Quick Chat with Dianna Allen of Budget Meal Planner

Courtland Allen: 0s

Dianna Allen, Welcome to the Indie Hackers podcast.

Dianna Allen: 4s

Thank you for having me.

Courtland Allen: 5s

You are on a roll right now. I think you’ve had the number one milestone on Indie Hackers for three days in a row.

Dianna Allen: 11s

I didn’t even know that. That’s amazing.

Courtland Allen: 14s

Yes, you’re killing it. You have been working on your app, Budget Meal Planner. When did you launch it, late March?

Dianna Allen: 21s

Yes, the first day of me actually doing something with it was March 27th. It was just a couple months ago, really.

Courtland Allen: 30s

A couple months ago and, yet, today you’re already waking up to articles about you on Lifehacker and you’re number one on Product Hunt. Getting a ton of traffic. Let’s talk about this. How did you get here?

Dianna Allen: 41s

I’ve always worked on something in the past, just little things that were part of my life. The first thing that I did was travel related. Then I started working on something that was related to tea because I really like tea and its health benefit, but none of those really felt like my heart was in it.

I sat down one day just spontaneously, and this was the day that I started Budget Meal Planner, and I thought about what was going on in my life that would be interesting to some people. I thought about how I eat for $5 a day. And, at the time, I didn’t think that anyone would really be that interested in it, but I knew it could help somebody.

I knew someone out there it would help. I went ahead and just wrote down a typical day for me. I think, back then, I just wrote down one day versus a week of meals and I went to Reddit because, at that point, I had become familiar with Reddit. I was in a few subreddits that were food related, so I understood that I could get immediate feedback on it.

When I posted that post about what I eat typically in a day for 5 bucks, I went ahead and included an email sign-up link in it, just because I was measuring to see how worthy this idea was. I put a link in it and was like, “If anyone was interested in this, I can write more of these each week, if that’s what you would like”.

Then, I posted it. Literally, within a couple of hours, I watched my mailing list grow. First, it was just the first couple few. I was like, "Oh, cool. That’s my point. Someone out there was interested in it." Next thing I knew, I was hitting 50 people. Then, it was 100. Then, I think by the end of the night, because I posted it about 5 pm.

When I was going to sleep, I checked one last time and I had already 250 people signed up. Then, that was when I was like, "Okay. I guess I got to go through with my promise and follow up on providing these every week." That's basically how it all started.

Courtland Allen: [00: 02:53] What were you using to collect these email sign ups?

Dianna Allen: [00: 02:56] I was using Mailchimp back then.

Courtland Allen: [00: 02:59] Tell me about this Reddit post. I don't spend a ton of time on Reddit myself, but I know there are lots of different strategies that people use to make posts more or less successful. What did you do to make sure that your post did as well as it did?

Dianna Allen: [00: 03:11] During that day, I wasn't actually thinking strategically or anything. In the past I have read about Reddit and how useful it was, but that day, I honestly went to a word editor and I just wrote down, let's say for breakfast, I eat an omelet. I would just write, "Omelet". I would write how many ingredients you needed, so two eggs, a couple mushrooms, maybe some cheese, and then I wrote down in two sentences how to make an omelet.

I did that for each meal, so I did breakfast, lunch, dinner and I did snacks, because that's a typical day. That was pretty much it. It was very straightforward, but it was very in-depth at the same time.

Courtland Allen: [00: 03:58] That's super straightforward. How did you feel once you saw hundreds of people interested in this and you had to commit to putting out more and more meal plans?

Dianna Allen: [00: 04:07] When I first saw people signing up, I was internally screaming, because I didn't expect anything to come from this. It just hit me that day, that I was like, "You know what? This is a really good idea." I did some quick Google searches and I tried to see if anyone was actually offering content like this.

The thing is, there are websites out there that say, “budget friendly,” but then I read it and they're still saying it's $5 a meal. I'm like, "Okay, $5 a meal, that's pretty cheap, still", but if you're actually, truly on a budget, a lot of people can't afford $15 a day. That's when I was like, "I know this can help people."

I wanted to proceed and go forward with offering the content. That's when I decided to switch the focus instead of just talking about a daily guide of meals. I went ahead and made it so you get a week's worth of meals because if you don't normally do 1 grocery shop a week, you could just follow this guide and know what to get that one day and it would last you the whole week.

Courtland Allen: [00: 05:15] Five dollars a day. This is making me feel so bad. I paid $19 for a salad the other day in San Francisco, no joke. It was $12 in added chicken, $17 in tax-- $19.

