ForkableRecipe.com - "Pitch"
What?
Problem
tl;dr The recipe web sucks, its full of blog-spam, SEO-influence noise, life stories, and un-quantified instructions.
If you google "pie crust recipe" below is a screenshot of the first result. Notice what's not on the page. An actual recipe. Does pausing and resuming a video make sense while making a pie crust? The first three sentences are an assault on reader's intellectual abilities, all in the name of SEO.
Solution
tl;dr "GitHub for Recipes w/ Lightning to Fix Incentives"
Here is a link to a "pie crust" recipe in cooking-mode in our app. Note the signal-to-noise improvement.
The hypothesis is that given Lightning and CookLang now both exist, a platform to manage recipes can iterate on incentives to reward great recipe publishers in a novel, maybe V4V (trying this to start), or maybe some other way (eg. pay-wall/subscription) in the future, although that is less ideal. Information wants to be free!
ForkableRecipe.com is live and ready for users w/ basic V4V forms of appreciation. We are running a lightning node so that we can give all users [email protected] automatically to start. Then each recipe they create gets [email protected] .
It's working! ...for users who have lightning wallets registered in their operating system to open links prefixed with "lightning:". Work to upgrade to WebLN on the front-end is in progress. Users can tip, and those tips flow through with attribution to a "Money"-dashboard, where they can also request a withdrawal.
The site uses a novel approach to custody, which I call "UX Directed Temporary Custody". The tl;dr is we only custody funds until the users give us some form of async push withdrawal instructions, after which payments will flow automatic to them. Withdrawals are working, but they aren't automated. That's WIP, but good enough for initial users.
Product market fit has intentionally not been tested yet. There is strong data from past attempts at various other "GitHub for Recipes", along with TONS of recipe creators online, to suggest that PMF is achievable on the recipe-side. The open question/risks more surround lightning and the V4V parts. The total addressable market for recipe publishers is very small right now, but there are millions of recipe-readers.
There are also plans to experiment with splits for rewarding contributors to the same recipe.
But, to stress...
It's working. In prod. And integrated with lightning. Because of BOLT.FUN. Thank you so much, to the community, and sponsors, for the help and encouragement! I learned so much, had a great time, and met some awesome folks!
Who & How?
This project was taken zero to one (in evening and weekends!) by a single developer -- along side many BOLT.FUN community members (encouraging, helping, pointing, discussing, ftw!). Nothing existed before the start of the hackathon, except the prior open-source projects referenced.
During the hackathon the following was implemented:
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The devops for dev and prod
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A lightning-native auth and sign-up flow
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A lightning address server
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Business logic for parsing and displaying recipes using CookLang w/ GitHooks to block unrelated content
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Profile, and Recipe-page enhancements to display total sats earned for each user.
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A "Money"-dashboard (aka UI & schema) showing users deposits and withdrawals
Major Technologies
Bitcoin Related
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Voltage.Cloud w/ an LND
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Lightning Hub
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FLOW for 2nd channel (I think I overpaid, oh well)
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Native Lightning Addresses to @forkablerecipe.com for users and recipes
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Uma-Connect
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Ligess
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LN-Auth Protocol
- Library by Fiatjaf for golang
Non-Bitcoin Related
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Gitea - the site started as a fork of gitea
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Golang
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Postgresql
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Docker
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GCP
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Cloud Build
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Two Compute Instances
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Roadmap
The roadmap is pretty linear...
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Talk to single-digit, manageable number of recipe creators, get feedback
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Get WebLN wired up for a better V4V experience
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Talk to single-digit, manageable number of recipe creators, get feedback
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Get recipe scaling working - a key feature of recipe apps on
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Talk to single-digit, manageable number of recipe creators, get feedback
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Get a recipe-to-JSON API working
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Talk to single-digit, manageable number of recipe creators, get feedback
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Help contribute back to cooklang and ligess
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Talk to single-digit, manageable number of recipe creators, get feedback
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Make sure security is bulletproof
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Talk to single-digit, manageable number of recipe creators, get feedback
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Catch up on unit-tests
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Talk to single-digit, manageable number of recipe creators, get feedback
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Run demand test, and organic GTM tactics via socials
Intent is to invest just a tiny bit more into a few features, then make some noise amongst the many bitcoin and cooking communities, very organically, in hobby-mode for a while.
Demo
Links
Prize Money(?)
If I win a prize in the hackathon -- tbh it's a bonus. The real prize was the education, experience and relationships! Seriously! Amazing to be hacking along side the other amazing projects!
The money would be used to reward the initial users who post recipes on ForkableRecipe.com, and help convince my family that other people see the same hard-money future that I do. :) ...and also cover hosting costs. Right now, dev, prod and the LN node cost about 400K sats per month.
If I don't win, it won't really change anything. I'm going to push forward on this, in hobby-mode, until I collect enough data to kill or keep it longer term. It'll run for probably at least 12 months.