10 months of grinding finally paid off!
My app was finally approved to the Apple Store after 10 months of hard work, countless pivots and changes. I'm not a full-time developer, rather I work full-time in social services. Through my experiences, I saw a need for help meal planning with ingredients on hand and creative ways to make food last longer. I didn't like chatting with AI to edit meal plans and share my preferences over again, so I thought I could make a utility tool to leverage AI and make editing meals simple. I wanted to create a dashboard and editing functions simple and easy to use.
I worked on my project during my lunch breaks, while I was waiting for appointments, essentially every chance I could. Honestly, the only thing that kept me going was a deep drive to make something worth sharing and hopefully help a few people along the way.
I probably broke every rule and best practice about making a MVP. I sometimes got lost in my dreams of what I wanted it to be, and had to learn to be confident in the first version. I think for meal planning apps, the bar is quite high for different features. Instead of being driven by a timeline, I found consistency was the better marker.
The most important lesson I've learned was that delays and compromises are part of the beginning process. I'm looking forward to hearing more feedback on how to improve. If you would like to try it out, my app Curate My Plate is out now as a web-based app and on iOS.