The Member Kitchens platform already worked; it was delivering real value to creators and their followers. It was growing from all perspectives. I iterated weekly with new features that brought new value to the tenant owners and their members. It was a very stable platform with limited support needs and very simple to operate.
In the early days of Mealpro App, the founder Liam drove that change as he responded to customers and saw opportunities himself. I’d implement his plans and watched the product gain traction. To this day, I applaud the early decisions that were right for that phase, despite being wrong for today - prove the market fit quickly, and scale later. Eventually I bought the business and continue to focus on customer outcomes both current and future.
And then last year, five years after the first line of code was written, I decided to start all over again. Nothing was broken, but it was time to re-up on the commitment to not just provide a home for recipes and meal plans, but to bridge the gap between generic platforms and full blown custom development.
What was working
The original platform already had table stakes - recipe library, dynamic meal plans, support for member subscriptions and supporting resources. Tenant owners provided curated content in an ad-free user experience that made daily meal prep simpler. Tenant owners, both those with existing bases of customers and those who were just starting out, were generating real revenue with over 150,000 member accounts and 40,000 weekly unique users.
One such owner is Vanya Insull who moved from simple sharing of ideas, to Kajabi, to using Member Kitchens as a home for her members.
What members do every week
It was easy to see that while the platform was valuable, it was more of a clean searchable list of content rather than an engaging platform. Members can get recipes anywhere, so what they are really paying for is to be guided with curated content, from a personality they respect, enjoy and have a common perspective as it relates to food. Sure, they still want to put their own spin on things, but having that curation, support and a guided journey from a trusted personality are what they pay for.
When incremental improvement stops compounding
The constant iteration of new features was the right method of development in the early years, and it was driven mostly on customer requests. It proved that the platform concept was working, and that food content creators found value but wanted more. That continued for years – there was always something more to be done.
Along the way, I was learning about the domain. I had plenty of experience building online tech products, but no history in the recipe space. I learned that recipes and their ingredients are really quite complicated if you want to do it right, and I learned that while an online fax product built once to serve millions is possible, somebody wanting “their own app” really does want things “their way”. This isn’t a bad thing, it is just an element of business that I wasn’t familiar with.
So I found myself with all this experience, a growing business, and lofty goals, but needed to break free of early decisions that were holding me back. The core tech was great for getting it up and running, but was no longer keeping up with my needs. Customer feature requests had slowed, which could be incorrectly construed as “it has everything”, instead of “it is stale and stagnant".
What I chose to optimize for next
I envisioned a complete platform, on the scale of any other SaaS product, but built with a very narrow target audience. I focused on what would be a good business model for myself, and for my tenants. The business originally focused on food content creators, but I kept hearing from nutritionists, and wellness coaches as well. Their needs were different, and there were gaps to be addressed. The platform has also had success with non-English customers so that needed to be built into the platform as a primary use case, not an add-on.
Heavier focus on the personality, the tenant/app owner
First rate ingredient/nutrition model
Guided experience options
More flexibility and branding
What scaling products taught me about this call
At j2, a company with 40% net profit margins and a public company, we were not in a position to wake up and rebuild an entire platform – investment in the future came in the form of M&A. I loved working with the acquired targets as it meant agility, speed, innovation and excitement. These small teams were always looking to do the next thing for their customers, bring new value and help them succeed. Always on the table was, can we do this another way. The mothership was the stable giant meeting the needs of the masses, while the smaller entities could make fundamental changes without inserting large scale risk.
If something went wrong, it could be remedied fast. If a test failed to meet expectations, it could easily be rolled back. And if a good early decision was not a hindrance to growth, it could be re-imagined.
Reinvention happened through acquisition because the core ship could not turn. As a solo owner of a profitable niche SaaS, I was the acquired startup — I could take the risk the mothership could not.
Before and After
So I pulled the trigger and rebuilt everything. As of today, existing tenants are migrating to the new platform on their timeline. I expect some tenants to stay put for quite some time, and that’s okay too as the cost to support is relatively low.
Existing tenants that have moved, did have to go through a one-time ingredient mapping routine as the old text based model was moved to a robust entity model. The migration meant having to automatically map to established ingredients but given that users sometimes “misused” the flexibility of the text based system, the mapping was not 100% accurate. So a review process was developed allowing tenant admins to either clean up completely, accept the mappings, or migrate with custom ingredients and clean up over time.
Other than that, migrations have been smooth, with small bugs identified and fixed within a few hours. And tenants are now discovering the added value that they can incorporate into their apps. I have two new challenges to address: 1. Educate admins on what is available (when they most need it) and 2. Simplify the experience for new tenants – the platform now can be overwhelming.
The overall sentiment is that tenants are thrilled with what the platform offers. Tenants will slowly over time begin to look more unique and personalized for their own business needs and branding.
What Hasn’t Changed
While the platform may be new, the relationship with tenants will continue as a partnership in monetization. Member Kitchens and tenants have aligned goals of membership growth for the tenant by providing value to members that can’t be found elsewhere. I still respond quickly to feature requests, and bug reports, and many new ideas are now possible with the new tech stack in place.
Onward.