For the last few months, I’ve been all in on an idea that I believe has the potential to define a metaverse on the basis of sharing how we cook at home and interact with recipes shared online. I also wrote two other articles about the idea: the first was Cookbook: A Social Recipe Network, which described the early vision and mission and was my first attempt at learning to code and write. Then I wrote The Cooking Metagame, which describes the incentive mechanism for a two-sided marketplace between chefs and foodies.

Each time I write about and expand on the idea, I get inspired to build and ship the product. The first place I look to when starting a new project is the _buildspace website. The Buildspace product team has been innovating and experimenting with new ideas. Their motto, GTFOL (Get The Fuck Off Localhost), has inspired builders worldwide to develop their idea by deploying and iterating on products people use.

The product itself started off as a reason for me to learn how to code so that I could pivot from Project Management to Product Management. But while coding, writing, and iterating, I learnt that I enjoy building things, whether analogue or digital, that create value for the people around me. So I’ve focused, without distraction or diversion, on bringing my ideas to light.

But, I’ve pivoted many times since I started working on the product. From a cookbook that saves my recipes to a data-based machine learning project that helps you make the perfect home-cooked meal to a metaverse of cookbooks with a kitchen that’s auto-generated based on the recipes in your cookbook. I even tried to set up a protocol that runs competitions to find the best recipes. Ideas are flying faster than I can implement, and I learned that I need to slow down as I am still figuring out how to validate my ideas.

My most recent attempt to test and validate my idea was through the _buildspace Nights and Weekends program, which was, in essence, a game designed to get you external feedback on your work. The metagame created by _buildspace’s Farza Majeed for the Nights and Weekends program is a simple, brutal, yet effective take on creating products and deciding whether it adds value.

An idea, when implemented, can take many shapes. So, to decide whether we’re adding value to the world with the product’s current form, we can make a game of it. Within a 6-week timeline, ship a new feature every week, gauge user engagement and solicit feedback.

To play this game, create an overall goal for the six weeks. At the start of each week, set a smaller goal to progress towards the overall goal and show it off to the world. Build a community, get feedback, ship products and features, and repeat. There are no failures, just small wins or losses along the way that’ll help you steer the ship.

For me, the goal was to test my metaverse idea as written out here. It’s a grandiose goal: an abstract digital space for chefs and foodies to interact with each other’s recipe ideas and contribute directly to the ones whose recipe ideas match their tastes. For the six weeks, I worked on making progress towards adding new recipes, creating a digital cookbook, and building a metakitchen. Here are all the videos of my progress: week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4, week 5, and week 6.

At the end of the 6-week program, _buildspace hosted a virtual demo day with hundreds of people walking by the 150 booths set up to show off the progress made by the builders in the program. Together with Founders Inc., they also hosted a 3-day in-person workshop in San Fransisco and gave each founder the goal of gaining either users or revenue.

My goal for the three-day workshop was to gain $200.00 from 40 users. I picked these two goals because increasing weekly active users is how I ensure the application grows, and generating revenue from users would allow me to continue working on the product.

I now have $5/month revenue from 1 user, five weekly active users on the application, and 17 silver spoon NFT holders! This traction is super exciting, even if I couldn’t meet my goal of 40 users and $200 in three days. Receiving this validation has motivated me to keep working and building toward my goals.

As I continue to build new features and iterate on my experiments, the main feedback I’ve received is that I should focus on revenue and user growth. So I’ve been surveying people about how they interact with their food and started a substack that delivers a recipe to your email weekly, which you can subscribe to here. I’m also working on creating cookbook tokens that will be available for purchase to support the platform and the chefs on it directly.

Since this is a recipe-sharing application, there are high expectations for the usability of the app as a recipe app. But a survey of most of my current potential users says that they don’t share recipe ideas but are willing to pay to have recipes delivered to them that match their taste.

Another critical feedback I’ve received is to explain the business value of a metaverse experiment. Why run metaverse experiments when big companies like Meta, Sandbox, and Roblox run their own?

The metaverse is not some futuristic 3D-architected application running VR by combing the power of all the best graphics cards to create an imaginary world that acts as an escape from the real world. That’s just another game. The actual metaverse is about human connection, peer-to-peer contribution, and individuals sharing a story about their life.

We are losing the plot. To get ahead, everyone eats the same, dresses the same, and talks the same. But there are lots of smaller, older narratives around health and wealth. They state that each individual is unique and has to put in the work required to find out what works for them. As Ben Hunt (@EpsilonTheory) says, ‘Narratives are as real and as alive as you and me.’

I hope to build a world on the base layer of recipe ideas with the Cookbook Social metaverse experiment. A space where we share the narratives about the food we consume and directly contribute to others who help us on the journey. A metagame for ourselves to improve our lives.

Thanks for reading my project update. If you enjoyed the read and resonated with the idea, support the project and help me meet my goal by collecting this article as an edition at the bottom of the page!

You can also complete this survey and subscribe to Cookbook Social’s substack to receive taste-matched recipes weekly.

Alternately, start using the product to create your cookbooks and become an early member of this metaverse at cookbook.social.

Follow me on social media to get updates on the project @duvvuri_krishna on Twitter and join the Cookbook Social Discord.