Monday, June 3, 2013

Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine app

I'm writing this on my iPhone while waiting in the cell phone lot at JFK to pick up my mother.

About a year ago, my mother, who is very well known as an excellent cook, told me she was thinking about publishing a cookbook. I suggested that instead of a cookbook, why not make it into an app?  I have several cooking apps, but the kosher apps are very weak, so thought this would be an easy thing to do. 

She agreed and we started work on it. At the time, my mother gave me a very limited budget of $3,000 max. For a custom app, that basically leaves you with either outsourcing it to India or finding a college student to do it for you. 

We tried the India route initially, but communication was terrible. They do know English, but there were frequent misunderstandings and "that's outside of the scope of work" comments. It taught me to be extremely specific and forced me to enunciate what I wanted to see. 

When I work on stuff like this, I like to collaborate and have the product or service evolve based on feedback to the finished product. Often times I'll have an idea, but when I see it in practice, realize that it doesn't work.  I found the 2 different India groups we tried out to be unable to work with this kind of feedback. 

We then tried out a college student out of Canada, but he realized that he didn't have the time to work on this as he thought so we had to look for yet another developer. 

To be continued... 

No comments:

Post a Comment