Dianna Allen: [00: 05:28] I believe it and we've all had our meals that we splurge on. There's nothing wrong with that, but I just know there's people out there who appreciate a cheaper meal once in a while, too.

Courtland Allen: [00: 05:39] When you started this, you didn't have a website. You were just posting on Reddit, you had your mailing list. What made you decide to actually build this into a website? Into an actual product?

Dianna Allen: [00: 05:50] When I started working on this, I worked on previous projects before, but none of them really hit off. This one, I actually told myself, "Dianna, do not dedicate more time than you need to do this project" because in my past, I didn't have a winning streak. I told myself, "I'll only work on this once a week and just send out a newsletter".

Well, it didn't matter how little I was working on it because my mailing list was just growing and growing and growing. There came a point where every couple weeks, someone would ask, "Hey, is there a way to access the previous ones?" because in my newsletters, I would put what number this was. At that point it was like, "Weekly Meals Issue #13".

People knew that there were 12 before this and people would ask, "Where can I access these?". Then, one day I was just like, "You know what? I've had 5 people ask me to access these. I have them saved on my laptop. I might as well post them somewhere for everyone to see them all."

Courtland Allen: [00: 07:00] Makes so much sense. I love this whole "start small" approach. You started off with nothing but a newsletter. It's not crazy hard to get a newsletter out the door. You don't have to code, it doesn't take months of investment. I mean, you said you were working on it for one day a week, which is pretty spectacular to have such a great response to something you're not putting a crazy amount of effort into.

Dianna Allen: [00: 07:19] It's been very rewarding because of that and I'm actually glad I didn't put more time into it because I feel like then, I would have actually set my expectations higher than they should have been. I think that's why, in the past, a lot of projects never really hit off for me because I had already put in so much effort for them that even if they had some minor success, I never felt it was enough.

Courtland Allen: [00: 07:43] I have a sticky note on my monitor right now that says, "The key to happiness is lower expectations". I try to remind myself, constantly, because sometimes things go really well, but I was expecting it to be amazing, so I'm not happy and that's really dumb. It's smart to start with realistic expectations.

It makes it easier to start, too, because then you don't have all this pressure to do crazy stuff. Anyways, people are telling you, "Dianna, we want to see the past meal plans." There's a lot of ways you can go about doing that. You can set up a website, you can just email them the past meals. What was your approach to going forward?

Dianna Allen: [00: 08:14] Funny you mention that. The first couple people who did ask me, I was like, "You know what? Just take my whole file system." I went to email them back and then I attached 15 meal plans. I was like, "I hope this is fine." They absolutely loved it. I did that for the first couple of people because I'm a giver. I don't care. That was the beginning of that.

Then, when I went to actually realize that, "Oh, a lot of people could actually take use of this. I can't email all of them. I can't email my whole list of everything". It was like a "time is money" situation, even though there wasn't money involved yet. Me personally, I know how to code and I could build a website myself, but it would probably take me a good 2 weeks until I built something that I found worthy.

I went to WIX instead because I figured, "If I just have to pick from a template, I'm not going to strive for perfection because I know I can't really work around it with code." I actually went to WIX, it was a Friday morning, and I was like "Okay, this is the day I'm going to invest in my website. I'm going to get it all set up."

Then, by hour 5 of putting all the content on it and getting it to how I liked it, it was done. It just took one day, 5 hours and then I launched the live website that following Saturday morning.

Courtland Allen: [00: 09:46] This is an impressive amount of discipline. To be somebody who knows how to code, you can build something from scratch, and yet, you didn't give into that temptation. Nobody does that. All of us just give in and build stuff from scratch and it's really bad. How did you know how to do that?

Were you just that wise? Or had you made a bunch of mistakes in the past and learned from them? What do you think it was?

Dianna Allen: 10m 7s

I wish I could say I was wise. But no, in that moment, I know who I am as a person. When it came to building websites on my own, I definitely strive for perfection. I'm not that great of a coder, so I know it would also take a lot of time and it was just something I knew I wanted done.

I just wanted it up and going in one day and I think my newsletter was about send, it was about the end of the week then. I had a newsletter coming out and I was just so excited to announce to people that I had a website, so I was like, "Okay, I'm going make this my deadline so that way, I can send out my newsletter, I can launch it the day my newsletter goes out and that way, I can get immediate traffic to it, also.

Courtland Allen: 10m 54s

Super smart. I think that's exactly what you should be focusing on. Let's zoom out a little bit. You said this is not your first project you've worked on. You've worked on other stuff in the past that, perhaps, didn't do quite as well as Budget Meal Planner. Why do any of this? Why release anything to the world in the first place?

