Big Pan Theory

Big Pan Theory allows you to search for recipes based on ingredients, recommends you new recipe of the day everyday also let's you create collections to organize recipes you have liked on the internet

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🏆 Hackathon Project Story — Big Pan Theory

Inspiration

A couple months back my friend had this idea to make a cooking recipe app, but we shelved the idea for the time being as we were working on another app. And when Shipyard came and Eitan's brief dropped we immediately went to the drawing board and started bouncing ideas. I really wanted to make something which is relatable, humorous and memorable so it sticks with the audience and they remember it, hence I came up with the name Big Pan Theory (pun intended) which is immediately relatable. And from there on everything about the app went to focusing on that core app idea: to make something fun while solving a problem.

What it does

The app is currently very much focused on providing a great experience with limited faetures which can be expanded later. At it's core the app recommends you a new recipe every single day featured as "Recipe of the Day" which helps people get to know about new recipes without themselves having to search and discover. Beside that it also allows:

  • A fun gamified way to swipe recipe cards to curate users preference: This helps avoid survey and provides a fun experience as well. A win-win for both the user and us.
  • Ingredients list which can be used to create a shopping list
  • Nutrition values and preparation steps
  • Find a recipe based on ingredients
  • Create collections and import recipe URLs from internet to organize them in a better structure

How we built it

We have literally hand crafted the UI design with 2 weeks of dessign iteration on solving the UX problems. The design involves my original thoughts with design inspirations from Uber eats and Tinder. And the codebase has been developed in just 1 week from Feb 5th to 11th with majority of heavylifting by Claude Code and a lot of manual coding and fixing issues by me. The techstack contains everything native from Apple: Swift language, SwiftUI & Combine framework, RevenueCat for monetization. Every elements UI & UX design has been handcrafted and the implementation has been leveraged from Claude Code through guidance from me. I have literally took 1 day each for Discover, Home, Card swipe, Onboarding, and then Collections, Settings & monetization to integrate to make it a seamless experience. The app uses AI generated images and videos bundled locally into the app to deliver a superior user experience.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge I faced was both emotional and operational. After completing over two weeks of intensive UX design iterations, I had to step away briefly for an important family commitment. During this time, development was scheduled to begin — however, due to unexpected personal circumstances affecting my teammate, progress was temporarily halted.

This meant I had to take full ownership of the remaining development within a very limited timeframe and under tight resource constraints. I transitioned from a design-led phase into rapid solo execution — building, refining, and polishing the entire experience end-to-end.

One of the most technically demanding aspects was implementing monetization for the first time, including full integration with RevenueCat and ensuring the purchase flows were properly tested and production-ready. Balancing paywall design, entitlement logic, and user experience required significant iteration.

In parallel, I also handled asset generation, creating and curating all required visuals while ensuring consistency with the product’s design language.

Given the hackathon timeline, I had to make strategic scope tradeoffs — including deprioritizing the planned backend infrastructure — to keep the product focused, stable, and shippable within the deadline.

Overall, this phase tested not just my technical skills, but my prioritization ability, and commitment to delivering the intended user experience despite constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • 🏅 The whole implementation is done under a week
  • 🎨 Being able to pull off the polished user experience close to what I intended
  • ⚡ No performance bottleneck

What we learned

Technical Learnings

  • SwiftUI
  • IAP and RevenueCat integration
  • Marquee animation with SwiftUI

Product Learnings

  • MVP scoping
  • Being intentional with UX design
  • Rapid iteration

Team / Process Learnings

  • Collaboration under pressure
  • Rapid decision-making

Other

  • Learning to make video edit and presentation

What's next for Big Pan Theory

We intend to scale this to a full fledged product with more features and even better user experince.

Short-Term

  • A better fun onboarding
  • Move to rely on backend server and add login integration
  • Saving users preferences and progress
  • Transforming the MVP prototype to production ready
  • Share a recipe
  • Creating a solid roadmap

Mid-Term

  • Cooking mode: Voiceover, One tap step change, alternative ingredients
  • Record your recipe
  • Challenge mode: Time based, difficulty based, surprise me feature
  • Search for recipes

Long-Term Vision

  • Community integration
  • Monetization experiments for better monetization

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