Diana Allen, welcome to the Andy Hackers podcast.
Thank you for having me.
You are on a roll right now. I think you've had the number one milestone
on Andy Hackers for three days in a row.
Oh, I didn't even know that. That's amazing.
The first thing I did with it was March 27, so it was just a couple months ago really.
A couple months ago, and yet today you're already waking up to articles about you on LifeHacker
and your number one on product time, putting a ton of traffic.
Let's talk about this. How did you get here?
I've kind of always worked on something in the past, just like little things that always were part of my life.
Then I started working on something that was related to tea because I really like tea
and its health benefits, but none of those really felt like my heart was in it.
Then I kind of sat down one day just spontaneously, and this was the day I started Budget Meal Planner.
I kind of sat down and just thought about what's going on in my life that would be interesting to some people.
I thought about how I eat for $5 a day.
At the time, I didn't think 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 one day versus a week of meals.
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 on a day for $5,
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 I was like,
if anyone's 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 hours, I watched my mailing list just grow.
First, it was just the first couple few.
I was like, oh, cool. That's my point. Someone out there was interested.
Next thing I knew, it was hitting 50 people.
Then it was 100.
Then I think by the end of the night, because I posted that at about 5 p.m.
When I was going to sleep, I checked one last time and I had already 250 people signed up.
That's 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.
What were you using to collect these email sign-ups?
I was using MailChimp back then.
Cool. 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?
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 just went to a word editor.
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 like two eggs, a couple mushrooms, maybe some cheese.
Then I just wrote down in two sentences how to make an omelet.
I did that for each meal.
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.
Yeah, it's super straightforward.
How did you feel once you saw hundreds of people were interested in this?
You had to commit, I guess, to putting out more and more meal plans.
Yeah, so when I first saw people signing up,
I was internally screaming because I didn't expect anything to come from this.
It just kind of hit me that day that I was like,
you know what, this is a really good idea. I kind of 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 like $5 a meal.
I'm like, okay, I mean, yeah, $5 a meal is 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
and 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, I guess, guide of meals,
I went ahead and made it so you get a week's worth of meals
because if you generally do one 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.
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 like $12 and I added chicken, $17 and taxed $19.
Yeah, I believe it.
I mean, we've all had our meals that we splurge on
and 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.
Yeah.
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?
When I started working on this, like I said,
I worked on previous projects before, but none of them really hit off.
So this one I actually told myself,
Diana, do not dedicate more time than you need to to this project
because in my past, I didn't have a winning streak.
So I told myself, you know what?
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.
And there came a point where every couple of weeks,
someone would ask, hey, is there a way to access the previous ones?
Because in my newsletters, I would put basically what number this was.
So at that point, it was like weekly meals issue number 13.
So people knew that there was like 12 before this.
And so people would ask, oh, can I access?
Where can I access these?
And then one day I was just like, you know what?
I've had like five people asking me to access these.
I have them saved on my laptop.
I might as well just post them somewhere for everyone to see them all.
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.
You said you're 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.
Yeah, 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
and 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.
I have a sticky note on my monitor right now that says,
the key to happiness is lower expectations.
And I had to remind myself of constants because sometimes things would go really well
but I was expecting it to be like amazing.
And so I'm not happy and it's really dumb.
So it's smart to start with realistic expectations.
And it makes it easier to start too because then you don't have all this pressure
to do crazy stuff.
Yes.
Anyway, people are telling you,
Diana, we want to see the past meal plans.
There's a lot of ways you can go about doing that, right?
You can set up a website.
You can just email them the past meals.
What was your approach to going forward?
Funny you mentioned that the first couple of people who did ask me,
I was like, you know what, just take my whole file system.
And I went to email them back and I like attached like 15 meal plans.
And I was like, I was like, I hope this is fine.
And they loved it.
They absolutely loved it.
But yeah, so I did that for the first couple of people because I'm a giver.
Like I don't care.
So that was the beginning of that.
And then when I went to actually realize that,
oh, a lot of people could actually take use of this.
Well, I can't email all of them.
I can't email my whole list, everything.
So that's when I was like, it was kind of like a time as money situation,
even though there wasn't money involved yet.
I was just thinking me personally,
I know how to code and I could build a website myself,
but it would take me,
it would probably take me a good two weeks until I built something that I found
like worthy.
