOS anyway.

• by nritchie on 11/3/24, 11:45 PM

  Nice idea. It would be great to plan a week's menu using something like this. Currently, we alternate weeks and it ends up being one week of the same 6 recipes and one week with slightly more variety. Then there is the kids who won't eat 80% the foods we'd like to. :-( Tough to please everyone.

• by metalman on 11/4/24, 10:13 AM

  as a foodie,with hypoglcymia, who also trained under the best chef in Canada,amongst other excellent food teachers, what would take sn application to the next level would a further evaluation of the users physiological state so; when my blood sugar bottoms out, I can EAT and need a fully balanced meal,and I have learned to look at my hand ,vibrating or trembling as a proxy for hunger and this is something a phones accelerometer could detect and use as data for recipie suggestions, and in my case I have to eat something before I can cook a meal ,so go into a whole menue sugestion I dont need or would use such an app, as I invented food,but I can see how it could be very helpfull,especialy in a busy family situation with diverse diatary requirements

• by justinl33 on 11/3/24, 11:38 PM

  I've seen people pay a yearly subscription for much less, so I'm not going to comment

• by dirkc on 11/8/24, 2:54 PM

  Nice app, I really like the idea! Let me know if you need help getting the Android app through the closed testing, happy to install and test!

• by cork0plent3 on 11/4/24, 2:13 AM

  Funny, there was something called "Why Don't We..." back in 2010 where people would post dates they wanted to go on. It was a lot of fun because dates were inventive and noval and it's how I found my current life partner.

• by nighthawk454 on 11/4/24, 4:39 AM

  Hey, just wanted to say nice app :)

  Lotta people talking about broader app/subscription ecosystem issues, which hopefully you can take as off-topic to your specific project. Making a cool useful thing and putting it on the internet is great, cheers.

• by wonderwonder on 11/4/24, 1:47 AM

  Do you have to input your own recipes? It doesn't just provide recipes and you can select your favorites?

  How long does it take for someone to input 40 recipes?

  I feel like this should essentially just be a cookbook app with a random function call.

• by ata_aman on 11/3/24, 11:51 PM

  It would be cool to be able to see what the other person has already swiped on or "favorited" so I can just look at that first to see if there is anything there I can immediately swipe on.

• by raldi on 11/4/24, 2:54 PM

  The killer feature for me is if you could tell it when you throw something in the bottom of the freezer or back of the pantry and it reminds you do do something with it in two months

• by nextcaller on 11/4/24, 12:53 AM

  Think of a pun and pay for a Shark Tank ad, they'll love the idea

• by ramassnel1 on 11/7/24, 5:49 PM

  I never think about this idea, probably next one "Tinder, but to decide what should i buy" kind of things

• by yaomtc on 11/4/24, 3:25 AM

  Any plans to extend it to the other 60% of smartphone users?

• by cvburgess on 11/4/24, 12:20 PM

  This is an awesome app that my partner half-joking had been asking me to build for years. Glad to see someone actually made it!

• by android521 on 11/4/24, 8:38 AM

  There is an idea like this coming out every year and they mostly failed. I think it is described in one of pg essays.

• by xttjsn on 11/4/24, 12:19 AM

  It crashes on my first three attempts after setting up the family code so I will probably not give another try :(

• by 0b01 on 11/3/24, 10:34 PM

  For me I like to use a tournament tracker.

• by xttjsn on 11/4/24, 12:18 AM

  It crashes on my first 3 attempts after setting up the family code, so I’ll probably not try it again.

• by ispaceman on 11/5/24, 10:33 PM

  If it would recommend/show meals from restaurants around that would be great.

• by wildekek on 11/4/24, 7:42 AM

  This would make sense as a Mealie extension. You have a content (recipe) bootstrapping issue.

• by tonymet on 11/4/24, 12:47 AM

  really fun idea. one marketing approach would be to use suggestive foods like squash or eggplant.

  About your girlfriend, she wants you to make a decision. That's why you're ending up in a recursive loop.

• by hi_hi on 11/4/24, 10:11 AM

  I was really hoping this would be a thing that gave you home cooked meal recipes, for normies. Not the bullshit "I fancy myself as a chef and want to brag about how much effort i put into my family dinners" kind of recipes, but the "oh my god, I'm so brain dead after a day at work, what can I throw together that is healthy, tasty and relatively simple".

