LittleSpoon

A Recipe Platform Built by Someone Who Actually Cooks

LittleSpoon started as a passion project on a Sunday afternoon. I was frustrated with existing recipe apps — they're either glorified blogs buried in ads and life stories, or they're so over-engineered that finding a simple pasta recipe feels like navigating enterprise software. I wanted something that put the cooking experience first.

What Makes It Different

The core insight is that a recipe app should be optimised for the moment you're standing in the kitchen with flour on your hands. Everything in LittleSpoon is designed around that context:

• Step-by-step cooking mode — large text, voice-friendly, keeps your screen awake, auto-advances
• Smart ingredient scaling — change the serving size and every measurement updates, including converting between metric and imperial
• Meal planning — drag recipes into a weekly plan, auto-generate a shopping list with ingredients consolidated and grouped by aisle
• Collections and sharing — save, organise, and share recipes with friends and family

Social Features

I built social features because cooking is inherently social. You can follow other cooks, share your versions of recipes, leave tips and modifications, and see what's trending in your network. The challenge with social features is that they need critical mass to feel alive — a feed with three posts feels worse than no feed at all.

Technical Stack

It's built on the same Next.js + Supabase stack I use across my products. Supabase handles auth, the recipe database, real-time features, and image storage. The recipe data model is more complex than you'd expect — nested ingredients, instructions with timers, nutritional data, dietary tags, and relationships between variations of the same dish.

The Journey from Side Project to Product

What started as a weekend hack kept pulling me back. I'd add one feature, then realise it needed another, then another. The recipe import tool (paste a URL and it extracts the recipe from any blog) was a rabbit hole that taught me more about web scraping than I ever wanted to know. The mobile experience had to be completely rethought because responsive design alone wasn't enough — cooking mode needed a dedicated mobile-first interface.

Where It Stands

LittleSpoon is live and growing organically. I haven't spent a penny on marketing — it's all word of mouth from people who genuinely enjoy using it. The lesson is that if you build something you'd use every day, and you obsess over the details, people notice.