Some months ago I had to research Elastic Search. Its a search engine but to put inside apps. Sort of.
During my research I found the origin of the product:
At the time, I was a newlywed that just moved to London to support my wife with her dream of becoming a chef. I was unemployed, and desperately in need of a job, so I decided to play around with “new age” technologies in order to get my skills more uptodate. Playing around with new technologies only works when you are actually trying to build something, so I decided to build an app that my wife could use to capture all the cooking knowledge she was gathering during her chef lessons.
I picked many different technologies for this cooking app, but at the core of it, in my mind, was a single search box where the cooking knowledge experience would start a single box where typing a concept, a thought, or an ingredient would start the path towards exploring what was possible.
I got completely hooked with the project, and was working on it more than the cooking app itself, up to a point where it was taking most of my time.
Oh, and btw, my wife is still waiting for that cooking app.
source
Not bad for a company making $70 million in annual revenue growing 70% year over year.
