Sơn on why he built a food diary

Robin — Of everything you could build, why a food diary?

Because the meals worth remembering kept slipping away. Sơn eats his way through Saigon — street stalls, the same few cafés on rotation — and none of it was being kept anywhere. A photo here, a vague memory there. Perfeat started as a way to give those meals a record that did them justice: a rating, a place, who he was with.

Robin — So it’s personal before it’s a product.

Entirely. He built the thing he wanted to use. That’s the only reason a one-person product gets the details right — the maker is also the most demanding user. If logging a meal felt like a chore, he’d have stopped using his own app, and that would have been the honest verdict.

Robin — Does the everyday eating actually feed the product decisions?

Constantly. The café habit, the street-food runs — that’s the test environment. Every awkward step in logging a real meal in a real place is a bug he feels personally. The product gets shaped by his own Tuesday lunch more than by any roadmap.

Robin — What would make it a success to him?

That his own eating history becomes something he reaches for — a searchable taste library, not a dead archive. If a year of meals is in there and he uses it to decide where to go back, it worked.