The origin story here is really strong - milk protein allergy with a newborn is a deeply relatable, specific pain. That's the kind of problem-clarity that makes for good founder-market fit.

The "AI for search and substitution" angle makes sense - ingredient substitution for dietary restrictions is genuinely hard to do well across recipes and that's probably where your moat is vs. the generic meal planning apps.

I'm building ad-vertly.ai (marketing autopilots for solo founders). Curious where you're at with distribution - the allergy/dietary restriction angle seems like it would resonate well in specific communities (new parent groups, allergy forums, etc.). Are you targeting those, or still mostly letting the product speak for itself at this stage?

Are you going to localize this? Using US recipes works only okay-ish: I usually have to figure out local substitutions for some ingredients, and transform units.

Anyway, amazing idea and I absolutely feel you. Recipe sites (and search engine results) are cluttered like hell, that's why I started collecting recipes in Mealie. But in practice this merely bumped my pool from "five fallback meals" to "10 usual recipes, which mostly cover my eating preferences since I'm the only one in the household putting recipes into Mealie".

So... what does it do? You made it sound like Tinder for food. (I am assuming the food always swipes right!)

this is good! the problem is so real, every single dinner cooking on weekdays starts with the same conversation

I stress at all the steps for planning and making dinner - especially finding a good recipe that won't take too long! At the moment I'm utterly dependent on Hello Fresh to be able to make a nice dinner. MealDone could be a potential replacement, where dinner is planned for the week but instead of having the items delivered, I can buy it cheaper at the store.

For me, having a selection of high quality recipes would be important. For more experienced cooks like my husband, he would just tweak on the fly or use his own recipe anyhow and would enjoy being able to plan with the household and have a shopping list.

Good luck with the project!