Guaca - Simple Cooking

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  Recipe Creation with Guaca

Inspiration:

As I watched Eitan’s brief for the first time, I knew I was going to build his app idea because the problems he mentioned with saved recipes you never cook had happened to me so many times. I wanted to build an app to help with that. Besides competing against others, I was also competing with my best friend, Daniel Weisser, which made the competition even more interesting, because he built an app for Eitans brief as well.

What it does:

So Guaca helps you manage recipes, create cookbooks, and build shopping lists, all in one app. Its main feature lets you share TikTok or Instagram videos to the app, and Guaca extracts the information and turns it into a detailed recipe with ingredients, instructions, and a ready-to-use shopping list.

How I built it:

I started by writing down ideas and sketching the main tabs of the app. Once I had a rough direction, I began building using Claude Code as my CLI. As development progressed, new ideas for the design and functionality kept coming up, and the app gradually took shape. After completing the core tabs, I designed the onboarding flow, keeping the same visual language throughout. I then built the backend for recipe extraction and connected it to the frontend. The final steps were fixing bugs and polishing the design to make the experience feel smooth and consistent.

Challenges I ran into:

he hardest part for me was building a backend that could reliably extract data from TikTok and Instagram videos without getting blocked. Both platforms have strong protections against scraping, so it took a lot of trial and error to find an approach that actually worked. I had to experiment with different tools, request methods, and fallback solutions to make the extraction stable and fast enough for real users.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of:

In my opinion, my biggest accomplishment is that I created an app I will actually use myself. It solves a problem I’ve had for a long time, saving tons of recipes but never actually cooking them. Building something that’s genuinely helpful in my daily life feels really rewarding, and it motivates me to keep improving the app and adding new features. And I think it's pretty helpful for other home cooks as well.

What I learned:

In this competition, I learned how much you can get done in a short amount of time when you focus on one thing and work under a “healthy” amount of pressure. That kind of pressure pushes you to keep moving forward, stay consistent, and not overthink every decision. It helped me work faster, prioritize what really matters, and actually finish something instead of getting stuck in endless tweaks.

My goals for Guaca:

Right now, Guaca is only available on TestFlight, but I’m planning to publish it on the App Store soon. No matter whether I win or not, I want to keep working on Guaca and continue growing it. I truly believe it’s a genuinely helpful app with a great use case for a lot of people, now and in the future.

Built With

• claudecode
• fastapi
• react-native
• revenuecat
• supabase
• typescript