How easy is it to create a recipe from scratch, is it a case of looking through some and trying to get an idea on the amounts of flavour. Not even sure of how much flavour totals should be.
It's dead easy to be rubbish at it
but only takes a bit of time before you can come up with adapted, or even new recipes that aren't half bad, and I'm still waiting to find out how long it takes to come up with a winner most of the time !
Best start by getting the practical side of it down pat; mix up little 10ml batches of existing high-rated recipes that you like the sound/theme of and start tweaking from there, mix without nic so it's cheaper to experiment and the small quantities get you used to being precise - apart from the actual recipes themselves, accurate repeatability is key.
Do it by weight, not drips, get a little jeweler's scale that does 3 decimal places. Not that you need the third decimal itself but so you can see when the second decimal is about to tick over, with 10ml mixes the second decimal is certainly worth trying to stick to especially for the flavours you just want 1 or 2% of.
That'll get you up to speed with the manufacturing process so you can reliably and repeatably make the recipes you want to try - then start making adjustments to the ones you like; maybe you fancy it a bit creamier or with a bit more strawberry, or with a different strawberry (maybe you can't get the one the recipe asks for !), or would a bit of pomegranate set off that tangerine nicely etc etc.
Some sites (alltheflavours.com does) have guides to the suggested %age for different flavours, and stats on how much other folk put in, they're a reliable guide but shouldn't be seen as a hard limit.
It's important to keep records, all mixing sites have various facilities to copy and tweak an existing recipe to make it your own, and label the bottles with the batch/recipe version used to make it, and the creation date so you can see immediately how long it's been steeping and 2 months later you can look at a bottle and call up exactly the recipe that went into it and reproduce it when you hit on a new all-day-vape.
The trick is though, just adding more of a specific flavour you like doesn't always make it nicer if you see what I mean, doubling the biscuit won't necessarily turn your cheesecake with subtle biscuit notes into biscuit heaven with a dollop of cheesecake... though it might !! - but more often then not just whacking a load more in muddies things up, so small adjustments and not adjusting too many flavours in each iteration are the thing.
...then you just have to try out the mountain of little 10ml bottles you end up with... immediately just for the fun of it, then after a week... 2 weeks... longer for bakery and creams, shorter for fruits and lighter flavours.
