So I made a product last week, called Keto List Singapore. It’s a curated local directory site for people on the keto diet in Singapore, listing out all the local bakeries, restaurants, cafes, supermarkets and online retailers selling keto-friendly products.
Scratching my own itch
I live in Singapore and started on keto not too long ago. This site was born out of the initial frustration of not being able to easily find all the local links to keto-friendly food, eateries and products. So I made this site to address that. Hopefully this will come in useful not just for keto beginners, but also the seasoned folks.
How Keto List helps
1. For keto, by keto
I’m on the keto diet myself, so these are places and products I vet and use myself. I had also included a form where other keto folks can suggest a new link or establishment that just opened. Over time, I hope the list will become a crowdsourced and community-curated one.
2. Local relevance
The establishments are local to Singapore only, except for a few online retailers which I thought are useful to add in as they might not be top of mind in keto beginners. Why local, if you ask? Because it solves that painpoint I mentioned initially - lack of local knowledge that’s not captured on Google search. There’s lots of links and resources in local keto forums and communities that Google doesn’t quite serve up. Most of these links are lost in comment threads, chat groups, and random conversations, walled up behind apps like Facebook and Reddit. Since I frequent these forums, I thought it’ll be such a shame if these links are not captured somewhere.
3. Discover new stuff
Even seasoned folks will sometimes miss out or not be aware of new places and products available in the market, so this site helps with discovery. I tried to keep to the not-too-obvious recommendations in the listing - not too obvious from the perspective of a beginner. Hence I left out the usual supermarkets like NTUC Fairprice, Sheng Siong and Giant, as even beginners would be familiar with them. I also tried to localize suggestions, where there are filters for the regions where the establishments are located. So that if you happen to be in say, the East, and in need of dinner, you can use the “East” filter to see if there’s any keto restaurant nearby. It’s a crude location filter at the moment, but perhaps in the future, that can be replaced by a real store map.
The making of Keto List
I knew this was an informational/content product in a listing format, so it probably could leverage on nocode tools to create them. I used Sheet2site before to create similar products last year (Coffice City), so this isn’t a new approach to me. One of my favourite listing formats is the grid cards format popularized by Nomadlist, so that was the style I wanted to go with. But with Airtable getting quite popular and closing the gap on being a viable back-end (especially with Zapier integration), I was interested to try it out. Instead of trying to figure out the API and integrate it (which will take lots of work, at least at my level), I decided to go with Table2site, a SaaS app that took inspiration from Sheet2site but adapted it to Airtable instead. Table2site was so easy to use without knowing any code - just create and fill out or import an online spreadsheet, refer to the good documentation for how to set up the site, and I went from concept to MVP in 2 days flat! I was blown away by the ease and convenience. Table2site also had more good features (like clean URLs, using shortcodes) which I enjoyed using a lot.
Figuring out product-market fit
As a user myself, I know this will be helpful for my keto diet. But I was curious to know if others felt the same. I also wanted to know if I should invest more time to develop this further, and whether there’s a potential product business worth venturing into. So to test that, I decided to set up a mini crowdfunding campaign ala Kickstarter style, on the site itself, using my BuyMeACoffee link. The hosting fees on Table2site costs USD120 per year, and if I can raise that amount (just 24 coffees!), I’ll take it as an early signal to continue building up the directory and to build more useful features for us keto folks in Singapore. Otherwise, it’s still a good enough product to use, and I’ll just update the directory as and when I find new links.
What’s next
It had been really fun to create this! I’m quite happy with how it looks and works at the moment, but also curious to see how the local community would respond to it. Fingers crossed that people are excited and will want to fund the further development of it. If they do, there’s a few features on my mind that I would love to build next - voting for each listing item, a visual map of the store locations, custom domain, analytics, more useful content (in listing and/or blog), or even a pay-to-be-featured link for businesses (for sustainability). This is also the first time I’m trying out crowdfunding as a mechanism for finding out product-market fit, so I’m looking forward to learning more about it through this experience.