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Built This Week is a weekly podcast where real builders share what they're shipping, the AI tools they're trying, and the tech news that actually matters. Hosted by Sam and Jordan from Ryz Labs, the show offers a raw, inside look at building products in the AI era—no fluff, no performative hype, just honest takes and practical insights from the front lines.
I call this Ryz Chef. What I'm do is actually gonna use AI, to extract the screenshot of my Amazon purchases from the supermarket. It built out 11 recipes, three for breakfast, three for lunch, three for dinner, and two desserts.
Jingle:Built this week, breaking it down. Built this week, we show you how. A fresh idea, a clever tweak, you locked in. Built this week.
Sam Nadler:Hey, everyone, and welcome to Built this week, the podcast where we share what we're building, how we're building it, and what it means for the world of AI and startups. I'm Sam Nadler, cofounder here at Ryz Labs, and each week, I'm joined by my friend, cohost, business partner, Jordan Metzner. What's up, Jordan? How are doing today?
Jordan Metzner:Hey, Sam. How's it going? Welcome back. Happy to be back as well.
Sam Nadler:Awesome. So excited for the docket today. But before we jump in into the agenda, just remember, everyone, we have new episodes out every Friday. Please like and subscribe on your favorite platform where you listen to podcasts, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And just to kick us off, as always, we're gonna discuss a tool we built in the last week.
Sam Nadler:This one is, I think, a little fun tool. It's not business related, but it has some cool functionality, and I think could probably help every family or individual. And then we're gonna discuss a little kind of cool use case I discovered are that's probably pretty common for Nano Banana. And then finally, just some hot AI news. As always, every week's different.
Jordan Metzner:Alright, Sam. Let's, let's jump right into it. So, yeah, another hot week in AI news and AI building and products on the market, and, I guess we can, kick it off here with my, Ryz Chef tool. Are you ready to get started?
Sam Nadler:I will. Okay. So give me the kinda high level what is it, and then we'll jump into how you built it and what it actually does. Quick demo.
Jordan Metzner:Yeah. So, you know, everyone's trying to eat healthier nowadays, and sometimes it's hard to be creative on what to eat, and, you know, sometimes you get bored on, you know, cooking the same things every week, and trying to stay healthy, you know, find new recipes, and be creative in the kitchen. I like to cook a lot. I definitely like to cook dinner a lot. So I'm always trying to think about, you know, ways I can I can take kind of the same products I always buy and think about new recipes so I can can change it up and make them more exciting?
Jordan Metzner:And so what I decided to do was build a tool that could help me with this. And I think I think what's so interesting is that, you know, especially as as we get older, as people get older, you know, you have kind of more and more dietary restrictions and different types of issues and things like that. Those kinds of issues could have a huge impact on your diet. And so, you know, AI is gonna be a a huge helper in in helping you find kind of recipes and tools and things in which you could improve your quality of life. And so I call this Ryz Chef.
Jordan Metzner:I'm a huge fan of the Mediterranean diet. That's my favorite, like, type of diet and type of eating style and using olive oil and whatnot. And so essentially, what the tool is is you can paste your purchases, or you can simply just paste in a copy of your receipt, whether it's from the supermarket, Instacart, Amazon, pretty much anywhere you shop for your groceries, and then some magic will happen. So I took a copy of my last Amazon purchases. Let me see if I have that here, and I'm gonna upload that right up here into the tool.
Jordan Metzner:There uploaded the screenshot, and so what it's gonna do is actually gonna use AI to extract the screenshot of my Amazon purchases from the supermarket. So I went to Whole Foods. Now basically, it's reviewed, and it's giving me back the ingredients that are in my that are in my cart that I ordered. So tahini, and carrots, and pineapple chunks. So these are all the things I bought.
Jordan Metzner:It allows me to add additional items if I if I need to. But I think this is pretty good, chicken breast, strawberries, these are these are all the items I purchased. And then I'm gonna click generate Mediterranean recipes. And so like I said, you can even take a picture of your refrigerator and it'll identify the objects and ingredients that you have. So it works by pretty much any type of upload, just as, you know, simple shot of your receipt or whatnot.
Sam Nadler:Yeah. Have you tested taking a couple pictures of your refrigerator and just seeing if that if it identifies eggs, strawberries, you know, without having the the written receipt?
