The shopping list now has a date range. That was not where I expected to end up when I started talking about a messaging app.
I spent this session fleshing out two ideas for Served Online Studio. Neither is built yet. There are notes, decisions, and a fairly healthy backlog, which is a much cheaper place to discover that you've accidentally designed three different products.
The starting point was something that winds me up: having a conversation, then seeing adverts that seem suspiciously close to whatever we'd been talking about. I can't establish from that coincidence how an advert reached me, and I'm not claiming a particular service is reading my messages. But it makes an ordinary chat feel uncomfortable. I want somewhere I can talk to my people without wondering what commercial use is being made of it.
That's the idea behind ServedOnline Messenger, or S.O.M. A private messaging app where a group feels like it has its own space. I provide and maintain the service. The people using it pay to keep their chat going, rather than every friend needing a subscription just to reply.
Then I started thinking about what people actually do in those chats.
I'd already had an idea for a recipe-sharing app called ServedOnline. I thought I'd saved the plan somewhere. Couldn't find it. We ended up rebuilding the idea from what I remembered, which may have been useful because it forced me to describe what I actually wanted from it now.
Your own recipe library. Recipes you've written, plus ones you've favourited from other people. A calendar for deciding what you're cooking, and a shopping list built from those meals. Optional household sharing, because someone using it on their own shouldn't have to invent a household to get started.
The bit I particularly like is inviting people over.
The host can ask guests to bring things, choosing ingredients from the recipe or adding something like a bottle of wine. Guests volunteer for an item. Everyone can see what's covered. Accepting dinner doesn't mean you've also agreed to supply half of it.
That gives the meal somewhere to live outside a long conversation. You can still discuss it in S.O.M., but the plan shouldn't depend on remembering which message said someone was bringing dessert.
I want these to be two apps with the same account. S.O.M. is where the conversation happens. ServedOnline is where you organise the meals and recipes. I don't want opening a messenger to mean navigating an entire household dashboard first.
Which, given where this started, needed a bit of thought.
I'd like the organiser to be useful for free. There may be paid extras, and eventually I'd like to offer cookbooks through agreements with their authors or publishers. The prices and paid boundaries can wait. For now, I'm trying to work out what people would want to use.
Basic sponsorship could help fund that free version. The version I'm comfortable planning is a labelled sponsor card in public recipe discovery. No adverts between cooking steps. Nothing competing with your timer. S.O.M. stays ad-free.
I'd also like an optional setting where you can choose the types of sponsors you see. Cookware, baking equipment, cookbooks. Leave it alone and you get a general rotation. Choose something and that's the preference, without the app quietly adjusting it because of what you've cooked, saved, searched for, or said to somebody.
It would still be advertising. I'd need to describe it honestly, and check the actual implementation rather than assume that calling it private makes it so. Selling sponsorship also means finding sponsors, so it isn't a revenue forecast yet.
But I can imagine choosing to see an advert for baking equipment. I don't want a conversation with a friend making that choice for me.
Public recipe discovery can come later. The first release is for personal and household organisation: recipes you can follow one step at a time, meal planning, shared shopping, invitations, and private sharing with people you know.
That also means the proposed public-feed adverts come later. They aren't a reason to rush a public feed into the first version.
There's already plenty to build. Even the shopping list raised a useful question: am I buying for a couple of days, or doing a big shop? So it gets dates you can change, rather than assuming everybody shops for exactly the same week.
I'm leaving the pricing discussion there for now. Next time I pick this up, I want to walk through planning a few actual meals and see where the household version gets awkward. There will be something. There always is once you stop writing feature names and try to use them.
