KitchenPC

A couple weeks ago, I blogged about my commitments and envisioned next steps for KitchenPC.  I thought I’d write up a short progress report and detail the road traveled so far, and shed some light on the insights I’ve developed along the way.  I’m hoping to share my experiences not only to update my own followers, but also provide a realistic baseline of expectations in a world where the media distorts realism and manufactures this false notion that every startup we’ve ever heard of has been an overnight success.  This simply doesn’t happen; more often than not, launching a consumer product is more analogous to lining up two turtles on a line, firing off a starter gun and shouting “GO!”

Which leads me to my first point.

Getting 1,000 Users Is Tough!

With the six-billion+ people that use the Internet, and even the tens of millions of people who frequent cooking sites, it seems like it should be pretty easy to wrangle 1,000 users into at least signing up for a new website.  I tried, on purpose, not to overdo it (as I explained my reasoning before,) not wanting to blow my marketing budget and having floods of users sign up, find out the product is a total miss, and never coming back again.  Yet, still getting that initial set of a thousand early adopters to model feedback off of is proving rather challenging.  I’m trying my very hardest to remain optimistic and capitalizing on every chance I get to gain insight and experience.

First, the initial word got out about KitchenPC through my own Facebook page.  This meant the first few signups were friends of mine, or those following KitchenPC through my own Facebook profile (for example, ex-coworkers.)  This happened the evening of Wednesday, October 6th and resulted in 9 signups on Wednesday and 14 signups the next day.  That Saturday is when I sent out email to the 290 or so people who took the survey, yet Saturday only peaked at an additional 14 signups.  Monday was a big day, as the press release was made public.  This generated quite a bit of blog and Twitter buzz, however no real media attention.  All of the media mentions about KitchenPC were simply a copy of the press release that I wrote myself, no original content was created and I’ve still yet to be contacted by any media outlet that wants to write an article about the site.  However, links to the press release were mentioned in dozens of Twitter feeds, some of them with well over 5,000 followers.  Though there were several hits on the site, Monday only resulted in 32 new user signups.  Since the press release cost $500, that’s over $15 bucks per user!  Now I don’t feel quite so bad about spending a dollar per click-through to advertise the survey on Facebook.

Since then, I’ve done no “real” advertising, but a slow trickle of new users has been constant since.  There’s been a few spikes here and there, but I’ve been averaging about 5 new users per day.  Since I haven’t really been active about promoting the site, I will assume these users find out about the site through word of mouth or running across a random mention of the site online.  According to Google Analytics, 63% of users logon to my site by directly typing in the URL.  Another 32% reach the site through a referring site.  Who are the big referrers?  Seattle20.com is at the top, with 50 referrals.  One can argue these users probably are interested in checking out the site from an entrepreneur point of view, not to become regular users.  Facebook.com is responsible for 18.  Third place (at 13), surprisingly enough, is some site called gourmetretailer.com.  What’s fascinating about this site is the average user referred by this site will spend 6 minutes and 41 seconds on my site.  The average direct user spends only 4 minutes, average seattle20.com user spends 2:41 and the average Facebook user spends barely over a minute.  So, apparently users on The Gourmet Retailer (who simply republished my press release and nothing else) really dig my site.  This seems like a prime spot to advertise on, however I’ve already checked in to their banner ad prices and they’re several thousand dollars.  Not quite ready for that yet.  Though I will admit that’s a much better deal than a full page ad in a popular cooking magazine, which go for well over $100,000 for a single issue!

Ok, so as it stands today as I write this blog, I’ve collected 177 user signups (which includes the early alpha users, which I believe were about 20 or so.)  Probably not too shabby, though it’s still a long ways off from my desired 1,000.  So how do these people behave?  Only 51 of these users have ever come back after the initial logon.  Thus, the majority of the users check out the site, feign minimal interest, and then don’t come back.  There’s only been 10 users (not including myself) who have signed up and logged  back on at least 4 times.  However, those 4 times seem to have been over the first few days of creating an account, as none of these “active users” have logged on recently.

Over the past 10 days, I have recorded an average of 12.2 logons per day.

Let’s take a look at how people are actually using the site.  This is a bit more interesting, as it can provide evidence supporting whether or not I’ve built any sort of useful product, even if it’s not yet well known.

First, the shopping list seems very popular.  29 users currently have an active shopping list on the site.  To me this shows people are indeed interested in finding a couple recipes and generating a shopping list based on what they need to buy.  At the very least, the feature is easy to use and discoverable.

How many people use the calendar?  This is key, as the entire success of the site hinges on the desire for people to plan meals using a calendar.  Right now, 22 users have at least one recipe scheduled on their calendar.  Out of the 51 users who have ever come back post signup, I don’t think this is too shabby.  The site is indeed being used for meal planning!

The Pantry feature is a surprising one.  Unlike the shopping list and calendar which provide easy and immediate access from most any page, the pantry is a feature you have to actually go navigate to a separate page to find, and then manually enter ingredients and amounts.  However, 20 people have gone through this effort and are using the site to store, on average, 4.3 items in their pantry.  I’m pleased by this stat, as a big part of me thought the pantry would be completely useless.  I guess there’s a few people who don’t mind managing their inventory on a website.  However, we’ll see if this trend starts to “scale.”

The cookbook is another popular feature.  29 users on the site have at least one item added to their cookbook, and 9 users have more than one.  This not only indicates a desire to manage personal collections of recipes, it means these users have the intention of returning to the site to access these recipes.

How about my clever little ingredient blacklist feature?  Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t spend too much time on this feature as only one user currently has anything added to their blacklist, and that’s a friend of mine who I had talked about the feature with.  Absolutely no one has discovered this feature on their own and decided to use it.  This might mean the feature is completely useless, or it could also mean that the feature is too buried to be discoverable.  Once I have my first thousand users, it would be interested to survey them asking questions like “Do you know about the blacklist feature and how it works” and “Is this a feature you would find useful?”

I also have 9 users who have commented on at least one recipe, which isn’t too bad.  It means they’ve either tried out the recipe and decided to share their feedback, or they at least find the recipe interesting enough to warrant the time to commentate on.

Only 16 people have rated recipes, which I find somewhat depressing.  Not only is rating recipes made super easy by the recipe viewer, but this means every other user hasn’t received the benefits of a single recipe rating, which enable features like automatic recipe suggestions on the home page and more accurate meal planner results.  I think recipe ratings will tend to come over time, as more users use the site to find recipes, cook those recipes, and come back to add comments and rate them.

While these numbers are interesting, I just don’t feel with the number of users I’ve collected so far, that they can really be used to prove or disprove any trend in user behavior, or validate development efforts that will shape the future of KitchenPC.

Ok, so how do I get 1,000 users really?

It’s been nearly 3 weeks and I’m not even close to my goal of 1,000 initial users, which I feel is a required number of early adopters to justify any decisions regarding the next steps of KitchenPC.  Development and further coding on the site is literally on hold until this happens.  The press release had almost zero effect, emailing everyone I knew didn’t help much, so seriously, what does it take to get 1,000 strangers to use your site?  (The was not a rhetorical question, if you know the answer please let me know!)

I’ve employed three strategies, that I’m hoping when combined will help me achieve this goal.

First, I hired a marketing company.  Last week, I signed a deal with Jumpstart Marketing to generate some initial publicity for the site.  Under this contract, they’ll create a video demonstrating the site features and enticing users to sign up.  The video will be published on a newly created KitchenPC YouTube channel, and they’ve guaranteed a minmum of 3,500 YouTube channel subscribers.  With any luck, a good chunk of this YouTube traffic will mosey on over to KitchenPC.com to check out the actual product.

Since these guys have a strong background in advertising and customer demographics, hopefully they’ll be able to cater to the types of users I want on my site.  Worst case, I’ll at least have a demo video I can put up on the landing page.