Jordan Metzner:Yeah. It does. It does a pretty good job of that as well. You can simply just use your iPhone or whatnot and take a picture of your inside of your fridge. The problem is that, you know, my fridge has dwarves, and so, you know, I I started to do it and I realized, like, I needed to take, like, four or five pictures in order to get every item inside my fridge in order to upload it.
Jordan Metzner:Whereas, you know, in the case of Amazon, I'm a Whole Foods. I shop at Whole Foods, and if I shop at Whole Foods and I show my Amazon QR code, then the item that entire order, even if I shop in in the physical store, gets saved inside my Amazon order details. So it was a really simple mechanism to do that. I also like to use Instacart sometimes, so I'll just screenshot my Instacart order. So it's easier to use the receipt, but you can use pictures if you so need to.
Jordan Metzner:So okay. So while we spoke, it built out 11 recipes, three for breakfast, three for lunch, three for dinner, and two desserts. So for breakfast, it recommends a tahini pineapple breakfast bowl. I've never heard of that, but that sounds pretty cool and interesting. Dark almond chocolate pineapple parfait.
Jordan Metzner:Okay. Strawberry peach Mediterranean bar toast. So these are all, like, pretty high end elegant recipes. You can click your view recipe. So this recipe is the baguette strawberries, yellow peaches, and Mediterranean bar.
Jordan Metzner:So you slice toasts of the baguette, you slice with strawberries and peach slices, and then you crumble. It says Mediterranean bar, but basically, that's because we use, like, the salad bar. So that's maybe, like, a little bit of a typo, but I think overall, it's got the recipe, like, pretty well well done. You know, here we can go through, and I'm using, you know, I was using AI to generate the images, the meals, but I wasn't getting good results, so I moved over to like actual images. But, you know, here's a here's an example of a, you know, tahini chicken carrot stir fry.
Jordan Metzner:So I probably, like, never really make this. So chicken, carrots, tahini cilantro, and olive oil. Chicken breasts saute until golden, add baby carrots, cook until tender, and then stir in tahini and cilantro. And then it even gives desserts as well. So strawberry dark chocolate bites, let's see what we do here.
Jordan Metzner:Dark chocolate and strawberry, wash the strawberries, melt the chocolate, dip them in. Yeah. Of course. And then same with peaches. So you definitely could add different features.
Jordan Metzner:I've added in exports. You can export the PDFs. I have some filtering here. It's all responsive on mobile, and then, you know, we could we could start all over again. So I don't think you've ever seen this before, but, yeah, I'd love to get your feedback, what you think of Raise Show.
Sam Nadler:Yeah. I mean, I love it. I mean, a couple weeks ago, we discussed how I use just ChatGPT to kinda monitor calories and kind of guide me through my dietary choices later in the day, and, you know, I think combining that, my kind of, you know, fitness tracker, calorie counter with these recipes based on, you know, the diet I like and the actual food I have, is a really powerful combination. How did you, like, guide AI, I'm assuming you're using OpenAI, into, like that it's just not combining random ingredients, that it's actually, like, a thoughtful, good tasting recipe?
Jordan Metzner:Yeah. So I can't recall my original prompt, but I really tried to focus it on a high end professional chef that was cooking Mediterranean meals using, like, olive oil and avoiding French diet, like, kind of high in fat, like butters and things like that. I don't recall if I told it, like, a specific chef that I favored the most, but I really just try to focus on healthy Mediterranean diet and creativity in the kitchen. And you can kinda see that. Our AI chef creates high end healthy Mediterranean recipes that transform everyday ingredients into extraordinary meals.
Jordan Metzner:I I think my prompt has like some flavor of that in it. But, yeah, I mean, you know, if you had your, you know, if you if you love a certain chef, you know, then you you could probably use that in your prompt to to generate more creative instructions. It also probably would work really well to generate kind of kids meals, especially if your kids had, like, certain, you know, types of favorite foods or least favorite foods. You could also include things like gluten free or low salt or, you know, if you had certain type of dietary restrictions, you could add that in. So you can imagine, you know, you had some medical restrictions in your family where, you know, one person doesn't eat gluten and one person can't have high salt and, you know, one person is trying to stay away from sugars or, you know, something like that.
