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
Review my startup - RecipeTonite
11–18 of 18 posts
Re: Review my startup - RecipeTonite
#12Great 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
Re: Review my startup - RecipeTonite
#13Do 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 ?
Re: Review my startup - RecipeTonite
#14Do 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…
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.
Re: Review my startup - RecipeTonite
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 f…
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
Re: Review my startup - RecipeTonite
#16Using 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.
Re: Review my startup - RecipeTonite
#17Using 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 c…
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?
Re: Review my startup - RecipeTonite
#18Using 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 c…
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 :-)