Dianna Allen: 11m 10s

For me, it's always been a personal story aspect of everything. I guess that's just because it's what I'm most familiar with and it's easy for me to go about creating things of that nature.

When I came to Budget Meal Planner, all I wanted to do was help people. I know exactly what it's like to want to lower your food bill because I don't have the best track history either when it comes to eating out and all that stuff. I also know the situation of when you only have so much money to spend on food.

When I started working on this more and more, I realized that this is just something I'm passionate about and I honestly just want to help people. Of course, I want to monetize it, eventually. I really feel good just helping people. Someone replied to my newsletter once and they actually told me that they printed off, probably, 50 copies of one meal plan I sent out.

They said they took it to their local YMCA and they posted it on a bulletin board. It basically just said, "Take One" and he said he did it because he knows a lot of low-income families go there. He found that it could be helpful to them and that just broke my heart. That was my moment of success.

Courtland Allen: 12m 33s

Let's fast forward to this past weekend. Which is really not even that much of a jump because we're only 1 or 2 months ahead of what we were just talking about. It's not been that prime. July 6th, 2019, I'm looking at your Indie Hackers product page, looking at your timeline.

Where you've made all these posts about different things that have happened and July 6th, you said, "Launched on Product Hunt". Let's talk about this launch. I know it went really well. Tell me about why you decided to launch your meal planning app on Product Hunt and how you got it to go so well.

Dianna Allen: 13m 2s

Product Hunt had actually always been in my mind when it came to pushing us out into the world. I knew Product Hunt was a valuable website, but the thing is I don't see many products – I don't even consider my website a product, to be honest. I never considered it appropriate for Product Hunt.

That's just my opinion, but I'm in a few communities. Obviously, I'm on Indie Hackers, but I'm in Women Make and Makerlog, also. I just chatted with a couple people from each website and I told them what was on my mind. I said, "I really want to launch Budget Meal Planner on Product Hunt. I really want to start driving more exposure for it. I want it to get out into the world."

But I was hesitant because I didn't want to lower the quality of products that are found on Product Hunt. Usually, they're apps or they're actual, physical products that are more suited towards the tech scene. A lot of people reassured me. They said, "No, what you're doing still counts. It's a website, it's still tech related."

I actually got it verified from someone who works at Product Hunt that it's good to launch. That was on Friday this past week and I was like, "You know what?" I don't know if I can cuss, but I was like, "Fuck it. I'm going to launch this tomorrow. I don't even care". It was Friday at 8 pm and I was like, "I'm launching this in just a few hours".

I went to Product Hunt and I got my product scheduled, I got it set up and I set it to launch at 12 am San Francisco Time, which was only a few hours from then. I just went with it. I didn't really have a plan. I didn't even know how to launch on Product Hunt. I remember, after I got it verified from the guy who works at Product Hunt, I was like, "What do I do now?"

He actually had to link me to the "Post Your Product" page because I just had no idea. I just set it up, hit schedule. Then the next morning I woke up and started watching the traffic and feedback rolling.

Courtland Allen: 15m 22s

That's crazy because that means it's like 100% organic. I know a ton of people who launch on Product Hunt or Hacker News and they have a whole game plan. They've been thinking about this for months, they've been blogging and building an audience and they've been promoting it in different places and telling people to support their launch.

I think somebody just tweeted me today, like, "Courtland, will you retweet my tweet about launching on Product Hunt?" Whereas, you just put it on Product Hunt and then you went to sleep. Then you woke up.

Dianna Allen: 15m 45s

I'm very careless but it always works out for me, so I have no shame in that.

Courtland Allen: 15m 51s

That's how you know you built something that was really good. It didn't need the extra push, right? It wasn't you manufacturing the success, it was actually something that people on Product Hunt were really excited to see. You ended the day with almost 500 upvotes.

You were the number one product of the day. How did that feel? Were you surprised at the results?

Dianna Allen: 16m 10s

Oh my goodness. I have no words. I still have no words. Just thinking of my position, how I was so hesitant to even post it. I was actually scared that people were going to hate on it because, to me, it still didn't seem suitable for Product Hunt. In fact, it was nothing but positive outcome from it. I just have no words for it.

Courtland Allen: 16m 35s

Another thing you did was that you actually did tweet after you posted on Product Hunt. I'm reading your Tweet right now and it says, "This is my first Product Hunt launch ever as a solo-maker. I appreciate any and all love you can give it today."

That Tweet blew up, too. People really wanted to support you. People who saw that and saw Budget Meal Planner were super excited about it. Why do you think that tweet did so well?

