AI app that tells students what to cook from available ingredients

Get ready with me as I decide a UVP for my new app — Coinesseur. As a student, I've always had this problem: deciding what food to make. I love cooking my meals, but on some days, I could go to bed hungry simply because I couldn't decide what to eat. Sometimes I don’t want to scroll through Pinterest or Instagram, and even when I do, I get lost in an endless feed of meals — some related, some not. If you’re a student, you probably relate. So I started building an app model for students (definitely starting from my school) that answers the question: what should I eat? I'm taking you through my ideation in the exact words I used, so you can see the process. I started with drafting my raw thoughts: "With the food choice app, students can communicate anything from their food history to the ingredients they have available, to help them determine what to eat and even create calendars" "The app is updated with different recipes daily, from Pinterest, cookbooks, and even collects data from your location to see the best local dishes around." "I tell you the ingredients I have and you get me a good food I can make with those ingredients (or the closest thing I can make perhaps if the ingredients aren’t complete)". "Students get to rate the foods they make on the app too. They rate the recipe after cooking, so if it’s bad or good, others on the app can see it when they’re given the same search results". See how messy that is? But messy was just the start. ⁀➴༯🍃 I went ahead to do competitor and audience research and to my non-surprise, I have a lot. But, none of them do what I have in mind. And then, to know where my competitors are missing and how I can capitalize on it, I searched for user sentiment: •My direct competitors had too many search outputs, leading to choice overload. Coinesseur is for people who want the decision made for them in one click. •They’re all monotone input-output apps. None are AI-based, conversational, or memory-retentive, and none collect local information. •Users value community ratings, and that’s a key feature I’m building. Then the features started to take shape. ⁀➴༯🍃 V1: ➺AI chat-based model where students discuss ingredients, food options, preferences, and history to obtain the best available meal (memory retained across chats). ➺User-submitted recipes. ➺Ratings and comments. ➺Local dish recipes. ➺Reputation and loyalty badges. V2: ➺Video recipes. ➺Social feed (everything about eating and making food). ➺Priority and variety filters — choose healthiest, cheapest, or specific variations. ➺Calendars and food budget planning (drawing data from chats and local prices). Now that’s a lot of features, and for most people, that’s where confusion sets in. I might want to promote meal planning, because it’s also valuable to my audience. Or maybe I should focus on the social features, because that could give me a better revenue flow. This is exactly why the unique value proposition (UVP) exists. ⁀➴༯🍃 Your UVP is the core thing you offer, that sets you apart from other alternatives, in the way it benefits your users, delivered in one clear sentence. It should contain three things - the problem, the solution (your offer) and the result (whether directly or indirectly). As a content strategist, I’ve realized that the hard part isn’t in understanding the value proposition itself, but in stringing the words together. Initially, my UVP was this long: "University students find it hard deciding what to cook or eat, but that shouldn’t be the case. With the food choice app, students can communicate anything from their food history to the ingredients they have available, to help them determine what to eat and even create calendars." See how feature-heavy that is? So I started cutting ruthlessly by asking questions like: -What can I remove from this without diluting the product's purpose? -What word can replace a group of words here? -Can I rephrase this for consiceness? And after trimming the poor sentence down, I settled with: "We take the mental load off food decisions by telling you exactly what to make from what you have." Now that’s a promise, cause that's what a UVP is. From there, taglines like: "Tell us what you have, we’ll tell you what to eat." "We do the thinking, you do the cooking." …naturally follow. ⁀➴༯🍃 See how it all comes together to serve the original purpose of its creation? That’s the point right there. The UVP becomes simple once you know the exact pain the product was created to solve. What drove you to create your product? What anomaly did you see? That’s where your UVP comes from. ⁀➴༯🍃 Why do I need all this as a content strategist? Well, the UVP determines the brand's narrative, which helps create content structures, or like I would say, content architecture. So when deciding the product's UVP, I : • Question... No interrogate the founder, ruthlessly. How he got the idea, where he was when he got the idea, his thought process, everything. •Ask the team members their own perspective to the vision of the product. Every angle counts •Research. Do I still need to explain why?? •And finally, deliver the purpose in one clean line. And there you have it. UVP creation right before your eyes. Would you like me to do case studies of popular brand UVPs?