StageChef

Bake intelligence into any video recipe

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Inspiration

I cook often, but I kept hitting the same wall. I'd save a recipe video, get excited, and then spend the whole cook rewinding the video, Googling techniques, and guessing at quantities. It's especially stressful when you're mid-cook and under time pressure. If I wasn't a dedicated cook, I'd have given up and defaulted to the same five recipes I already know. And then there's grocery shopping. You miss something, you buy duplicates, you end up back at the store. I'd been planning to build something to solve this for a while. When I saw the Shipyard's brief and Eitan's challenge, it was a perfect match. Same problem, same audience, same vision. I started building immediately.

StageChef

Share a recipe video link from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or Safari. StageChef extracts the recipe, enhances the steps with AI, adds realistic time estimates, and builds a combined grocery list across all your imported recipes.

How I Built It

Researched Eitan's demo and style. Did a lot of reddit, forum and competitor research to prioritize MVP pain points. Tested AI pipelines to assess how well it works. Many many prompts after I saw the magic, and decided to build the app. Flutter and Swift for the iOS app. Supabase for auth, database, and real-time updates. An async backend pipeline handles extraction and AI processing. RevenueCat for subscriptions. Built solo in 15 days.

Challenges

  • Supabase Edge Functions rejected valid Sign in with Apple tokens due to a JWT verification issue at the gateway level. Required a workaround to verify tokens in-function.
  • First TestFlight build was rejected for a dashboard config issue, second for missing Apple-required subscription language. Both were non-code fixes under time pressure.
  • Zero prior experience with mobile subscriptions, TestFlight, or App Store review before this project.

What I Learned

Ship the smallest thing that works, then fix what breaks. Half of my hard problems were configuration, not code. Read 3rd party documentation and quickstarts, even at the age of AI :).

It was challenging, but great fun building. Looking forward to iterating StageChef!

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