It’s a pattern we all recognize in the tasting room world: a packed Instagram feed, a loyal local following, hundreds of likes on last Saturday’s pour — and a slow Tuesday that nobody can explain.
The likes didn’t predict it. Neither did the follower count.
I’ve run these same follow-up flows at the tasting room I work — repeat visits increased 15% in 90 days. Not from more posting. From owning the line to guests instead of renting it from an algorithm.
Read More →There’s a version of this story that ends with you paying a developer $15,000 for an app that’s basically your website with a home screen icon. Guests download it once during a slow moment, poke around, and never open it again. You get to say you have an app. Nothing else changes.
That’s not the version worth building.
A companion app done right is one of the few places where you have a direct, uninterrupted line to a guest who’s already told you they’re interested. No algorithm. No competing posts. No feed. They opened the app because they wanted to. That’s a different kind of attention than anything you’ll get from Instagram.
Read More →(Originally Published on Medium.com)
I love to cook, but I rarely have recipes for food I like to eat (Asian, Mediterranean, etc.). When AI assistants hit the mainstream, I found myself prompting them for simple recipes from my favorite dishes or low-sodium, low-sugar recipes for others using whatever ingredients I had on hand or excluding the ones I didn’t.
Copy-pasting those outputs into Apple Notes worked for a while, but soon I had an unindexed mess. That’s when the idea struck: why not build an app that bridges recipe generation with structured storage? My Head Chef was born — and it became my test case for Vibe Coding.
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