Second, I spent last weekend working heavily on SEO.  For those non-technical readers, SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and is webmaster vernacular for “getting your site to show up in search results.”  With only around 5% of users coming into my site through a search engine, this is definitely an area marked for immediate improvement.

My initial thoughts on KitchenPC was that since I was a private site that required a user account context to really be useful, SEO was not much of a priority.  In other words, I did not envision KitchenPC simply being “a huge recipe database” like Epicurious or AllRecipes, so I didn’t really want to show up when people Google for “chocolate cake.”  However, seeing how difficult it is to generate initial traction in a consumer market, I’m revisiting that assumption and have come to a different conclusion (a bunch of my friends reading this are now saying, “See?  I told you so.” – I am the first to admit when I am wrong.

I did several things to greatly improve SEO.  First, I created “permalinks” to all the recipes on the site.  The URL for any recipe in particular will be a more human readable description, such as /Recipes/Chocolate_Cake.html or some such.  Google will assume a search result is more relevant if the URL contains words the user searched for.  In other words, searching for “chocolate cake” will more likely turn up Chocoalte_Cake.html than Recipe.html?id=123.

Next, I added <meta> tags in the recipe peramlink pages for keywords and descriptions.  The description (which is basically the recipe description) will be directly displayed on the search results page rather than some auto-generated description based on relevant text parsed from the page content.  Users will see the recipe title and description right on Google without having to click the link.  The keywords are somewhat dynamic as well.  Every recipe will have a fixed set of keywords, such as kitchenpc, cooking, recipes, etc.  I also add a keyword for each “tag” on the recipe, such as “bread” or “breakfast”.  This should make my site come up much more often when users search for things such as “dessert recipes.”  Next, I created a robots.txt and siteindex.xml file.  The site index file will allow search engines to crawl much more deeply into my site, and index all 1,000+ recipes without needing to logon to the site or find these recipes by manually crawling (which would be impossible.)  This means a user who searches for “chocolate cake” might get a result pointing to a chocolate cake recipe on my site, even if they don’t search for KitchenPC.  This alone should drive up that 5% considerably, and hopefully some of this new traffic will translate to new user signups, especially if I rework the recipe viewer page to entice users to signup (great opportunity for some A/B testing!)

The third thing I’ve done to generate new traffic is employ some basic Facebook viral advertising.  I was scared of doing this while the product was in such early stages, but I decided spending some minimal investment in this area can pay off now.  The main feature is it’s now possible to “Like” a recipe.  Both the non-logged-in permalink version of the recipe viewer as well as the logged in recipe viewer popup panel will now contain a standard Facebook “Like” button.  This allows users to post a link to the recipe on their own Facebook page, which promotes a recipe as well as drives new traffic into the site.  Facebook posts are viral in nature, as a friend might check out the recipe and decide they “Like” it as well, spreading the message another level deep on the Facebook social graph (6 likes, and it could be seen by Kevin Bacon!)

Why don’t users come back?

I’ll be the first to admit that my bounce rate (the percentage of users who go to kitchenpc.com, but then leave without signing up) is way too high, and the user attrition rate is also way too high.  Even at this early stage, it’s pretty obvious that KitchenPC is not really providing any value to the average consumer.  Even as a free site, a very small percentage of users come back and I’ve yet to see anyone turn into what I would call a regular user.  I don’t believe it’s too soon to start looking into what I’m doing wrong.

The first step I took was to integrate into the site a fantastic product called Uservoice.  Uservoice allows people to suggest ideas for features or provide feedback, and then other users can “vote up” those ideas, so the most popular ideas show up at the top of the list.  The interface is well done, and it’s easy for users to find the mechanism, logon, and vote.  They’re a “freemium” service which means they offer a free basic plan and offer paid plans with more features.  For now, I’m just using the free version until I get more users.  I entered 10 ideas myself, and I’ve had 2 other ideas posted by other users so far.  Though I haven’t seen too many people use this tool, I suspect it will grow in popularity as my user base increases.  The problem with that, though, is I won’t be able to use this tool as a vehicle to attracting an initial user base.  This means, for now, I have to use other techniques to ascertain why the site isn’t very useful.

The best idea I’ve had so far is to just do individual case studies.  My friends like me, they want to see me succeed, and they love the idea of KitchenPC.  Most people I’ve pitched the idea to say “That’s awesome!  I would totally use that!” – the only problem is… they don’t use it.  None of my friends are active users, and most have only logged on once.  Insulting?  Not really.  I simply haven’t built a product that they want to use.

So, I’ve posed the question (more politely, but I’ll be blunt for the sake of blogging) – “Hey <insert friend’s name> – You seem excited about KitchenPC and you were receptive to the idea, however you don’t use it.  I’ve checked and you’ve only logged in once.  What can I do to make you use the site?”

The response is incontrovertibly unanimous.  People actually don’t give a rat’s ass about features, the meal planner I spent so many long nights working on, the pantry feature, super accurate shopping lists, etc.  While they have a few little ideas here and there on that stuff, it comes down to one plain and simple fact.  They’re looking for a recipe, my site doesn’t have it, they leave.  With only around 1,000 recipes on the site, it’s simply not useful as a place to go to for recipes, which is the primary thing people want out of the site.  One of my friends IM’ed me the other day and said, “I was looking for a paella recipe and your site has none!  How do you expect me to use your site when you don’t even have a single paella recipe, I won’t even bother telling my other friends about your site yet.”  The Uservoice data also supports the conclusion: I need to add way more recipes, or I’m dead.

There’s a small problem with this.  Everything I’ve tried to get more recipes onto the site has failed!  Every other website has the advantage of having a very non-normalized way of storing recipes, allowing them to use technologies like bulk-importing massive databases or screen scrapping other recipe websites, or just turning into massive portals of recipe websites, acting like recipe search engines.  However, since I went the route of flawless data integrity (a route I’m not yet willing to admit was the wrong decision), I need to know the exact ingredient (and match it to an entry in my ingredient database) as well as the form the ingredient is used in.  This makes bulk-import all but impossible.

I’ve tried hiring people to enter recipes.  Out of the 10 or so people I’ve hired, 8 of them just never started, 1 of them entered around 280 and quit, and the other shows up less and less by the day.  She’s entered a total of 481 so far, however she’s been at it for almost 3 months and her estimate was 10 days to enter 1,000 recipes.  Suffice to say, she isn’t meeting expectations.  I could hire 50 of her and perhaps eventually get somewhere, but I’d have to hire 500 people to maybe have a chance of 50 actually doing any work, and plus managing 50 data enterers would be a full time job in itself.

Crowd sourcing the effort might someday be an option, but for now there’s no chicken to lay that egg.  Users won’t go to the site because there’s no recipes, thus there’s no users to enter recipes.  Plus, so far I’ve yet to see a single person (except for my previous alpha testers) enter a single recipe during beta.  I’d need 100,000 users to have 1,000 users entering any recipes.  So no, that’s no good.  People want recipes but they won’t enter them and you can’t pay them to be entered.  That leaves one option – find a way to bulk import recipes even though it’s impossible.  At Microsoft, I was often asked to do impossible things.  It’s kinda fun.

Turns out finding the raw recipe data is pretty easy.  I recently came across this site which sells a database of over 41,000 recipes in SQL or Excel format for cheap, with publishing rights assuring I can stay out of any legal issues.  The problem is their schema is the exact antithesis of all that is great about KitchenPC.  They have a single table (one row per recipe), and all the ingredients for the recipe are literally stored in a single text field, with each usage delimited by a carriage return.  Talk about a parsing nightmare!  I’d not only have to parse out the amounts and units, I’d have to figure out the ingredient as well as the form it’s used in.  There must literally be hundreds of thousands of distinct ingredient references to accurately parse, with minimal room for error.  On a side note, I emailed the company asking if they could provide data conversion into my schema.  They replied back saying they could accomodate this, but it would be a manual data entry job which they bill out at $24 USD per hour.  For kicks, I asked them for an estimated number of hours, to which they never replied.  I think it would take months, and they’d probably contract out the work to workers in foreign countries making $4-$6/hr.

