This app was created in response to Rebecca Louise’s brief:
“Rebecca hears it constantly: mums are short on time, want financial independence, and need practical help. Build an app that offers everyday money-saving guidance (shopping swaps, batch cooking, cost comparisons, home reno savings) plus an approachable path into investing basics so users can grow what they have, without overwhelm.” When I last checked the Devpost website, it said there was 7026 participants. So, I can only hope you’re not reading this proposal after already reading the other 7025! Regardless, whoever you are, thank you for your time and your consideration in my submission for the RevenueCat Shipyard contest. Introducing Mamaza! This app was created in response to Rebecca Louise’s brief:
“Rebecca hears it constantly: mums are short on time, want financial independence, and need practical help. Build an app that offers everyday money-saving guidance (shopping swaps, batch cooking, cost comparisons, home reno savings) plus an approachable path into investing basics so users can grow what they have, without overwhelm.”
As a new dad, this is something that I relate to wholeheartedly. And you know, there’s going to be about eleventy-billion submissions in this category that are a swiss-army knife of an app that offer shopping swaps, batch cooking, cost comparisons, home reno savings, investing basics as developers try to implement literally every single thing in the brief. However, the last sentence in the brief nails it. The people using this app, they’re probably already overwhelmed. Serving up something with 20,000 screens is not going to help that.
So, I wanted to focus on two main aspects of the brief and tease those features out into a simple, high quality app that rewards engagement and makes it easy to achieve the things they want to. These two aspects are related to batch cooking, and investment (but probably not in the way you think…).
Batch Cooking
In the US alone, food delivery services made about 429 billion in 2025 alone. Whether you’ve got a new baby or a teenager, no doubt the lack of time presses people into spending more money on food delivery, costing them money and nutrition.
But, not everyone has the time to roll out a fresh pizza base to have leftovers for a few days. Cooking and cleaning is expensive, time involved work. What we need is minimum effort for maximum payoff - a way to cook a mountain of relatively enjoyable food in a short amount of time.
In Mamaza, I implemented the idea of pivot recipes. The idea is simple. Make a lot of a “base” recipe, and then pivot it to other types of recipes. The user chooses their preferred base recipe (such as “Golden Turmeric Chickpea Base”), and then chooses from a list of “pivot recipes” such as “Chickpea Coconut Curry” or “Spinach & Chickpea Bake”. In this example, the user would make the chickpea base, and then put it in a baking dish with some eggs to make the bake, or stir in diced tomatoes, spinach and sour cream to make the chickpea coconut curry.
When the user selects a base recipe and pivots, all required ingredients are added to the shopping list in the app, for them to purchase. If they abandon their cooking session (because they’ve changed their mind), the ingredients are taken off the shopping list automatically. It’s this simple behind-the-scenes work that makes the app easy to use and users’ don’t have to worry about accidentally buying the wrong thing from a stale meal prep plan.
People can also specify if they have a pressure cooker, and if they do, time-saving optimisations are applied to the recipe steps to make their meal prep as concise as possible.
The app has 5 recipe bases with 5 pivots per base. So that’s 25 recipes that could be made, about a month's worth of food if the user used it each week. Over time, users could add more recipe bases and suitable pivots, voting on what variation worked the best and adding images for each made recipe. The core idea here is to make a lot of something and then spin that off into things that people might actually like to eat. If people could get away from food delivery services, it could save them literally hundreds of dollars per week.
Investing (projects/upcycling) There are a lot of really good apps out there like Raiz that specifically help people to invest. Being in competition with them, well, we’d lose immediately. And also, Raiz (and equivalent products) provide no API for us to leverage. So the only thing we could do in our app would essentially be to… redirect to Raiz, which would cause the audience to boo.
When I think about investing, it’s true that I can invest my money. But I can also invest my time. Knowing how many used pieces of furniture or pallets are on things like Facebook Marketplace, this put me down a path of adding a feature to Mamaza where people could add their own upcycling projects to the app. The user writes in what their idea is and a brief description of what they want to do, and (as a premium feature) AI generates a roadmap, list of materials needed and what tools they need. If they’re not a subscriber, they can supply this themselves.
Over time, they can post updates for how their project is going. Other people can follow the creators they think have the best ideas, or most relevant to their interests. People can send monetary tips to creators via a service like ko-fi (Sorry RevenueCat, I thought about doing this through your service, but I guess I’d have to have a consumable that cost money, and then send the money to the creator? It got tricky fast)
All of this is wrapped up in a stable, consistent .NET 10 API with a sensible PostgresQL backend. There are integration tests for the app to track regressions as new features are introduced, and also tests for the .NET API side of things as well. After all, if we ship the app and it works but it asplodes when we try to add a small feature, that’s not going to wash with our subscribers. What we ship has to be quality, regardless of the time we’ve had to build it.
Monetisation strategy
The first way to ensure monetisation is to demonstrate value within the free tier, so people would have access to a rotating list of base/pivot recipes so they could experience the concept. They would have a seven day trial upon signing up which would give them all functionality, and then after that they would only have access to 2 base prep recipes and 3 pivots (randomly selected each week). Subscribing would mean they could see all base/pivot recipes, as well as valid substitutions for ingredients in the recipes. Also, the project tab, for AI generation, that would depend on subscribing to the premium subscription. I also intend to add a creator program where the most popular creators could receive tips over time, and Mamaza could possibly take a % cut of that as well.
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