Review my startup - RecipeTonite | Hacker News Reader

Review my startup - RecipeTonite

recipetonite.com

8 pointsdanest17 comments

I love it! It solves a very real problem I have all the time. Honestly, I think a better idea is to do it weekly, so I can say "give me ingredients for 3 nights worth." There are several reasons for this.

* I can't cook every night but it's convenient to have it there so I don't have to plan from the morning to cook if I end up staying at home. I think most people would do the same.

* 5x / 7x less shipping fees for everyone.

* If you have stuff for 7 nights worth of food already set, I can pick my favourite 3. This is very powerful because I get a lot of choice and thus, satisfaction. The main problem people have with CSA farm shares for example, is that they can't control what they get. Also, this way you don't have to come up with recipes and mass-source ingredients every single day (which is very hard). Instead, you get to do that over the course of a week.

I think you can learn a lot from the methodologies of http://www.bostonorganics.com/.

Also, if you really are considerate of the vegans and vegetarians, you will get rave reviews and the support of a vocal and big customer base who love to cook and blog.

Nice photos go a long way, especially in food. It's hard, but it makes the difference between whether I will cook a recipe or not (i.e. a good photo will make me do a $20 purchase and commit 1 hour)

Finally, I think you should encourage customers to "hack" your recipes with their own ingredients, and maybe even offer a few variations with every recipe.

Hope this helps, and good luck! :)

thanks for the feedback, this is some really useful advice. Increasing the frequency of our deliveries is maybe something we will consider in the future. For now, we just wanted to get something out there, test it out and see if people are even interested in it. The plan for the future is to have special recipes for people on certain diets; vegetarians, vegans, paleo, etc..

We're working on our new page already. This page will have much more details, pricing plan, sign up, etc... We definitely have to liven up the page and add more pictures

And I love the idea of hacking recipes

For some reason, I imagined you were sending daily, although I guess the website says nothing of the sort. Sometimes I make things up in my head! :)

I like the special diets idea.

Even better with hacking is that you can have a community-voted hack of the week (where you can't vote for yourself) and people upload their photos. Even better, you can offer those winners one of next week's recipes for free, in exchange for rights to their photos. So that you can uploads those photos in time for next week, and also get some valuable feedback.

Argh, even thinking about this is getting me excited.

Haha, that's great that you're excited. That's also a pretty good way to get our users involved with the service, good idea

Using a picture of a plane for the delivery icon is somewhat confusing. It implies an impersonal corporation far away with a one size fits all mentality to the whole country. What is preferable is (mostly) locally sourced ingredients and a realization that (for example) Californians have different tastes than Alabamans.

You'll want to provide some sort of "difficulty" level with the recipes. Not everyone is good or confident at cooking. Following on to what makmanalp said, that could be another factor in addition to vegetarian, number of diners etc. Being able to pick 3 meals for the week would help greatly.

I'd recommend you publish your recipes even to those without accounts etc so others can try them, even though they'd have to get the ingredients themselves.

You'll find that not everyone has the best cookware and tools. You may find a good source of ancillary revenue and/or "frequent flyer" benefits to be supplying nice tools (eg knives, spatulas, scissors) and pots/pans.

These are from really good suggestions. You brought up some points that we didn't consider. In the future, we planned to post recipes along with blog posts and tips.

The difficulty level is also a great idea. I think giving them a choice of meals/difficulties is good, we also want to add the option like "surprise me" for people to discover new things. What do you think about that?

Presumably the "surprise me" would mean a random selection of the offerings rather than something not on the visible list? Americans are very fussy with their food so not knowing what it is until it arrives at your door may be going too far. But from a UX perspective I think that is shirking your responsibility to make the meals interesting.

You can certainly gamify things, and also take inspiration from the humour of Woot. For example bingo cards where you try to have meals covering the whole alphabet, or colours. Or "World Tours" where there are sequences of recipes that trace a path geographically around the world. Or voting certain ingredients off the "island". Or pick a film/TV show and make what the characters eat (or inspired by what they eat, or their locations). The Once Upon A Time In Mexico DVD has a 10 minute short on it showing how to make puerco pebil that I've done several times.

Here for example are the Indiana Jones locations: http://indianajones.wikia.com/wiki/Travel_with_Indy:_Locatio...

Out of that you'd get South America, France, Egypt, UK, India, Spain, Venice, Jordan and the US Southwest. My mouth is already watering :-)

Do you plan to overnite / express mail the ingredients ? Because the recipe can contain produce / meat (perishables), you have to make sure the ingredients reach the customer within 1-2 days, else the perishables might go bad. Besides, you need to consider what impact the weather might have when shipping perishables (given the 100+ temps recently in east coast), even a few hours longer and they might spoil. If you do plan to overnite / express mail the ingredients (which can get expensive fast), will the cost be borne by you or passed on to the customer ?

Right now, we're only going to be shipping to SF and I'll be doing the deliveries for now. We have considered the weather and perishables and shipping that can get expensive especially including the insulation and ice pack for each box.

Great concept. This is something I would want in NYC. Lugging groceries on the train is a big hassle especially during rush hours and no seats. Driving to the city to get the freshest groceries is almost impossible. What's great about this is that you guys provide a recipe with the order! As a food lover, I'm always down to try new recipes and add it to dishes i would love to cook for family or friends

I think this is a really smart idea. With working all day and living alone it's hard to get the motivation to cook well for just myself, but a program like this takes all the hassle out of it!

Basically what we are is a subscription service that delivers ingredients and a recipe to your door, saving you the hassle of picking out ingredients, waiting on line, etc..

it's a great idea. definitely gotta clean up the UI a bit though but its pretty good. Hope it takes off! and if it takes off, hope you guys have enough people to buy and ship all this stuff lol

this is awesome! hope it becomes big!

If you want this reviewed you should have a video on the front page at the very least giving a walk through and pitch of the service you are providing.

We are trying to make a service where ingredients and recipes are delivered straight to your door. So that you can start cooking without the hassle of picking up every item.

right now we're just kind of gauging interests. we're working on the site with more details soon. and we'll definitely add a video in there. thanks

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