A better idea I’ve come across is a file format used by MasterCook.  MasterCook is a fairly popular brand of recipe software, and they have an XML based format for storing recipes.  It’s fairly easy to understand and parse, and ingredient names, amounts, units, etc are stored separately making parsing much easier.  I would still have to figure out which ingredients are used in which forms, but I think this sort of natural language processing is at least in the realm of realistic.  It also just happens that I have a CD with around 8,000 recipes in this format.  This seems like a great place to start.

I don’t believe I’ll be able to import all 8,000 recipes, as many contain schema features that I just don’t yet support.  In the MasterCook format, recipes can be “recursive”, for example an ingredient in a recipe can be a reference to the implementation of another recipe.  This is a concept I’d love to have in KitchenPC, but it’s a ways off as it leads to issues like circular references and generating massive shopping lists for a single recipe.  Luckily, the 8,000 recipes don’t contain too many recursive recipe references, and a fair amount of the ones that do, I can substitute known KitchenPC ingredients for this recipes.

I think the best I’ll be able to hope for is to partially automate this task, but what I’m hoping is to design some software that can “learn” as I manually process these recipes and start to catch on and match ingredients and forms on its own.  I’ve been working the past few days on a prototype for what this software would be like, but haven’t made a huge amount of progress yet.  Besides ingredient parsing, there’s some other problems such as figuring out the “tags” for a given recipe.  I’m curious if one could implement a machine learning algorithm that can accurately “guess” what tags a recipe will have based on what ingredients are in that recipe, words used in the title, description, and method, and other various attributes of the recipe.  Such an algorithm could be “taught” by looking at the current set of the ~1,000 recipes I have.  Definitely an interesting computer science problem, it’s this sort of thing I love about KitchenPC as I was never able to work on these sorts of challenges while at Microsoft.

If this seems like a lot of work to go through to get 8,000 recipes, it probably is.  However, there’s an additional benefit for being able to parse recipes using intelligent metaheuristics.  This technology could eventually lead to my dream of allowing users to directly paste in entire recipes, upload Word documents, or import a recipe from a URL.  KitchenPC will truly take over the Internet, probably gaining sentience and enslaving mankind, if it gets to the point where it can truly read and understand a recipe all by itself.  There’s a whole list of companies who would make multi-million dollar offers for a KitchenPC buy-out for that sort of technology alone.

While a lack of recipes, in my opinion, is the primary factor stopping people from visiting the site, looking at the feature design is also important.  Even if I had 100,000 recipes, I still don’t compete with AllRecipes and Epicurious (they have way more) unless I nail feature scenarios and get users to “come for the recipes, stay for the meal planning.”

Talking with my friend Steve yesterday morning validated a notion that’s been brewing in my subconscious for a while now.  Though I hate to admit it, no one really cares about the meal planner; or even understands what it does.  The BuildPlan.html page doesn’t even appear on Google Analytics (though this might be some bug, since MealPlan.html appears quite a bit) and the people I’ve interviewed about the meal planner, Steve included, just don’t really find it useful in the least.  The root of the problem is people have this notion that I expect an up to the minute, complete and accurate count of their entire inventory.  While people love the idea of the meal planner, and it’s always a hit when I tell a group of people about what it can do at a party, people don’t really think about the front loaded costs associated with its use.  I’ve come up with 3 things I can do in the immediate future to make the meal planner less scary.

First, the name “meal planner” confuses every single person I’ve talked to.  Some disagree it’s even a planner, as it’s technically more of a “finder.”  The first step will be to rename the meal planner to something else.  My idea at the moment is call the option “What Can I Make?”  This text would appear on the top menu and on the home page, as it instantly convenes exactly what the feature does and why you would want to use it.  Meal planner is a bad name because the entire site is a meal planner, this is just a modeling algorithm that figures out “what you can make” based on the criteria you give it.

Second, there’s a lot of friction to even use the thing.  When you go into the page, you have to either have a pantry (a concept that scares everyone, as they assume “Well shoot now I have to manage my inventory online?”) or they have to type in ingredients and amounts.  If you’re lazy, you just hit the “Go” button and it errors out saying you must enter at least one ingredient.  I’m forcing you to do something you don’t want to do, just to use a feature you don’t yet understand the benefits of.  The user thinks, “Screw that, I’m not that interested in this anymore.”

I’d like the meal planner tool to be useful, albeit not as useful, to this customer demographic as well.  It should do something, anything, without giving it a single piece of data.  In other words, the meal planner needs to just “do things” when you click Go.  The solution I’m considering is to create a “virtual pantry” for these users.  If you go to the meal planner and don’t type in any ingredients at all, it will run the meal planner with the top 10 most commonly used ingredients with average household amounts.  This virtual pantry could be dynamically calculated based on database statistics, or more likely for the initial manifestation, hard coded with “common crap everyone has.”  What this would give you is an efficient meal plan that uses common ingredients and strives for ingredient overlap without users having to enter a single thing at all.  Users would experience a basic meal plan, and hopefully begin to experiment more with the feature, perhaps typing in some of their own items this time.

As for people being scared away by the pantry, I believe there’s a few simple things I can do to make it more clear I seriously don’t expect anyone to use KitchenPC as an inventory manager.  On the meal planner, the radio button that says “I have the following ingredients available” should be renamed to something like “Try to use the following ingredients:”  The former verbiage conotes a desire for completeness, asking the user “what they have” is interpreted as a complete tally for your inventory.  The latter appears more optional and laid back, and the meaning even works with no ingredients at all.  Users are more likely to just enter one or two things they have in their fridge, and not feel pressured into typing anything at all so they can see a meal plan in action and see how the feature works first.  Another pantry change, an idea proposed by a friend of mine, is to set up each new user with a default pantry.  This pantry would contain household staples such as flour, sugar, milk and eggs with common amounts.  It would almost be like a default account template, showing the usefulness of the feature.  It would also challenge users to go to their pantry when they say, “Hey I don’t have that – how do I change that?” leading them to enter what they actually do have.

Though these things can be done very easily, a bigger change I have planned down the road is to make ingredient amounts (in both the meal planner and the pantry) completely optional.  I would like users to be able to enter ingredients for the meal planner, but omit some or all of the amounts if it’s unknown or they simply don’t care.  The meal planner would run more like Supercook.com, and simply generate a set that uses as many of these ingredients in any amount as possible.  Running the planner is this mode would probably require a slightly modified UI, as the “Selection totals” on the left side would be more of a tally of which of their desired ingredients are in fact being used, and the total required usage.  The scoring algorithm for the planner would also have to take this “fuzziness” into account.  Either way, this would cater more towards users who are scared off by entering too many numbers and just want to use the feature as quickly as possible.  I’m kicking myself for not designing the feature in this way to begin with, as this sort of thing is the same exact mistake we made in Project!  I even wrote a whole bloody blog article about how I would learn from Project’s mistakes.  Mike, you should know better!

Between getting 1,000 users, finding a way to bulk import recipes, and making minor usability tweaks in the product, my life is pretty swamped at the moment.  I also only covered about half the things I wanted to discuss in this post, which is already starting to look like a novel.  If you’ve read the whole thing, you must either be a true fan or very bored at work.  Thus, I’ll save the other news items (mainly about my search for a business partner) for the next post.  See-ya then!

