Not a rocket science project nor ML/AI/CRYPTO/ESG/GME - just sharing with the community as I've been a reader for years (literally since the moment I spotted THAT orange page at my friend's desk).

The project idea was pretty simple - assist restaurants with creating and posting their menu online with no cost and no effort.

Motivation behind project: - Plenty of family/friends struggling during the pandemic months - Having my project 'my baby' where man can focus on all aspects of the business, not coding only - Solving the specific problem of hosting multiple subdomains with no/zero effort and maintenance cost - Extending skillset above coding SEO, marketing, building the audience, blogging - Not really profit-oriented, but for sure with ideas how to cover cost of bigger traffic if it comes to that

Highlights/lessons: - Tried out interesting architecture - Get a better feel of AWS services - Realized how nice alternatives are - Netlify, Vercel, FaunaDb (ending using both stacks for cost effective solution) - Finally go a legit reason to try FB and Google ads (the former are pain in the ass if you don't exist on Facebook) - Did some digging for alternatives and included them on the blog - https://blog.emenu.today/ (even added this very post there)

Fails: - Overcomplicating UI/UX - trying to go with unique design instead of casual and familiar bootstrap style for the user - Literally close to 0 users, way more bots signed up for it lol - Maintaining 3 separated pages/projects - landing page, app itself and the blog - could easily be squeezed together in one repo for simple pipeline, editing etc. - Diving into offtopic - like looking the simplest blog editor/creator - for me it was Hexo - hexo.io - Not picking the better idea - recently even FB added the menu tab (still it requires editing menus, generating images and uploading, but people are used to that) - Probably not pushing harder

Any comments, questions welcomed.

Cheers guys!