So I just went to Wix instead because I figured if I just have to pick from a
template, I'm not going to be,
I'm not going to strive for perfection because I know I can't really work
around it with code.
So 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.
And then by hour five of putting all the content on it
and getting it to how I liked it, it was done.
So it just took one day, five hours.
And then I launched the live website that following Saturday morning.
This is an impressive amount of discipline.
To be somebody who knows how to code,
you could build your own stuff from scratch,
and yet you didn't give in to that temptation.
Nobody does that.
All of us just give in and just 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?
I wish I could say I was wise.
But no, it was just in that moment,
I know who I am as a person.
And when it came to building websites on my own,
I definitely strived 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 to send.
It was about the end of the week then.
So 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 to make this my deadline.
So that way I could 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.
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 that you've worked on.
You've worked on other stuff in the past
that perhaps didn't do quite as well as a budget meal planner.
Why do any of this?
Why release anything to the world in the first place?
Yeah.
So for me, it's always been like 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.
So when it came to budget meal planner,
all I wanted to do was help people.
Like 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.
But I also know the situation of when you only have so much money
to spend on food.
So when I started working on this more and more,
I realized that this is just something I'm very passionate about.
And I honestly just want to help people.
Of course, I want to monetize it eventually.
But 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 had sent out.
And they said they took it to their local YMCA
and they posted it on a bulletin board.
And it basically just said, take one.
And he said he did it because he knows a lot of low-income families go there
and he found it could be helpful to them.
And that just broke my heart.
That was my moment of success.
Let's fast forward to this past weekend,
which is really not even that much of a jump
because we're only going like one or two months ahead
of what we were just talking about.
It's not been that much time.
No.
July 6, 2019.
Yes.
Looking at your IndieHackers product page,
looking at your timeline,
where you've made all these posts about different things that have happened.
And July 6, you said launched on Product Hunt.
So 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.
So Product Hunt had actually always been in my mind
when it came to pushing this 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.
So I never considered it appropriate for Product Hunt.
That's just my opinion, but I'm in a few communities.
So obviously I'm on IndieHackers,
but I'm in WomenMake and Makerlog also.
And I kind of just chatted with a couple of people from each website
and I told them what was on my mind.
I said, I really, really want to launch Budget Meal Planner on Product Hunt.
I really want to start driving more exposure for it.
I wanted 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 because usually they're apps
or they're actual physical products
that are more suited towards the tech scene.
And a lot of people reassured me.
They said, no, what you're doing still counts.
It's a website, it's still tech related.
And I actually got it verified from someone
who works at Product Hunt that it's good to launch.
So 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.
And it was Friday at 8 p.m.
And I was like, I'm launching this in just a few hours.
So I went to Product Hunt and I got my product scheduled.
I got it set up.
And I set it to launch at 12 a.m. San Francisco time,
which was only a few hours from then.
And yeah, 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, so what do I do now?
And he actually had to link me to the like post your product page
because I just had no idea.
And yeah, so I just set it up and hit schedule.
And then the next morning I woke up
and started watching the traffic and feedback roll in.
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 you went to sleep.
Yeah, I'm very careless, but it always works out for me.
So I have no shame in that.
Well, that's how you know you built something that was really good
and you didn't need the extra push.
It wasn't you sort of manufacturing the success.
It was actually something that people on Product Hunt
were really excited to see.
And you ended the day with almost 500 upvotes.
You're the number one product of the day.
How did that feel?
Were you surprised at the results?
Oh my goodness.
I have no words.
I still have no words.
Just thinking about it.
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.
And then the fact it was nothing but positive outcome from it.
I just have no words for it.
Another thing you did was that you actually did tweet
after you posted it 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.
And that tweet blew up too.
I 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?
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.
When I started that initial tweet,
I was actually growing my audience on Twitter
because people were interested from that point.
So 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.
And so when I tweeted out,
I had made friends with a few people in the indie maker community.
And I think they really just wanted to see me succeed with the product
because a lot of them already knew I was about,
they believed in it the same as I do.
And yeah, it just kind of started a snowball effect from there.
Getting to know people and getting them to know you is so underrated
because if people know you, they just want you to succeed.
I want you to succeed.
We've been talking for 20 minutes and I'm like,
go Diana, 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 sort of the most recent development.
And it was only a couple days after you launched on Product Hunt.
Yeah, so 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.
And it's ironic because that day I was planning on finding 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.