I just got back from CrowdPitch, Funding Universe’s event to allow startups to pitch in front of a live audience and receive feedback from both audience members and a panel of judges.  Overall, I had a great time but did not get to stay as long as I wanted.  Parking was an issue so I could only find a two-hour spot.  I did get to see all the presentations and was able to talk to a couple of the founders and give some in-person feedback.  I also got to chat a little bit with Alex Lawrence, one of the founders of Funding Universe, who I hope to be able to keep in touch with.  I just sent him a long email about getting traction for KitchenPC, I hope I’ll get back some optimistic feedback from him!

Like the last time I blogged about CrowdPitch, I’ll go over the presenters and share my thoughts on them.

Bada8.com

Bada8 is a company specializing in travel between the United States and China, and also within China.  From what I understood, they do everything from arrange tours within the country, setup business travel, arrange for hotels, and basically do anything you’d need if you needed to travel there for any reason, business or pleasure.  Apparently, their advantage over other travel agencies is they do more for you, know the locale a lot better, and have business partnerships with various important people.

I think, overall, their company is going somewhere.  It’s a huge market and they already have revenue, and I think they’ll end up doing well.

Honestly, I did not like their pitch in the least.  The pitch started out very nervous sounding, with pauses for perhaps over five seconds while the presenter looked up at his slide deck.  For a company that has been around for almost 3 years, I think they should have their pitch nailed forward and backward by now.  The presenter did NOT state the problem up front, which should be within the first 10 seconds of any pitch.  He spent probably half the pitch on random facts and numbers that I don’t care about, and were too fast for me to really grok.  I was not clear in the least on their business plan, and think they have a long way to go before they’ll convince any VC firm to cough up money for them.  They need some serious coaching to organize a slide deck, and to practice their pitch in front of a mirror about 100 times to get it smooth and seamless.

My Score: 2/5

Green Planet Ziplines

Ok so these guys somehow combine zip-line based amusement parks and green environmental stuff.  To what extent, I’m not entirely clear.  I guess their parks are all carbon neutral and sustainable and stuff.  Their idea is to build a zip line park in Port Angeles, which has a cruise ship terminal and is in other ways a great location.  The closest zip line park in the area is all the way up in Victoria, BC.  They seem to have a great management team with lots of experience in this industry.

To be honest, this pitch didn’t really capture my attention.  It’s not a technology company, and thus I would be very surprised if a VC firm would invest in it.  It seems like a typical business you’d just go to a bank for.  There was some discussion around this in the panel, and the answer seemed to be “We’ve been trying that with no luck, banks have all gone bankrupt or they’re dealing with bad loans.”  I got somewhat of a desperate vibe from the pitch, and the whole thing just reminded me of some guy who wants to start an amusement park, has a good plan, but needs money.

I also have to wonder if there’s really any need for franchised zip-line parks.  Do people really go out and zipline all the time?  Or is it something you do like once or twice in your life while you’re on vacation in some tropical area?  I don’t really rate it as an activity you just go out and do, like mini-golf or bowling.

I wish this guy all the luck in the world with his venture, but I’m kinda wondering why CrowdPitch chose him to present to an audience of computer techie people.  It sounds a bit mean, and I by no means am saying I don’t like his idea or don’t think his business plan has any merit, I’m just wondering if CrowdPitch is an appropriate platform for him.

My Score: 3/5

Shirts for Greeks

Yes, like many others I thought this said “Shirts for Geeks” as well.  I liked these guys quite a bit.  Their pitch was excellent, and finally one that started right up front with the problem!  They create attire for both fraternities and sororities, such as tshirts, hoodies, jerseys, etc.  In order to do that, you have to be licensed to use their trademarks; thus not many companies can do this.

One thing I liked about their pitch was they had some pictures on their slidedeck of some of their items.  I think the presenter should have been wearing some, but instead he chose to go the professional route and wear a suit and tie.  One thing I liked about their business vision is they hire people to be “in the know” about events and goings-on around campuses.  These are their eyes and ears on campus, and gives them a competitive advantage knowing about trends, upcoming events, etc.

They also employ a vertical hierarchy; that is, they design, manufacture, sell and ship everything in house.  The other competitors out-source all that stuff.  This gives them the ability to handle custom changes or orders for cheaper and deliver a better product.  There was some discussion in the panel about whether this is or is not a real advantage, but if it drives down their cost, and they have the numbers to back that, then I like it.

Their business does seem to be getting some traction.  They did about $300k in sales the first year, and only sell at University of Washington, and dominate about 20% of that market.  They’re looking for $150k in investing to continue to expand.

My Score: 4/5

Viafo

The one sentence pitch for Viafo is, “We make building mobile solutions easy.”  This mobile platform company is definitely in a hot market, and will have a lot of competition.  From what I got from the presentation, they want to make integration of various mobile services a lot easier by being the “proxy” to broker communications.  For example, if I wrote a KitchenPC Mobile App (there’s one in the works of course) and I wanted to allow users to post recipes they plan to make on their Facebook page or Twitter feed, I could tie into the OpenGraph and OAuth APIs and have at it.  However, when those APIs change, or something goes wrong, stuff can start to get messy.  The idea seems to be that I can instead integrate with their API and just “click” which services I want to post content to.  Ideally, they would make this experience work better than integrating directly in with a bunch of different frameworks.

The pitch was very well organized, and the presenter had the unfair advantage of having a British accent (Note to self: Hire a British co-founder.)  I understood the problem right away, but he totally lost me on his exact solution.  I got to talk with the presenter a bit after and gave him one idea.  I think he should make up a fictional app to use as an example, and go over how the architecture would work.  What features could this app now have thanks to his solution?  My brain, I think, would connect with those sorts of examples a lot better than a bunch of PowerPoint bullet points.  He mentioned that he could actually use real-world examples as soon as his current customers launch their products.

His business plan seems to also target enterprise level customers.  However, I think he’ll run into some friction getting those customers unless he has some mad sales skills.  It seems to me that building on this platform now makes his online services a point of failure for a ton of mobile apps.  If his site ever goes down, ever loses data, ever introduces any bug that causes apps to stop working; he’s lost a ton of credibility.  He needs to be able to convince his customers that they can “trust” his company to build a scalable solution (handling any amount of trafic they throw his way) and it will be fault tolerant and highly reliable.  Luckily, he had a huge list of founders and advisors who have the experience in this industry to perhaps provide this level of credibility.  Even with this, I think it’s a hard sell and he might want to go after smaller customers as well.

My Score: 4/5

Wisemuv

Wisemuv, pronounced “Wise Move” is a startup that will help you make decisions fast.  I thought this pitch was the best out of the group.  He immediately identified the problem, and started to lay out a solution.  However, the idea is one I’m unsure of.  The deal is, people make all sorts of important decisions all the time.  Should I take job offer A or job offer B?  Should I move to New York?  Whatever the decision is, Wisemov helps you compile various data points to help you make a decision.  Interestingly enough, some of those data points can be from within your social network (Like “Phone a Friend” on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”)  You can pull certain contacts to provide personal feedback, or even pull complete strangers for advice as well.

This is definitely an interesting idea, and I plan on checking out the site to see what it’s like.  I’m trying to imagine if this sort of thing can really replace “gut instinct” as a decision making tool.  Some people make decisions more emotionally, while others (myself included) more logically.

One thing that would have really helped him (which was brought up wisely by the panel) would be a live demonstration.  Even if he just had some screen shots of his site demonstrating a typical question, it would go a long way to allow the audience to conceptualize this idea.  My brain had a hard time imagining what this site would be like.  Until I use it, I have no idea if it would be useful to me at all.

I’m also curious if he has statistics on how many people end up going with the decision route proposed by the site, or if people have already made up their mind and just want some data to confirm their gut feeling.  Either way, I think I’ll check out the site and see what the deal is.  I think if the implementation is well done, it could be something people use.