Jordan Metzner:And you can put in kind of everything you buy at the supermarket and, you know, you could spit out a recipe that, you know, could could meet all of the requirements of everybody who's eating with you. And then on top of that, I think, like, as you mentioned, you know, you could get the output of calories, macros, micros, and, you know, how much protein, etcetera. So, you know, and then probably there's, like, an output at the end that could say, like, if you like this meal, I could tell you what to order again next time you go to the supermarket. Right? So you could probably kinda build a whole full circle all the way around.
Jordan Metzner:So hopefully, that gives a little insight into the Ryz Chef tool.
Sam Nadler:Absolutely. I love it. Lastly, where are you pulling these images from? I I I think you initially tried to use AI to generate the images, but that did not work. So where are you actually getting these images?
Jordan Metzner:Yeah. Good question. So I try to use AI to generate them. One, it was a little bit expensive and slow. And two, you know, these are like actual meals that don't maybe don't exist yet.
Jordan Metzner:And so, like, AI wasn't the best at generating these things. And so I moved to Unsplash. I believe Unsplash, which is an open source library of of images, and so I'm using Unsplash's tool. And I mean, I guess, like, with carrot and tahini, they've got great images. I mean, you know, this is chicken and pineapple.
Jordan Metzner:This has great images. I mean, this is bolt on on a sandwich. I've never had that before. I mean, that sounds incredible, actually. But I get with bolt on strawberries and cilantro.
Jordan Metzner:So, yeah, it's crazy what you can do here. Again, you know, I mostly built this just for fun. Also thought it'd be a great addition to the show. I love the idea of exporting it, so you could kind of like take the recipes with you. You could also work on serving sizes.
Jordan Metzner:So, you know, these are all based around two servings, but, you know, if you wanted to like use this as a mechanism to make a recipe for a party or something like that, then, you know, that might be a great way to do that to, you know, kind of add those additional features.
Sam Nadler:Very cool, Jordan. You know, I think to transition here, we're gonna cover a little bit of a kind of fun, also pet project of mine. Let me quickly provide a little bit of context. About every semester, 11 year old daughter and then I try to build a little kind of business for her, and we do it for a couple different reasons. Number one is, it's fun.
Sam Nadler:It's a way for us to connect and, you know, expose her to some tools, at a very early age. Number two, I want to instill that entrepreneurial spirit. And then number three, all the proceeds of whatever we're selling go to a good cause. We, support an orphanage that we're connected with. So, it's been a fun little activity, but, I've used a couple AI tools, or we've used a couple AI tools in our latest project that I thought was, probably an applicable use case for a lot of different people.
Sam Nadler:But just to give you a quick, you know, very quick demo of, like, what we're building. So we're building a little ecommerce website, and, basically, the concept is to three d print these little hoodie charms and sell these for a couple dollars. Obviously, all proceeds going to benefit the organization that we're connected with. And we have a three d printer, and we've, you know, created the designs of the three d print files. And, you know, we haven't created all of our inventory, but we're we're going through that.
Sam Nadler:Our expected launch date is in about three weeks, right, as we hit fall. You know, the goal is to, you know, have these little three d printed charms to decorate your hoodies as fall comes comes along. For all the images on our website, these are all AI generated images that originally started as just taking a picture of the charm we three d printed, then generating a picture of the hoodie, and then generating the picture of roughly the demographic of her age group. So we took a picture in the, in the case of these dolphins. We took a picture of the dolphin charm.
Sam Nadler:We printed out, yeah, I think 20 little dolphins. It added the pink hoodie, and then we added this, girl in jeans and white Converse. And, you know, I think it's, a, takes minutes. I think the images are extremely high quality. This top image is something we created together.
Sam Nadler:We wanted to create a couple of the models in the pictures. In the banner image, obviously, you can see some of these charms are are way too big, but I actually think that's good, because it makes it more obvious as to what we're selling. And just to give, like, a really quick demo here, I have, you know, my chat with Nano Banana on Google AI Studio. Yeah. So, basically, I'm just I print out the the little charms, take a picture, throw it into Google AI Studio, give it a quick prompt, add these charms to a yellow hoodie.
Sam Nadler:Every single time it's come out perfect, then I prompt it again. You know, you know, add this to a 11 to 13 year old girl with, black pants and white shoes, whatever kind of graphic I give. Almost, you know, very rarely do I have to reprompt it. For this use case, it's been, that I've been using in the past week trying to help her get the site ready. It's been really great.