  Where are those recipes? Like ones that Kenji does, but without having to do everything from scratch because I'm lazy and would forgo some amount of taste for pouring a packet or jar of something over some other, more fresh, stuff and cook it for 30 minutes. Thats real person minutes, not "Jamie Oliver, this has been timed to perfection by a team of 10 pro chefs who spent 5 days tweaking everything so I could rock up infront of a camera and make it look effortless" minutes.

  Oh, and while I'm at it, if you could also make these recipes palatable to my 8 yo child so I don't have to cook A WHOLE OTHER MEAL while brain dead and lazy, I would happily like and subscribe and even pay the equivalent of my Netflix subscription.

  Thank you.

• by djbusby on 11/3/24, 11:46 PM

  UrbanSpoon (again)?

• by cjoelrun on 11/4/24, 3:00 AM

  Lol. I read the title as Tinder, but they(the girl) decides what to eat. Could work.

• by artpi on 11/4/24, 6:12 AM

  DINDER

• by massung on 11/4/24, 12:00 AM

  When my wife and I were dating, we came up with a simple rule:

  Whoever was driving would mentally pick a place and start driving there. The other - before getting to the parking lot - could pick anywhere else and that’s where we would go instead.

  We’ve been happily married 26 years now and still follow that same rule for choosing where to eat. ;-)

• by casta on 11/3/24, 11:17 PM

  I don't mean to belittle your app, I can't try it 'cause I don't have iOS.

  We did solve the problem in a much easier way though. We do have 40 recipes we usually cycle through. I wrote them in a spreadsheet and marked them based on who can cook them, if it's brunch, lunch or dinner, quick or elaborate, summery or wintery.

  Then in another sheet I just create a list of those recipes/dishes picked randomly based on the day of the month.

  If we start the discussion "what do we eat tonight", I can just open the spreadsheet. 99% of the time proposing the option for that day on the sheet gives us closure and we're done.

• by crossroadsguy on 11/4/24, 2:36 AM

  There is absolutely ZERO case for a dedicated app for this thing - a web app is 'more than' more than enough. Glad to see a subscription fee. Totally makes sense. Without that I could not have stomached it.

  So very venture capital - solving real world problems, one subscription at a time. Nice.

• by dankwizard on 11/3/24, 11:10 PM

  Putting this behind a subscription is crazy.

• by dhoe on 11/4/24, 3:45 AM

  I'm the person most positive about technology of all my friends, and this gets a no from me. A relationship is an endless sequence of coordination problems, and you need to work out a way to do these effortlessly. Defer to the person with stronger opinions, everybody decides half of the time, some quid pro quo, I mean there's just endless ways to solve this in an easier and more fun way than using an app.

• by dmje on 11/4/24, 10:51 AM

  Weird, unlike everyone else on this thread I just don't see this as a problem to be solved. My wife and I talk to each other (I know, crazy, right?) and one of us suggests something to eat and then we decide. No subscription required.

• by rhabarba on 11/3/24, 10:35 PM

  > Tinder, but for couples

  :(

• by bovermyer on 11/4/24, 11:41 AM

  Neat idea and good execution.

  However, I would not personally use this, because I plan meals for a full week in advance, trying to arrange for both a style of cuisine and for repeated ingredients.

  So, I'm not your target audience.

• by eliaskg on 11/4/24, 12:03 PM

  Missed name opportunity: Dinnder

• by dylanwenzlau on 11/4/24, 8:02 AM

  [flagged]

• by seu on 11/4/24, 10:09 AM

  I'm not sure if I'm getting this: people need an app to decide something that can easily be decided by... talking to each other?!

• by KaoruAoiShiho on 11/3/24, 10:35 PM

  Actually a great idea

• by hkon on 11/3/24, 10:56 PM

  Have you considered just eating two separate dinners?

• by bmalum on 11/3/24, 9:51 PM

  Nice! Solving this problem with technology. Looks amazing. Well done!

• by iamhamm on 11/4/24, 5:19 AM

  What about an app to tell you what kind of sub sandwich to eat? Could call it Grinder!

• by casta on 11/3/24, 11:17 PM

  I don't mean to belittle your app that unfortunately I can't try it since I don't have iOS.

  We did solve the problem in a much easier way though. We do have 40 recipes we usually cycle through. I wrote them in a spreadsheet and marked them based on who can cook them, if it's brunch, lunch or dinner, quick or elaborate, summery or wintery.

  Then in another sheet I just create a list of those recipes/dishes picked randomly based on the day of the month.

  If we start the discussion "what do we eat tonight", I can just open the spreadsheet. 99% of the time proposing the option for that day on the sheet gives us closure and we're done.