His revenue model seemed to be based around the collection of trends and statistics to sell to other companies.  I had a similar idea for that sort of revenue model when I thought KitchenPC would make money by tying into online grocers.

My Score: 5/5

My vote?

I gave my money to Wisemuv, mostly because I thought the pitch was the best and I liked the originality of the idea.  I don’t necessarily think that this idea is the most likely to succeed, but I decided to make my decision based on the quality of the pitch, which was fantastic.

The winner ended up being Viafo, which was my second choice.  I almost split my money between the two, but figured I’d just go with a single choice this time.

Afterwards, I didn’t stick around too long.  I was hoping to get a chance to chat with Andy Sack a bit, but he took off immediately (He’s probably busy with that whole TechStars thing) and my parking was about to expire.  Overall, this was another fun one and I’m looking forward to the next one.  It also gave me an idea of how far I still need to go with KitchenPC.  I really have no numbers, no revenue projections, no profit model or anything.  I’d love to present, but I think I’d get my butt kicked without these things, so I’ll have to work on getting a bit more traction and then see where I’m at from there.  Also, I need to find that perfect, preferably British business partner to stand much of a chance of getting any funding anyway.  I think patience is the key at this stage of the game, and luckily I can survive for a bit longer without any funding.

That’s it for now!

At Microsoft, we had these things called “Commitments” that were tied in as part of our review process.  The intent was to establish discipline around focusing ones career objectives around common goals and a well thought-out long term career path.  There was a single problem with this; no one cared.  No, seriously no one cared.  The only time anyone thought about the items on their commitments was for the thirty minutes they spent writing them.  A year later, you’d look at your commitments (not remembering what you wrote) and laughing about how outdated they were, and how they were aligned to a universe that had almost entirely no likeness with the current reality.  There was initially supposed to be a element of transparency between management tiers, allowing those in the lower ranks to get a glimpse of insight into the commitments of their leads and upper managers.  However, each time I tried clicking on a manager in the ranks above me, I got an error saying they had no published commitments at this time.

So, with that said, I plan to blog about my commitments.

The difference is these commitments will be actionable and will be the subject of many future blog posts, as they will be revisited and revised over the coming months.  Hopefully, these will serve as a roadmap for the success of KitchenPC.

Get 1,000 Beta Users

There are two reasons for not making this “get as many users as I can.”  First, that goal wouldn’t be something I could be accountable for and measure success or failure against.  True, I don’t have a boss to “judge” my successes or failures, but I think a commitment has to be something you can deliver on and measure real-time progress against.  That way, one could see if they need to shift focus away from other things.  The other reason is that I actually like the number, and purposely don’t feel the need to go over this for the time being.  In other words, effort should be spent getting to this number but no further efforts need be spent going beyond this number.

The reason for this is having a small trial group of users is easy to work with and model statistics around.  These will be my original “early adopters” and be sufficient enough to collect meaningful data.  What features are popular?  Any big bugs that people just gripe non-stop about ? Did I totally screw up on the pantry idea?  How many people sign up and never come back?  How many recipes does the average user enter?  Blah blah blah.

I think attempting to “go viral” right after launch can lead to a colossal failure.  The number one rule of viral marketing is don’t do it unless you’re sure your product doesn’t suck!  If you’re wrong, then your product sucking will thus be the message transmitted virally.

Collect meaningful data on initial user behaviors

There’s a great video called Startup Metrics for Pirates that I encourage everyone to watch (it’s pretty short.)  It really does a good job focusing on what types of data you need to be able to extract from user behaviors to help define the success of your current strategy.  I plan on adopting some (if not all) of these strategies to help determine what I’m doing right and where I’m screwing up.  I’ve already started collecting some basic statistics on the site, but there’s a whole lot more that needs to be done.

I think the most important piece of data to collect will be what features are people using.  For example, from what I can tell so far the calendar feature is quite popular with my regular users.  This is awesome news because it means people actually want to meal plan!  In fact, this seems to be more popular than any other feature on the site.  The common use case, from what I can tell from my statistically insignificant set of users, is to dig up recipes and add them to your calendar.  The shopping list also seems to be quite popular.  On the other hand, people don’t seem to be using the pantry too much and I’ve still yet to see a single person add anything to their ingredient blacklist.  It’s these sorts of trends that allow me to know where to spend effort on, how to priority bugs, etc.

As originally predicted, pretty much no one is adding new recipes.  I’m sure this is the case with most every recipe site on the Internet, but I need to know if this is because people just don’t care or if people try to add recipes but the experience is so awful, they leave before they save anything.  This leads me to my next career objective.

Ask my top users what they think

I do have a mechanism in place to see who my regular users are, the ones that come back a few times a week at least.  What I’d love to do is simply send out an email to all of them asking them for feedback as my early adopters.  Maybe I can throw out some incentives as well to anyone who answers.  The first manifestation of this commitment (action item if you will, but I rarely pass up the opportunity to use the word “manifestation”) will probably come in the form of a survey.  It’ll probably be fairly well designed and targeted towards people I already know like the site and are regular users.  It will be geared around trying to figure out what I need to improve and let them voice their ideas.

I also am considering the idea of doing a more “pessimistic” survey that would be sent out to people who signed up and never came back, or logged in a few times and then left for good.  This survey would basically say, “Hey we noticed you created an account and checked out the site, but then never came back.  This means you had an initial expectation of what KitchenPC should be, however we did not meet that expectation.  We want to know why.”  In other words, if people found out about KitchenPC and said, “Hey this sounds worth checking out,” then it means I had the chance, at that time, to deliver a product they wanted and would use.  Or, in their mind existed a product they thought they used and KitchenPC was not that product.  Either way, they ended up deciding what I delivered was not valuable to them.  It’s also possible they just like checking out new sites regardless of what they are, but still the element of a lost opportunity still exists at whatever level.

The second  mani – err…  “action item” will be in the form of a collaborative effort that users can actively participate in.  This idea was one that I’ve had for a while, but was more solidified as a “Yes, I must do this” type of item after watching this video of one of the Dropbox founders outlining their path to success.  Dropbox implemented this idea in the form of a feature called “Votebox.”  The idea is that each user gets ten credits to “spend” on various feature ideas.  This allows them to vote on where they think my priorities should be aligned.  I want to go one step further and implement a system that allows people to come up with features and add as much detail as they wish, and allow other users to add ideas and “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” various aspects of the design.  I’m hoping some sort of platform already exists out there to build on, and I don’t have to implement such a thing completely from scratch.

I have tons of ideas already for the site, however trying to do everything would be impossible.  Plus, I might spend weeks on a feature and have it end up like the ingredient blacklist support which has thus far gone either undiscovered or just unused.  Suffice to say, I want customers to feel like they’re actively engaged in the future development of KitchenPC, and the product is designed around them.  This is another reason to keep my user base small for now, as *snicker* you don’t want too many cooks in the Kitchen[PC].

Iterate based on initial feedback, and then expand the user base

The thing that’s so tempting to do right now is open up Visual Studio, stay up late eating ice cream, and hack out completely badass new features.  I already have a bunch of these features already done, they’re just turned off for the beta because I don’t feel they’re ready.  However, until I really have a good grasp of the minimal viable product, I have to focus on really delivering a core set of super useful features that people will use on a daily or weekly basis.  I think right now, about 90% of my dev efforts need to be spent on solidifying existing features, fixing high priority bugs, and making modifications to how a feature works based on customer feedback and observations.

With that said, after I have 1,000 users and have “gotten to know them,” I think it will be time to iterate and launch the “next attempt” of KitchenPC.  This re-launch will be 100% aligned with what I’ve learned about my early adopters and really try to nail exactly what they’ve asked for.  At this point, I’m hoping these users will start telling their friends about the site and user growth may start to expand more exponentially.  At least that’s what I hope.  If that doesn’t happen, it’s basically more iterations until they does happen.  Or I die trying.