Dianna Allen: 16m 52s

I think it did well because even though I hadn't exposed Budget Meal Planner too much at that point, I did talk about it every now and then. When I started the newsletter, I tweeted out and I said, "Oh my goodness. I did this thing on Reddit. There's 300 people on my mailing list now.”

I think from that initial tweet, I was actually growing my audience on Twitter because people were interested from that point. I think, when I launched on Product Hunt, a lot of people had already seen my progress, even though I was kind of quiet about it.

When I tweeted out, I had made friends with a few people in the Indie Maker community and I think they really wanted to see me succeed with the product because a lot of them already knew what it was about. They believed in it the same as I do and it started a snowball effect from there.

Courtland Allen: 17m 55s

Getting to know people and getting them to know you is so underrated because if people know you, they want you to succeed. I want you to succeed. We've been talking for 20 minutes and I'm like, "Go Dianna. I want to see this thing get as big as possible".

You can't just build things in a hole and never talk to anybody because people won't care if they don't know who you are personally. Tell me about this Lifehacker article that got posted yesterday. That's the most recent development and that was only a couple days after you launched on Product Hunt.

Dianna Allen: 18m 21s

After Product Hunt, the day ended. I honestly didn't have much expectation from it after that. For me, launching on Product Hunt was like, "Okay, I've attracted the audience on Product Hunt." That was my first step of exposure. It's ironic because that day, I was planning on finding my top websites.

Ironically, Lifehacker suited the type of websites I was looking for. I was planning on making a list and contacting their article writers or journalists that work for them. I was actually going to send out personal emails to each one letting them know, "Hey, I recently made this. I launched it on Product Hunt, it hit number one.

Maybe you find it interesting enough to write something about it?” The thing is, I never got to that point because, before I knew it, I saw traffic coming to my website out of nowhere. The Product Hunt traffic had already died out and I was like, "This is weird. Where is this spike coming from?" I checked on the referral list and it said, "Lifehacker.”

I was like, "That site sounds really familiar. That's a website I should know.” Then, I typed it in on Google and I was like, "Oh my God. This is one of those Buzz-trend-viral websites.” I went to the first page of it and I don't even remember what was going in my mind because I was just shocked when I saw the words "Budget Meals $5" because I knew that was about me.

I clicked on it and I read it and the whole article was about Budget Meal Planner. My heart dropped because I was like, "This is exactly what I was going to do.”

Courtland Allen: 20m 8s

That's nuts. Lifehacker's huge, by the way. Lifehacker is many times of millions of page views every month. It's one of the bigger sites on the internet.

Dianna Allen: 20m 16s

Yes, it's insane. I ended up learning about that after everything and was like, "Wow.”

Courtland Allen: 20m 22s

I'm just going to read some of your stats here to give people an idea of how much traffic you got from all these different efforts. From Product Hunt, you got 2,300 unique visitors. You had 9,000 page views and 130 new subscribers to your meal plans newsletter.

From Lifehacker, it looks like you got 6,000 unique visitors, I don't know how many page views and 400 new people signing up to your mailing list. It sounds like Lifehacker was even bigger than Product Hunt for you.

Dianna Allen: 20m 51s

Yes, and what's crazy is when I typed that, it wasn't even the end. I thought that was going to be it because at that point it was nighttime, and I saw the traffic dying down. What I didn't realize is, when people wake up in the morning, they're still going to start coming to my website.

I can actually tell you the updated stats, so I only know the whole weekend in my mind. With Product Hunt launch and the Lifehacker article combined, I ended up getting 8,000 unique visitors to the website – sorry, 18,000 unique visitors. That's a big difference in wording. Page views, nearly 100,000. I think it was 98,000.

My mailing list blew up so much, I had to go out and purchase a paid plan.

Courtland Allen: 21m 43s

That's exciting stuff. If you're going to pay for anything, room for more people on your mailing list is a pretty good thing to pay for. You're now on track. I mean, things are really happening for you. What's next for Budget Meal Planner?

Dianna Allen: 21m 53s

I've already sat down and thought about where I want to take it in the future. I'm going to continue with having a focus on eating for $5 a day. I going to keep the website structured how it is, the most part, with offering a budget section and a vegetarian section.

I'm going to keep posting content to there because that's the content people sign up to for my newsletter. What gets reflected on my website is what is reflected in the newsletter. They are twins.

What I'm going to do to monetize it, is I'm going to add specialty lifestyles, so I'm going to add in keto meal plans, vegan meal plans, Whole30, and someone actually reached out to me today about possible fitness, muscle building meal plans. My goal is to also create budget friendly meal plans for those categories. I don't think I'll be able to get the price to $5 a day for most of those, but I'm going to still try to get it as close as possible.

