Ask HN: Looking for beta testers for receiving cooking help via text | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Looking for beta testers for receiving cooking help via text

5 pointspalidanx9 comments

I started a site where you can get cooking help from chefs via text and am looking for a few beta testers.

How it works is through the day if you have any questions, you can text the number for whatever questions you have. For example, you might ask about a good salsa recipe, what a recommended knife is, or how to cook a particular vegetable.

Currently the plans are $20/month, but for the beta testers it will only be $1/month. I probably only can support about 5 testers at the moment so if you are interested feel free to post below or email daniel @ cookingmayday.com . At the moment only US numbers are active for the beta testing plan.

The site to check out also is https://www.cookingmayday.com

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Some friendly suggestions:

1. The domain name could be different. It is a little longwinded and it does not convey the value of the service clearly. It places it in a SOS context, whereas you will be able appeal to a larger customer base if it were positioned as a Chef-on-tap service.

2. How do you throttle chatty customers? How do you rebate non-power-users?

3. $20 per month is on a high side (I can get A family plan of Google Music and Netflix for ~3$ more per month). I am not saying everything should be pegged to these services, but as a customer I think this way. May be charge per question?

4. How have you implemented the chat? Curious to learn.

All the best.

1) Point taken. I'll think about swapping the domain name over in the next few days (as yours was the second comment already mentioning this.

2) That's a good question. Right now I don't have any data to examine the trends (hopefully I'll have more after the beta testing period).

3) I did a Google Survey and saw that a subset of the population would be willing to pay $20

http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/view?survey=6...

But this assumes people want on demand answers. If answers aren't on demand (maybe can be answered nightly), then I might be about to drop the cost down to $2 or $3.

4) Chat is currently integrated with twilio.com. I provisioned a Los Angeles based number (213) where anyone can text it (but it would be targeting towards the US market).

What's your rationale for making beta testers pay?

It is half technical and half psychological. Coding wise it would take me too long to implement a free plan (as it actually goes through Braintree's gateway to auth the card).

And just imo, but charging $1 helps filter who is really serious who might use the service. And there is something about charging people money which makes them more involved in the transaction compared to free.

+1 Good call here.

If you are cooking and have a May Day event or other urgent need, would you not be more likely to ask Google and get an immediate response? Sorry, still trying to get my head around the value proposition. Can imagine price resistance when you get get many professional opinions for free via Google.

I guess perhaps the domain name wasn't the best choice. What the service offers is a an authoritative opinion of the best response in a cooking situation. If you search Google, it is really hard to filter out what the right response to an answer is.

The best value proposition of the service is to use it as you go through your cooking journey, and not necessarily as only in mayday situations.

Cool idea. I'd be down to pay after the 14th of this month as a beta!

Sounds good! Can you drop me an e-mail at daniel@cookingmayday.com ?

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