Find a business partner!

Though I haven’t really gone into great detail about the “team” behind KitchenPC, I think it’s been implied so far that I’m going at this alone.  The fact is, I actually did have a business partner at one point who was planning on taking over the business side of things while I worked on getting the initial prototype out the door.  It was having this partner that gave me the confidence to quit Microsoft and work on KitchenPC full time living off savings.  However, this partnership didn’t end up working out.  I won’t go into details about why, as I’m sure he has his side of the story and I have mine, however needless to say the compatibility didn’t exist between us and we realized we had to go our separate ways.

I think having a business partner or co-founder is pretty much a requirement these days.  You definitely need one if you want to get into any of those startup boot camps such as Y-Combinator or TechStars.  However, the fact is doing a startup is just too much work for one person.  I sort of buried this realization in the back of my mind as not to depress me while I was hard at work on the initial launch, looking at where I am today and how long the road will be ahead leads me to the realization that this is a journey I can’t make alone.  At least not for very much longer.

Now, where does one find a business partner?  I haven’t a clue!  I already checked eBay!  However, I think my top business priority on this very day is to find one, and find one that works with me.  I’ve been thinking a lot about what a good business partner would be.  Do I need to know him or her already, or is a stranger just as good?  Do they need to live here in Seattle?  Do they need to be able to work full time?  Will they work for equity alone?  Should they be a techie like me, or should I look for an experienced business person?

I think the best idea at this point is just to get out there and network.  Start going to events, talk to people, post ads on job boards, etc.  I’m also curious if the fact that I already have a product out on the market will be a good thing or bad thing.  It’s definitely a double-edged sword.  On one side, a potential business partner can look at the site.  They know what I can deliver on (since I did this whole thing myself) and where my skills are.  They know if they like the idea, if they like the site, and can see themselves becoming a part of it.  On the other hand, they might feel a partnership is more “fair” if two parties worked on it together from the ground up and had an equal split in the ownership.  I will go on the record now and say that demanding a majority share of the company isn’t a requirement for me, because I know that what I have now is just the tip of the ice burg compared to what still needs to happen.  However, someone who does want to get on board as an equal partner better be in a position to truly bring it :)

So how will I spend my days?

Well, lately I’ve been spending my days sleeping.  Most good coders are creatures of the night, as has become my preference while I’ve been in hard-core “coding mode” the last few months.  However, it’s vital I start shifting my sleep schedule back over soon.  What I’d like to do from here is spend weekends wearing the coder hat, fixing bugs, making site improvements, etc.  Then spend the weekdays prioritizing networking, going to entrepreneur groups, and meeting new people who I might be able to align with.  I’ll be making an appearance at CrowdPitch again this Thursday (No, I won’t be presenting – I wish!), so be sure to ping me if you’re interested in meeting up.  I’ll be sure to write my official write-up after (especially since the last write-up brought in a ton of new blog readers!)

Other than that, I encourage everyone to use the site, or at least help spread the word.  I think everyone knows at least one person who would use it, let’s get that person to signup and help generate some feedback on where the site should go.  That’s it for now!

I am thrilled to announce that KitchenPC.com has gone live to the public!  It’s been an absolutely exhausting journey, but I’m pleased with the outcome of the Beta version and know that with the support and feedback of its users, the product will only get better from here.  KitchenPC has been a dream of mine for many years now, in one form or another, and to finally have a tangible (well, as far as bits can be) incarnation of this dream is something beyond words.  Many people helped me out along the way, I’d like to thank a few of them at the risk of turning this blog post into an Academy Awards acceptance speech.  They are (in no particular order) Lois C, Josh B, Cherise Z, Brooks T, Dylan A, Joe R, Rohling H, Myrissa Y, Tyson B, Pey-Hua H, Tasnim J, Stephen K, and Piotr K.  All of you had some sort of direct impact on the way the vision grew.

The next steps will be to ensure the beta version of the site delivers upon its initial vision and comfortably finds a user base to grow.  I’m hoping to get a targeted set of regular users who want to use the site a few times a week and share their experiences and feedback.  This means I’ll be spending a good deal of time promoting the site online and to the press, listening to users, and studying trends and behavior in site usage.  I also plan to make the shift into a more entrepreneur role; attending groups, going to presentations, and networking with the business community at large.  This, of course, will be done alongside maintaining a technical role on the site; fixing bugs, making minor improvements based on feedback and making sure the entire thing doesn’t come crashing down.

Well, I’d like to keep this post short so people will stop reading and go check out the site, but if you’re a fan of the blog (and I hope you are), please help spread the word!  Join the “KitchenPC” Facebook group, post a link on your wall, tell your friends, or just use the site and send me your feedback (support@kitchenpc.com).  Much more to come!

Mike

Wow, it’s been awhile since I’ve blogged at all.  As you can probably imagine, the final KitchenPC UI has arrived and, as tends to usually be the case, integration work took far longer than originally estimated.  The good news is that everything came out absolutely gorgeous and the folks at Merix were nothing short of a pleasure to work with.  Their code is clean and organized, and very easy to plug data into.  The problems I found, which were all fairly minor, were addressed promptly and they always fixed the problem on the first attempt.  They also came within the original budget estimate, even though a few design requirements were changed here and there.  If KitchenPC takes off, I’ll definitely be going back to them for any new UI designs I need to implement.

The second piece of big news is I finally feel confident announcing an official release date; KitchenPC will go live during the first week of October, 2010.  This is actually a conservative estimate, and if everything goes smoothly I should be wrapping stuff up late next week.  However, I decided to give myself a bit of wiggle room just in case any issues creep up.

Here’s a brief overview of the remaining work items before release.

Last minute bug fixes and cleanup

During UI integration, a few minor issues were discovered throughout the site.  These were issues that were small enough that I could justify putting aside for the sake of getting each page integrated with the new user interface quickly (Since Merix was waiting for their final payment.)  However, I’ll be spending Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday going through these items and finding solutions to most of them.  I also hope to find the time to integrate my auto-complete wheel with the ingredient picker, however I can’t promise this will make it in for the first release.  On Thursday and Friday, I’ll be out of town climbing up Mt St Helens (for the second time), which will be a nice “relaxing” break from KitchenPC (“Relaxing?  Climbing an 8,000 foot mountain?”)

Final Testing

When all known bugs are fixed, I’ll be going through each page with a fine tooth comb testing each feature and coming up with as many test cases as I can for each scenario.  This includes weird edge cases, looking for bad error handling, and just all around trying to break things.  Any bugs I find will be logged and triaged accordingly, and hopefully I can fix any major ones quickly.  I’m guessing this work will take up the first half of next week.

Performance Profiling

I hate to use the word “perf testing” here, as I feel performance is something built into the product from the early stages, however I feel it necessary to run some jMeter tests to get a good feeling of the hardware requirements needed to run KitchenPC.  I don’t estimate any database level bottlenecks as I’ve already done extensive testing with large amounts of data when designing the original database schema, and I’m pretty sure Postgres will have no problems even under high server load.  Hoewver, I do want to see how many users a typical web server can handle at once, and at what point it breaks (or response times get slow enough to annoy people.)  I think this will give me a good idea for figuring out what KitchenPC will cost to run depending on user estimates.  Apparently, investors like to know these sorts of details.  I’ve used jMeter before and simulating realistic user load is pretty easy.  There’s also a few websites I’ve run across that will pound your server with as much simulated traffic as you want.  Either way, I’ll spend the latter half of next week on this effort.

Server Setup

This work item should only take a day or two, and will include things like DNS configuration, setting up operating system images on the remote servers, and also investigating setting up multiple front end servers if necessary.  More on this in a bit.

Change in Plans?

