With Recipe Puppy I initially set out to make a recipe search engine that did everything. Besides being a hard time consuming problem, I found that I was adding features that no one was using. I changed my focus and made Recipe Puppy into a ingredient based recipe search engine that would return higher quality recipes before the lower quality ones.
Then I set out to make other single purpose products using the same technology and data I was using for Recipe Puppy. A variation on the same idea, looking deeper into the data, trying to create a community, a series of diet based recipe search engines, and most recently personalized recipes by email were all born.
The advantages of this approach is that each product is more straightforward, and offers a new opportunity to get press and become popular within a niche.
2 Comments
I wouldn’t call all of them new products, especially the series of diet based recipe search engines look like (domain) spam. Made for search engines, not people.
I know they look bad, but they are functional. See http://lifehacker.com/5531574/vegetarianrecipeus-finds-no+meat-recipes-from-dozens-of-sites