BJ Fogg, director of Behavior Design Lab at Stanford and the author of Tiny Habits, The New York Times bestseller, tapped our team to build an online tool to accompany his book. BJ developed a breakthrough method for changing behaviors by adopting new, sustainable habits. Our goal was to create an easy way for people to design these new habits using the Tiny Habits method. That's how the idea for Recipe Maker was born.

Recipe Maker is a responsive web tool that lets you choose the anchors (the conditions) and desired behaviors to create a new habit. It also evaluates the habit to indicate whether it's a good idea or if it probably won’t stick. After creating a habit, users can also share their email to get helpful tips about behavior change from the author.

We needed a tool that would save us the time of making a custom API from scratch and, at the same time, provide a simple admin panel interface to let BJ independently edit the content of the widget. AE Studio emphasizes giving our clients agency over the products we make for them, so that feature is important. We also needed to add some custom code.

We considered hosted cloud CMS but ran into some limitations. For example, it was impossible to make specific models public, and some were not public using a hosted CMS for the backend. If we wanted to make behaviors and anchors visible, we would have to do so with users' recipes and emails, which wasn’t acceptable.

With Strapi, we didn't have any data privacy issues.

The content model is pretty simple: we have several collection types (anchors, behaviors, categories, recipes made by users), and we have implemented criteria models to rank the ready-made recipes.

BJ can modify the behaviors, anchors, and ranking system at any time through the admin panel. He can send emails to users who have submitted their habit recipes through a form on a widget.

We also implemented a custom functionality that sends an email to BJ every time a new recipe is submitted.

The widget is embeddable so that anyone can add it to their website.

With Strapi, we saved a lot of time because we didn't need to develop a custom API and had an intuitive admin panel out of the box. We finished the project in 2 weeks—much faster than expected.

Strapi gives us a great balance between having something ready-made and the option to customize. We get just the right level of personalization and flexibility.