Dishsimply
A recipe web app that shows you what you can cook with the fewest extra ingredients, based on what is already in your kitchen.
The brief
I moved from Singapore to Germany and had to learn to cook from scratch. Two things kept getting in the way. The ingredients I grew up with were hard to find and I never knew what to swap in, and almost every recipe online buries the instructions under a long essay while assuming you will go out and buy whatever it calls for. I wanted the opposite: something that starts from what is already in my fridge and gets to the point. So I built it.
The challenge
The product only works if one constraint drives every decision: minimise what you have to go and buy. That had to shape the matching, the substitutions and the interface. Then it had to hold up as a real product built solo, with pantry first search, a community submission and moderation pipeline, AI nutrition, 13 languages including right to left support, offline access and SEO, and no team to hand any of it to.
How I ran it
- 01Framed the whole product around one question: what can I actually make with what I have right now?
- 02Built pantry first matching that ranks recipes by fewest missing ingredients, with suggested substitutions so a near match is not a dead end.
- 03Inferred diet tags automatically from each recipe's ingredients, vegetarian, vegan, halal, kosher, gluten free and more, then used them as filters.
- 04Opened it up as a free community platform: recipe submissions with photos and steps, running through admin review, approval and feedback.
- 05Shipped it as an installable PWA that works offline, in 13 languages, with structured recipe data and share cards built in from the start.
What I managed
- Product strategy
- UX/UI design
- Brand & identity
- Full-stack build
- AI integration
- Internationalisation
- SEO & PWA
A personal fix that became a free, community cooking platform, live and built solo end to end across product, design and code.
- Live at dishsimply.com and in active development.
- Designed and built entirely solo: concept, matching logic, interface, backend and API, database layer, moderation, AI nutrition, internationalisation, SEO, PWA and deployment.
- 13 languages with full right to left support for Arabic.
- One codebase running SQLite locally and MySQL in production, with migrations that add columns safely on deploy.
Have a project like this?
I’m available for project management and delivery work. Tell me what you’re building and let’s map it out.