DietMenus.com

DietMenus was my pandemic baby and an idea I’d had in my mind since the early 2010s after dating a vegan and realizing how frustrating it was to find out what meals they could eat at different restuarants. We had to go looking at menus, restaurant by restaurant, instead of finding all the vegan options for all the restaurants in one place.

I discovered that there was a lot of search traffic and very little competition for queries matching the “{diet} options in {restaurant}” keyword pattern, so I launched DietMenus to solve this problem and I grew it to over 300k monthly visitors at its peak.

I built the initial MVP with the help of a friend using a blank starter WordPress theme. I used Advanced Custom Fields to populate the page template and built my initial database of 300+restaurant menus using ParseHub, a no-code web scraping tool.

Classifying menu items into different diets gave me my first taste of Machine Learning and NLP. I used a no-code tool called Peltarion to build a classifier which was trained on the labeled data we had available; the menu items from restaurants with vegan or gluten free menus. This allowed us to accurately predict which menu items were vegan, vegetarian, keto or gluten free and make that information available to users on the site.

The skills I learned like hacking a prototype, working closely with design and engineering teams, and prioritizing and implementing product features are skills that I would love to apply as an SEO Product Manager.

Once the site grew past 100k visitors per month, I decided to move to a headless wordpress setup with a Vue frontend to improve the user experience with new features. During the migration I learned a lot about SEO best practices for server side rendering and how modern apps are built using frameworks like Nuxt.js.

I also learned to create wireframes and interactive mockups in Figma to help my product designers bring my design vision to life.

As the site continued to grow I learned about AdOps and how to monetize a site through programmatic advertising. I also leaned heavily into product management, conducting user research interviews, creating PRDs and product roadmaps to prioritize and manage our backlog and development sprints.

DietMenus gave me experience in generating millions of organic visits through a programmatic SEO strategy and taught me important skills in bringing a digital product to market from the ground up.

The skills I learned like hacking a prototype, working closely with design and engineering teams, and prioritizing and implementing product features are skills that I would love to apply as an SEO Product Manager.