And I was actually going to send out personal emails to each one,
letting them know like, hey, I recently made this.
I launched it on Product Hunt and hit number one.
Maybe you find it interesting enough to write something about it.
But 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's this spike coming from?
So I tracked down the referral list and it said Lifehacker.
And I was like, that site sounds really familiar.
Like, that's a website I should know.
And I typed it in on Google.
And I was like, oh my god, this is like one of those like buzz trend viral websites.
And I went to the first page of it.
And I don't even remember like really what was going in my mind
because I was just shocked when I saw the words like budget meals $5.
Because I just knew that was about me.
So I clicked on it and I read it.
And the whole article was about budget meal planner.
And my heart dropped because I was like, this is exactly what I was going to do.
That's nuts.
Lifehacker is huge, by the way.
Lifehacker is like many tens of millions of page views every month.
It's one of the bigger sites on the internet.
Yeah, it's insane.
I ended up learning about that after everything and was like, wow.
So 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.
Product Hunt, you got 2,300 unique visitors.
You got 9,000 page views and 130 new subscribers
to your meal plans newsletter.
And from Lifehacker, 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.
So it sounds like Lifehacker was even bigger than Product Hunt for you.
Yeah.
And what's crazy is when I typed that, it wasn't even the end.
I thought that was kind of 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.
And so I can actually tell you like the updated stats.
So I only know like the whole weekend in my mind,
but with Product Hunt launch and the Lifehacker article combined,
I ended up getting 8,000 unique visitors to the website or sorry,
18,000 unique visitors.
That's a big difference in wording.
Page views, nearly 100,000.
I think it was like 98,000.
And my mailing list blew up so much,
I had to go out and purchase a paid plan.
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?
Yeah.
So I've already sat down and kind of thought about
where I want to take it in the future.
I'm going to continue with having the focus on eating for $5 a day.
So I'm going to keep the website structured how it is for 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.
So what gets reflected on my website
is what is reflected in the newsletter.
They're twins.
But what I'm going to do to monetize it
is I'm going to add in 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.
And 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.
So I'm labeling those just budget-friendly
because they'll still be like the cheapest alternative
of those lifestyles that you can find,
or at least I hope you can find.
And those specialty lifestyles I'm going to put behind a paywall.
So that's the future of budget meal planner at the moment.
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 list.
You're putting out content that you ideally enjoy
and then people subscribe to it and they pay.
And 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.
I've actually never heard of him.
Check out paleo meal plans.
They'll be able to connect you with Joel.
He's a really smart guy.
Yeah, I love that.
He's making, I think, $15,000 a month
sending out these paleo meal plan newsletters
and it's working really well for him.
So I think the approach that you're taking
with the specialty diets makes a ton of sense.
The flip side is that 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.
But then again, if you're helping them save
many dozens of dollars a day, then it's definitely worth it.
Yeah, I would say at this point,
I've noticed my audience is actually 50-50.
So half of it are people who just want to lower their spending.
They just want to stop eating out all the time.
So they obviously have money.
Then I notice the other half of my audience
are actually low-income families or individuals.
So that's why I want to keep it separate.
I want to offer the free $5 budget meal plans
available to everyone.
Well, listen, Diana, I'm 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.
Yeah, I have a lot to update with also.
Yeah, I know. You're posted to be great.
You do a really good job sharing not just the milestones that you hit,
but how you got there, what you learned,
and sort of helping other people out as well.
So I highly recommend if you're listening to this,
check out IndieHackers.com slash product slash budget hyphen meal hyphen planner.
And you can see everything Diana is working on there.
Before I let you go, what's your advice for other Indie Hackers
who are just now getting started?
So 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.
So that was when I went to Reddit and I just 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 kind of see its future.
You'll kind of see how many people are truly interested in it,
how many people want it,
or if people are quick to offer alternatives.
Validation stuff is super important.
You don't want to waste months of your life
building something that nobody's excited about,
nobody's going to use.
Diana, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Thank you for having me, Karlin.
Anytime.
Listeners, this has been a quick chat with Diana 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 ndactors.com slash milestones
and post a milestone about what you're working on.
It could 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
onto the show to have a quick chat.
So once again, that's ndactors.com slash 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 ndhackers.com slash 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 ndhackers.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 listen 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.
So you'll see me on the forum for sure
as well as more than a handful of some of the guests
that I found 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 includes 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.