The Swipe Was Where I Started
The first thing I wanted to build for Mise was the swipe.
I am a visual person. I respond to images and context together, not to a blank search field asking me to already know what I want. Swiping through recipes, one at a time, reacting to what I saw, felt like the right way to discover food. So I built that first.
I used AI to prototype it quickly to test whether it felt right. It did. Choosing one recipe at a time made the result feel like something you had built rather than something that happened to you. The friction was the point. It made planning feel enjoyable instead of a chore.
But I had only designed the swipe. I had not designed what came after it.
The meal plan was empty. Not visually, but experientially. It had no weight. There was no clear path from "I just chose five meals" to "I know what to buy and when to cook." The interaction that felt great in isolation had nowhere meaningful to go.
So I had to whiteboard the whole thing.
Mise has five parts: Discover, Plan, Grocery, Cook, and Profile. It is easy to think of those as five tabs. The product is what happens as someone moves between them.
A recipe you swipe today needs to be part of a plan for the week. That plan needs a useful grocery list. The meal you chose days ago needs to be easy to find when it is time to cook.
Every step changes the state of the next one.
Something shifted for me here. I had started with the swipe because I cared about that interaction. Because I wanted it to feel genuinely fun, not just functional. And once I started mapping the rest of the workflow, I realized I wanted the same thing for all of it. The same spirit. The same care.
That meant the plan had to feel like yours. Easy to move around, because life changes midweek. Useful after the week ended, something you could build from again. The visual design had to help you see the week at a glance, not just look good.
I wanted people to enjoy using Mise, not just complete tasks in it. That joy shows up in big ways and in small ones, like when you share your meal plan with the people you cook for.
When you share your plan in Mise, it renders as a menu, the kind you might see at a restaurant that takes the food seriously. The food you planned for your family deserves that same care. When someone receives it, they are not looking at a list of links. They are looking at something made for them, because it was.
That feature started as a small idea. It became one of the clearest expressions of what the app is actually about.
I think about this a lot now, especially as AI speeds up shipping. The speed is real but doesn't put care into a product. Care comes from the person building it. When everything can be assembled quickly, the products that feel considered will stand out because they took more than speed to make.
The swipe was where I started because it was fun. The rest of the app exists because I kept asking: what would it look like to put that same care here, too?