It all started in a scattered notes app

Every week my husband and I sit down to plan our meals. We love to cook and furthermore we cook almost every. single. night.

Over the years I’ve used different methods:

• notion
• google drive
• other planner apps
• apple notes
• google calendar

Most recently I had an ongoing shared note with my husband of recipes to try and another one for recipes we loved and anooooother one for the actual weekly plan and the grocery list.

I never found something that stuck and everything felt either not user-friendly or too scattered. I also care a lot about visuals, if I like the overall look and experience of something I’m way more likely to get excited to use it. Nothing out there struck that magic in me. So I did something about it.

Around this time I was also very into watching The Summer I Turned Pretty where I was constantly hearing “Belly” (the name of the main character). Sometimes inspiration comes from the most random places.

I had half of a Figma design going when Claude Design dropped and I was curious. So I experimented by feeding it what I had, which turned it into a working prototype in seconds. Crazy. When I was happy with the starting place, I sent it over to Claude Code where it started building it out into an actual working app.

Less than 2 hours of prompts and iterations later, Belly was born. I had successfully created a working MVP that could immediately replace my scattered notes app. I was obsessed and my GitHub was lighting up like a Christmas tree.

Belly quickly went from simply a place to organize my recipes to an actual weekly planner to a grocery list builder. This became more than a weekly tool, it was a daily cooking companion. Recipes → planning → groceries → cooking.

It has truly improved both mine and my husband’s life by bringing so much joy and excitement to weekly planning to what can become a scattered and mundane task. As we get older we are much more intentional about the food we eat and Belly really helps us stay on top of planning daily balanced meals and feel our best each week.

Friends close to me started to get curious and wanted to try it. So I figured out how to add multiple user accounts, accidentally taking down our DNS records while setting up Resend in the process. Everything is a learning opportunity!

It’s a magical feeling seeing other people love what you’ve made and discover new ways to use it as well. We’ve since grown to over 40 users and have learned so much along the way.

Some major learnings

1. Building for yourself isn’t the same as building for your users.

   The way you do things is most likely not how everyone else will use it. Example: we were almost the only ones using Belly on desktop, everyone else was using mobile. I learned this when I realized I kept forgetting to test changes on mobile before shipping….

2. Getting something into people’s hands changes how you think about the product.

   Always always always talk to users. Relying on assumptions might land you with a bunch of features no one actually uses. This was a tough lesson from our last product, Workbench, where we spent months working on a new workflow we thought would be a slam dunk. Literally none of our customers used it.

We are continuing to answer “how might we close the gap between wanting to cook something to actually cooking it?” AND “how can we make it both fun and enjoyable?”.