SnackScout began with a familiar college dilemma: finding free food. What started as a simple group chat among friends quickly grew beyond what a chat could handle. As I kept discovering more organizations offering free meals, it became clear that I needed something that could actually scale. Around the same time, I was fascinated by how websites worked, so I built the first version of SnackScout myself.

Since then, it has gone through quite the evolution: group chat, then Google Calendar, then a Google Site, then a Shopify site, and finally a fully custom React website with an n8n backend. Each rebuild taught me something new and pushed the project further.

The part that failed

It also ended up being my first “failed” startup — at least financially. I tried to monetize it and didn’t succeed, but I still count it as a personal success. Through SnackScout I learned more about monetization models, newsletter management, and customer relations than I did about code.

After that failed monetization attempt, I shut the project down for a while. I was disappointed, but a few conversations over the summer of 2025 shifted my perspective. I realized that even if SnackScout never made money, I still had a responsibility to share what I had built and learned.

The relaunch

That fall, during my junior year, I rebuilt SnackScout from scratch and relaunched it completely free. The biggest challenge had always been maintaining the events calendar, so I taught myself automation tools like n8n to automatically scrape and upload event data from online sources.

Then SnackScout was nominated for, and won, a $1,000 Awesome Grant from 3 Dots Downtown. That reframed how I thought about sustainability. I had assumed the only way to fund projects like this was by charging users. It turns out there are organizations that actively want to support community tools.