I’ve also been putting in some serious thought into modifying my original beta rollout strategy.  My initial plan was to open up the site to 1,000 beta testers using an invite code strategy.  In fact, the invite code mechanism is complete and has been successful in the private alpha release.  However, my impatient side has waged war on my cautious, logical side (when did this blog turn into a Frosted Mini Wheats commercial?) and has nearly convinced it to drop the whole idea to skip right to a full on public beta release.  Here’s a few arguments in favor of such a ballsy decision.

• It gets right to the punch. This is either a product people want, or a product they don’t.  Just let people use the thing and see.
• Invite Codes are egotistical. When you’re a company like Google, you can entice people with your shiny new product, because you’re already all the rage anyway.  Geez, people eBay Google Voice invites.  No one has heard of me, so the sooner I get something real out there, the better.
• The Dot Com world waits for no one. With so many new recipe based websites springing up every month, the sooner you get a product out the better.  There might be a product just like mine around the corner, and the longer I wait, the sooner someone could beat me to the punch.  Not that first to market always wins, but you also can’t wait around too long.
• Server traffic is not the enemy. The original justification behind an invite code system was to gradually allow people to sign up and allow me to maintain control of server load as my budget and resources allow.  I had a fear of winding up at the top of Digg and getting a million hits and everything crashing, thus souring everyone’s initial opinion of KitchenPC.  I think this fear is justified but can probably be mitigated with cloud technology and proper planning.

To elaborate more on the last bullet point, I think if my servers did get flooded with a wave of “curious cooks” wanting to check out the next thing, that would be a problem I would want to have.  I would be quite the optimist to expect a huge onslaught of users on day one, as my blog has yet to get over 53 views in a single day, but worst case I could setup ten virtual servers and hack together a simple round robin load balancer or even use DNS to point to a random server as a temporary solution for a few days until things calmed down.  Ten servers would cost about $800 bucks to run for an entire month, but running them for only a few days then shutting down unneeded resources sounds like a worthwhile expensive to me.

In other words, using an invite code strategy would probably be a good idea for a website running on “real” server hardware, but when you can spin up new instances for 10 cents an hour, you can take a lot more precautions to counter unanticipated server load.  It is this reason I mentioned my plans to investigate load balancing technology and running on multiple servers.  My website is designed to be totally stateless, so any request can be answered by any server without any need for session state or anything.  I’d rather not look into SQL level load balancing, but I’m quite certain Postgres will be yawning quietly even if I get a ton of users.  The site simply isn’t database intensive, especially with the current side of the DB (I think it’s like 4 megs right now, yes megabytes.)  Fault tolerance is, of course, a whole other animal but during a beta, I don’t consider uptime critical enough to worry about.

With that said, I’ll be happy to get 100 signups on the first day.  If all my servers crashed under the massive load of anxious meal planning soccer moms, I’d be jumping for joy and calling all my friends, as I spun up a bunch of new virtual servers to handle the load.

The other big reason is pure media punch.  It seems so much more satisfying to announce the launch of a product.  “Here’s my product, go to this site, sign up or just logon with your Facebook account, and check it out.”  I really want to issue a press release and try to grab some media attention, or at least some mentions from the techie bloggers (who I’m sure I’ll be spamming post-launch as well.)  Doing a private beta release and then, a few months later, transitioning that into a public release creates a publicity gap.  Finally, having a public beta version out there creates that intangible satisfaction of being a real, legit company owner.  No longer is your idea “vaporware” or “I can’t show you yet”, but it’s released for all the world to see and judge and tell their friends about.  I can’t wait to switch my employer on Facebook over to “KitchenPC,” even if I’m technically just an LLC registered in Washington, paying myself a salary of one dollar per year.

Barring any huge disappointments during stress testing (such as finding out a server can only handle 10 users at once and there’s no easy fix,) this will probably be the route I go.  Anyway, I’m super excited and I think I know how an eight-month-pregnant mother feels.  The last few weeks have been crazy stressful and involved little sleep, but I’m proud of what I’ve created and for the first time, look at the site and am convinced that it’s going to be hugely useful to a whole lot of people.  From here, it’s just a matter of getting the word out and getting people to check it out, give me some feedback, and then turning this project into a viable, money-making business.

That’s it for now, back to work for me!

As you may know, near the beginning of the KitchenPC design phase, I conducted a survey to try to get a grasp of who my users would be and how they behave.  I’ll conclude up front that while I think this attempt was an overall failure, as I don’t believe it really led to smarter development decisions, the data I got out of it are still worth using as kindling for the cognitive fire.  To everyone who took the survey, I do greatly appreciate your time and honest feedback.

So, let’s go over the answers, shall we?

In total, I got 276 full responses to the survey, and another 15 partial responses.  While this is far from my initial target of 1,000 responses (which apparently requires incentives I just can’t produce at this time,) I think the data show a fair sample of the “techie” family types that are liable to try out a product such as KitchenPC.  So, what types of cooks answered the survey?  Only 8 would identify themselves as “gourmet” cooks.  57 rate themselves as an accomplished cook, and 154 (a little over half) are comfortable with the “home cook” label.  33 are aspiring, and 31 say they need help.  While these are simply labels that one assigns to themselves with no common denotation, the summary I can extract from this question is that I can be fairly comfortable trying to target the average home cook, which is nice because that’s what I consider myself.  One can also raise the valid point that the people who took my survey are not necessarily who will end up using the product.  Maybe I’ll attract gourmet cooks from all around the world on day one, and end up with full page adverts in “Gourmet Cooks Monthly.”  However, the strategies I used for finding survey respondents will be similar to those I employ to find beta users, so I predict a similar demographic for initial users.

Do you use recipes?

Do you cook using recipes?  This was a rather important question.  I mean, if you don’t use recipes you probably would get almost no use out of KitchenPC.  Luckily, I already know there’s about 55 million people in the U.S. that use recipe websites on the Internet, and culinary startups are huge these days.  Still, only around 5% admit to always using recipes when cooking, and 25% saying they often do.  The majority, with 51% of the responses, say they’ll use a recipe as a starting point but make their own changes.  This trend is a bit disappointing to me, as KitchenPC favors the cook who wants to plan out meals and compile a definitive list of what they need at the store.  If they’re tossing recipes out the window when culinary inspiration strikes, I might be a bit out of luck.  Still, I can hope that such modifications of recipes involve changing amounts, tossing in a few extra spices lying around, or leaving things out that don’t sound good.  In geek terms, these changes happen at “run-time” and will be independent of disciplined meal planning.  Even if this is making a wrong assumption about this user type, providing a service to the nearly 30% of cooks who usually use recipes is still a viable business.

The next question is a biggy, as it seeks to validate pretty much the entire principal behind why the site was created.  Do you usually plan meals in advance?  I’m actually somewhat pleased with the results, however I think the question was very poorly designed.  57 people (about 20%) said yes, which is awesome!  I would love to graph a correlation here to find out who these people are and how I find them.  Do they have families?  Are they experienced cooks?  These are my peeps!  However, 95 people (32%) said no.  The majority answer, at 129 people (44%) was “Sometimes”.  This is somewhat aggravating as I wish I had broken down this question to get a bit more detail about this.  Still, from these results I can ascertain that there’s a good chunk of people out there that would use features like a meal calendar, being able to compile accurate shopping lists from multiple recipes at once, etc.  The industry backs this conclusion with the number of online meal planning sites popping up on the Internet like weeds (or in the occasional simian form.)  Obviously, entrepreneurs think there’s a market out there for this, and I’m one of them; I just feel no one has really got it right yet.  I’m a bit comforted by the fact that KitchenPC will provide features for non-planners that I think would be useful, such as the ability to figure out what to cook based on an available set of ingredients.  I think this sort of feature can actually encourage those “sometimes” people to plan in advance a bit more.  Since multiple meals can be “modeled” quickly and easily, users can type in the main items in their fridge they’re trying to use up, and KitchenPC can suggest a few meals for the next few days.  Someone who answered “No” to this question now all of a sudden finds themselves with a meal plan that saves them money, targets their likes, and encourages them to try something they haven’t cooked before; ha, I’ve made a meal planner out of them!

