After spending 10+ years designing digital products for startups and corporates, I founded Happy Machines Company along with Sasi to start our indie apps journey in 2023 with Slipspaces - a tool for organising digital workspaces. While the product gained a slow early traction with 50+ beta users, our user research revealed a deeper problem: users were struggling to manage and share their collection of digital content across different platforms and devices.
Simplicity at the core
After analysing user feedback, we shifted our focus to Jeto in early 2024 to solve the core problem of seamless bookmarking. Having personally accumulated over 3,000 bookmarks across various browsers, I experienced firsthand how fragmented links & content management had become. Working with my co-founder Sasi, we spent 6 months interviewing 50+ heavy bookmarking users and found that 80% of them used 3 or more different tools to save and organise their digital content. Our research showed that existing solutions were either too complex or too limited. We focused on designing a simple experience that could work across any platform. We iterated over several prototypes and ran a few user testing sessions with our early adopters. This helped us strip away unnecessary features and focus on what mattered most - quick capture and easy retrieval.
How the product evolved
However, by late 2024, our experiments with AI-powered content processing led us to an unexpected discovery. While testing different ways to enhance bookmark organisation, we found that 40% of our users were saving recipes and food-related content. This pattern, combined with our own frustrations around meal planning and cooking, sparked another pivot. Now, as Mei Foods, we're applying our learnings about content organisation and AI to solve a more focused problem - helping users plan, cook and share recipes efficiently. We've kept our core principles of simplicity and cross-platform accessibility, while adding specific features for recipe management and meal planning.
Engineering cadence
The engineering journey has been equally iterative. Starting with a basic Progressive Web App built on React and Firebase, we've gradually expanded our stack to handle more complex features like offline sync and AI-powered recipe processing. Being a small team of two, we've embraced a lean development approach, shipping new features every two weeks based directly on user feedback.
Active development
The journey from Slipspaces to Jeto to Mei Foods has been a reminder that user needs should drive the product, even when that means walking away from the original idea. We're currently in the development phase, and user engagement and feedback continue to shape our roadmap.