Over de past ~4 years I build a lot of Bubble apps for clients or myself. This summer I was a bit burned out from all the building but still wanted to create a ‘side hustle’. I thought to myself what would I do if I wouldn’t know anything about building apps and I couldn’t use any “no-code knowledge”. I came across a script that was a QR menu builder and since I had already a perfect domain for it (Menu Cards) I thought this could be a nice project to try to market. Without building it myself I could completely focus on sales and marketing.
In the end, I got a lot of users (~150) and menu cards (~70) but not a lot of users (even the paying customers) were actually using the app. Because it was too difficult to quickly build a menu. Too many features a restaurant owner wouldn’t need. So I started a service to create menus as a service. But this quickly made me realize even more that the app I was selling was not something I would recommend to anyone. It took me 30 to 60 minutes to create a good menu.
After this realization, I talked with some friends about it and came to the conclusion to rebuild the app from scratch, strip anything that was unnecessary and add the features I was missing. Also, I just got the iPad Pro and wanted to test if I could build and design something using just the iPad.
What I liked is that it gives you a lot more focus. I was used to building on a Mac Mini + a 32” screen, yes 32 haha! So I always had multiple things open that could distract me. Also because of the M1 chip, everything was so fast!
(Even the plugin library loaded within a few seconds without turning the iPad into a toaster)
The design I mostly did from screenshots I gathered from Dribbble shots in combination with Sketching frames with the Apple Pencil. And because I now had the menu as a service, and created 20+ menus, I exactly knew what the process should be to easily create a menu. It was hard sometimes getting colors or getting the design right but inside Bubble, I was able to create a pretty good-looking design (I think).
After 5 full days of building, I changed the domain to point it to my bubble app and now it’s ready to build menus!
So far the users can:
- Create menu items
- Add extra’s and variations to the products
- Divide the products into categories
- Add tags like vegan, nuts, etc to the products (has no function now but will create filters to save allergies, etc for the customers)
- Add tables and unique QR so when your customer scans it you know what table to serve
- Online ordering straight from the table. You can even connect Stripe to receive online payments
- Download QR codes (for now simple, custom generator coming soon)
- Customers can see previous orders
- And I’m probably missing some
I truly believe this is going to be the best QR menu builder out there. Maybe it’s not there yet (hé it’s just been 5 days of building) it will get there.
If you want to try it out: https://menu.cards
And thanks Bubble for making this happen! 