I'm labeling those "budget friendly" because they'll still be the cheapest alternative of those lifestyles that you can find, or at least I hope you can find. Those specialty lifestyles, I'm going to put behind a paywall, so that's the future of Budget Meal Planner at the moment.

Courtland Allen: 23m 16s

I love it. That's a great idea. One of my favorite business models is paid mailing lists because the product is pretty simple. You put out a mailing lists, you're putting out content that you ideally enjoy and then people subscribe to it and they pay. It could not possibly be simpler.

I've interviewed a bunch of people who are doing similar things. Scott from Scott's Cheap Flights, where they will send you cheap flight recommendations and you subscribe to their newsletter, Joel Runyon runs Paleo Meal Plans very similar to what you're doing, but it's just paleo meal plans.

Dianna Allen: 23m 43s

I've actually never heard of him.

Courtland Allen: 23m 45s

Check out Paleo Meal Plans, they'll be able to connect you with Joel. He's a really smart guy.

Dianna Allen: 23m 49s

Yes, I love that.

Courtland Allen: 23m 51s

He's making $15,000 a month sending out these paleo meal plans newsletters and it's working really well for him, so I think the approach that you are taking with the specialty diets makes a ton of sense. The flip side is if your audience is people who don't want to spend more than $5 a day on food, perhaps they won't pay that much.

Then again, if you're helping them save many dozens of dollars a day, then that's definitely worth it.

Dianna Allen: 24m 11s

I would say at this point I've noticed my audience is actually 50/50. Half of it are people who want to stop eating out all the time. They obviously have money, then I notice the other half of my audience are actually low-income families or individuals.

That's why I want to keep it separate. I want to offer the free $5 budget meal plans available to everyone.

Courtland Allen: 24m 40s

Listen, Dianna. I am super excited for what you're working on and I'm looking forward to seeing more milestones that you post on Indie Hackers about all your progress.

Dianna Allen: 24m 48s

I have a lot to update with, also.

Courtland Allen: 24h 52s

I know, your post did great. You did a really great job sharing, not just the milestones that you hit, but how you got there, what you learned and started helping people out as well. I highly recommend, if you're listening to this, check out indiehackers.com/product/budget-meal-planner and you can see everything Dianna is working on there.

Before I let you go, what's your advice for other Indie Hackers who are just now getting started?

Dianna Allen: 25m 15s

My advice would be, pick an idea and validate it. For me, Budget Meal Planner was the only idea I actually validated the very first day I thought about it. That was when I went to Reddit and I started seeing the feedback about the idea.

I think if you just get that out of the way the first day and you see the response on it, that'll help you see its future. You'll see how many people are truly interested in it, how many people want it or if people are quick to offer alternatives.

Courtland Allen: 25m 51s

Validation stuff's super important. You don't want to waste months of your life building something that nobody's excited about, nobody's going to use.

Dianna Allen: 25m 57s

Exactly.

Courtland Allen: 25m 58s

Dianna, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Dianna Allen: 26m 0s

Thank you for having me, Courtland.

Courtland Allen: 26h 2s

Anytime. Listeners, this has been a quick chat with Dianna Allen of Budget Meal Planner. If you're ever interested in coming on the show to have a quick chat about what you're working on, I'll tell you how you can do it. Go to indiehackers.com/milestones and post a milestone about you're working on.

It can be anything that you're excited about. You came up with your idea, you found your first customers, you just went full-time on your business and quit your job. You just made $1,000 in revenue, anything. Any sort of milestone and what I'll do is go through the milestones every week and invite some of the top milestone posters on the show to have a quick chat. Once again, that's indiehackers.com/milestones. Looking forward to seeing you there.

If you enjoyed listening to this conversation and you want a really easy way to support the podcast, why don't you head over to iTunes and leave us a quick rating or even a review. If you're looking for an easy way to get there, just go to indiehackers.com/review and that should open up iTunes on your computer.

I read pretty much all the reviews that you guys leave over there and it really helps other people to discover the show, so your support is very much appreciated. In addition, if you are running your own internet business or if that's something you hope to do someday, you should join me and a whole bunch of other founders on the indiehackers.com website.

It's a great place to get feedback on pretty much any problem or question that you might have while running your business. If you're listening to the show, you know that I am a huge proponent of getting help from other founders, rather than trying to build your business all by yourself.

You'll see me on the forum, for sure, as well as more than a handful of some of the guests that I've had on the podcast. If you're looking for inspiration, we've also got a huge directory full of hundreds of products built by other Indie Hackers, every one of which include revenue numbers and some of the behind-the-scenes strategies for how they grew their products from nothing.

As always, thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.