Sam Nadler:And boom. We get this, you know, AI generated. You can see the charms, see the girl that's in the demo, the jeans, and the black Converse. So, the previous images had no background, so I'd probably remove the background. But most of the time, it hasn't even required a additional prompt to get it right.
Sam Nadler:Yeah. That's how I've been using Nano Banana for my daughter's ecommerce website. Okay. After some minor technical difficulties, we've decided do the news side by side covering two quick news stories today. What's hot in news, Jordan?
Jordan Metzner:Yeah. So another big week in AI news. Replit, one of my favorite no code vibe coding tools raised the mega round. Looks like they raised about 250,000,000 at a $3,000,000,000 valuation. You know, they talked about how revenue grew to, like, a $150,000,000.
Jordan Metzner:Looks like participation from Mandarin and Horowitz, Y Combinator, and a bunch of other companies. And as you know, I love Replit. I built today's cooking tool in Replit. I use it all the time. I think it's a pretty awesome tool.
Jordan Metzner:And so this is really great news, I think. Any feedback you would like to to
Sam Nadler:To wrap up, mean, that's a huge round, a huge valuation. I know it's your favorite. It's actually probably my least favorite, which is just shows there's, you know, a vibe coding tool for everyone out there.
Jordan Metzner:Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if it's my favorite, but for certain features, I mean, it's built in database and in authentication and other features like that. I find it to be, yeah, really easy to build stuff. So alright.
Jordan Metzner:Let's just talk about a few other quick things. So I don't know if you saw, but Oracle is up, like, 45% today in the stock market. Absolutely crushing it. Larry Ellison now number one richest man in the world, which I think is a follow-up to just showing like kind of AI growth and how it's taking kind of companies like Oracle who are kind of more traditional cloud providers and, you know, you know, their deals with OpenAI and others bringing them up to to be a mega player against, like, you know, Microsoft, Google, and and and Amazon.
Sam Nadler:Yeah. Huge day for Oracle. I remember, I think it was one year ago today, you told me to buy Oracle. Or one year ago, approximately, you told me to buy Oracle, and it's up three x since then. So a huge huge day.
Sam Nadler:And, obviously, yeah, this is this is where I'm trying to invest most of my extra cash flow is in the infrastructure around AI.
Jordan Metzner:Yeah. I think, you know, Oracle is gonna continue to be a big player against these major players. And, yeah, we're seeing the growth in their numbers, and and I think they're gonna continue to to crush it in the market. Okay. A few other quick stories.
Jordan Metzner:Bending Spoons, the Italian conglomerate, just purchased Vimeo for $1,300,000,000. Vimeo has had a lot of ups and downs, but just another interesting story as, you know, they own Evernote and a few other different companies. One last piece here. I wanna talk about Robinhood. They had their annual hood summit yesterday, and they announced a bunch of new products including Robinhood Social.
Jordan Metzner:And I thought this was really cool because you can share your trades with your friends and then you can copy those trades. So I thought that that was a very cool new feature that Robinhood's launching. I don't know if you were able to see that or not or what your feedback is if you're a Robinhood user yourself.
Sam Nadler:I I not really. I have a Robinhood account, but I haven't I I don't really use it as as much as maybe some others. But what a crazy idea. I would have never thought about that. I guess it makes complete sense.
Sam Nadler:And, you know, what a interesting product. I will be it'll be interesting to see how much adoption there is, you know, versus where I think there's a lot of communication regarding Reddit and different subreddits on on but I think this potentially has a much more personal approach. So very interesting.
Jordan Metzner:Yeah. I'd be willing to share with you all of my trades. Maybe you'd be willing to share with me, and maybe that starts to build a network. I have a Robin Hood account as well as some other other marketplaces, but this will be a cool feature looking forward to rolling out. So, anyway, another hot week in the AI news.
Jordan Metzner:So much going on. This was an awesome episode. Please like and subscribe. Follow us on YouTube or all of your favorite podcasting networks, Sam. For Sam and myself, thank you so much.
Jordan Metzner:You're listening to Built This Week. Sam, any other last comments or feedback?
Sam Nadler:No. Exciting week. And don't forget to like and subscribe. New episodes out every Friday.
Jordan Metzner:Awesome. Thanks, everyone. See you soon.
Jingle:Built this week, breaking it down. Built this week, we show you how. A fresh idea, a clever tweak. You locked in shoe. Built this week.