What's preventing you from planning meals in advance?

The next question only popped up for those people who answered “No” to the above question.  It simply asks, “What’s preventing you from planning meals in advance?”  The obvious trend in the answers (as well as those who typed in their own response) is that people just don’t think about it.  After reading these answers, I get the feeling that these people live alone and cook for only themselves.  I’ve made this conclusion purely due to the first person singular viewpoint in the responses (“when *I* eat” or “when *I* shop.”)  Hopefully I can play around with these data more in Excel and try to confirm this conclusion.  Needless to say, people who don’t plan meals in advance simply don’t want to; they figure out what they’re in the mood for right now, or by what looks good at the store, or just blatant procrastination.  There was a lot of references to “feel like” and “mood” in the responses.  Apparently, people aren’t military generals driven by a strict schedule.  “0700 Hours – WAFFLES, PEOPLE!”

It’s obvious KitchenPC needs to provide something for non-meal planners.

Opinions on meal planning

So how about the people who do meal plan (at least sometimes)?  38% of them say they do it to save money and optimally use ingredients.  Bingo!  These people are gonna dig this site.  I’m all about saving money and telling you how to use that leftover 13oz of pork you have.  51% say they do it to save time by consolidating their shopping list for the week.  Double bingo!  I do exactly that, and I do that ridiculously well.  25% say they don’t have time to think up meals on the spot.  This contrasts with the non-planners who somehow don’t have a problem with thinking up meals on the spot.  Like I said, I think it’s all about finding out what types of people plan meals.  The easy conclusion is that if you do plan meals, you’re gonna love KitchenPC.  The 20% of people who do plan meals in advance easily provides a large enough demographic to build a profitable business around.  Especially since the pool is so large to begin with.  20% could easily be millions of people, if marketed right.  I’m excited by this prospect, enough to justify my original business vision of building the best meal planning tool on the web.

How do you decide what to cook?

The next question is a very simple one; “How do you decide what to cook?”  The majority (65%) say they try to use ingredients that they have on hand.  This is great news, as most of the innovation around KitchenPC is “reverse meal planning”, i.e. finding meals that will use what you have on hand.  Nothing on the web that I’ve seen can do this well, or involving multiple recipes at once.  26% of people say they choose a cuisine first, depending on their mood.  I think these users will still get some benefits from KitchenPC, using modeling based around recipe tags, which focus on the major cuisines.  136 people (46%) say they just make whatever sounds good at the time.  I believe these people will also like the meal planner as it’s simply just a recipe suggestion engine that works with whatever data you give it.

Do you use a shopping list?

“Do you bring a list to the grocery store?”  If you do, you’re like 54% of my survey respondents.  A dismal 6% say no (I found this surprisingly low), and 37% sometimes do.  I think these numbers definitely support the need for an intelligent shopping list creation tool, one that’s easy to use, flexible, and integrates with mobile devices.  However, how do people create shopping lists?  Only 34% say they keep a running list through-out the week, with 42% saying they jot down their list right before going to the store.  Now, peoples’ habits are almost impossible to break but I can’t help but think better shopping list tools might tend to entice some people to store their running shopping list online, especially those doing a lot of meal planning.  Only 7% fell for my humorous answer, “I wander the aisles aimlessly asking myself what I need.”

The survey also asked users if they eat frozen or pre-packaged meals.  The idea behind this was judging the potential for designing some features around this concept.  I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that even people who eat pre-packaged meals are not the ones planning up front.  “Hmm, yes I shall eat this Red Baron pizza on Wednesday the 17th.”  In case you’re curious, only around 3% eat these meals almost every night (probably while watching some sort of reality TV show,) with 22% admitting to this habit a couple times a week, and the majority (30%) once or twice a month.  I really don’t see much value from this information.

The next few questions involve online shopping.  One of the revenue models being considered post beta is integration with online grocery stores.  Shopping list generation is done so accurately, it’s viable to implement a system that can transfer your shopping list to an online grocer such as Safeway.com or Amazon Fresh, similar to purchasing flight tickets through Expedia.  Needless to say this will not be a feature offered any time in the near future, however I’m trying to get the data to judge its feasibility (as it would be a massive business venture requiring many inter-company partnerships.)  To let you guys in on a little secret, I actually have a working prototype of this feature and a mocked up online grocery site called MikeMart.  I’ll blog about it more post-beta.

93% of people have purchased stuff online.  This is no surprise.  I also asked if people purchase groceries online.  Only 33% said yes, with an overwhelming 65% saying never.  Out of the people who do purchase groceries online, only 6 (not percent, 6 actual people) do so once a week or more.  11% do so once or twice a month, 42% do this every few months, and 33% have done this once and only once.  40 of these people have used Amazon Fresh, and 33 have used Safeway.

Why don't you buy groceries online?

Why don’t people buy groceries online?  I think the plethora of dot-bomb ruins over the past decade speak for themselves.  This is a near impossible business model, and people are just not going for it.  While it is growing slowly, the statistics I dug up showed that only around 1% of Americans purchase groceries online.  Still, companies such as Amazon Fresh are doing well, as well as Safeway who is also making a considerable investment into this market.  62 people said they don’t buy groceries online because it’s too expensive (e.g. delivery fees), and 115 said they want to select the items themselves (in other words, they don’t trust what’s gonna show up on the truck.)  37 people chose to write in their own response, and their answers led me to believe these people will not be easily convinced to change their ways.

I think the idea of trying to support KitchenPC from online grocery shopping revenue is far fetched, however it’s still a feature I would love to pursue at some point if I get enough users to convince Safeway or Amazon Fresh to sit down and talk with me.

What factors do you consider while grocery shopping?

When asked what factors people consider while grocery shopping, 71% said price, 67% included value, and 79% checked the box for quality.  Very few people (18%) cared about brand names.  Almost half mentioned they look for organic food, care about farming ethics, etc.  I’m actually quite interested in this concept, and plan to write a more protracted summary of these thoughts in a future blog post.

Another revenue model to explore is coupons (hey, it’s a multi-billion dollar business!)  Only 4% of people admitted to always using coupons, but there was a very nice bell curve here.  10% said often, 51% said sometimes, 13% said at least once, and only 16% said never.  I think very few people are going to turn down a coupon if it just magically appears on their printed shopping list, and it’s as easy as just scanning in at the grocery store.  For this reason, I think selling coupons through KitchenPC is a viable option to consider as a revenue model, and probably doable in a way that won’t annoy all my users.  The fact that I completely normalize ingredients in my database makes this implementation very straight-forward.

How many people do you cook for?

Here’s a question that purely exists to try to correlate results with other answers.  On average, how many people do you cook for?  I’m very curious if cooking for more people makes you more likely to meal plan, however those are data I’ll try to tease out once I get into the marketing stage.  15% only cook for themselves.  42% cook for themselves and one other person (young, married couples I guess?) and 31% cook for 3 of 4 people.  Only 7% cook for over 4 people.

I also asked people if they use club rewards cards.  21% do for a single grocery store, 53% have these cards for multiple stores, and 15% claim they have a rewards card for every possible store in their area.  Only 7% don’t use these cards.  This question was once again targeted around grocery store integration, determining if it would be necessary to transmit member information along with orders, and displaying member pricing as well.  Obviously, this would be a must.

Would you share what you cook?

The last question was geared around privacy, as the original prototype had a lot of social networking features that unfortunately will not make it into the public beta.  Never-the-less, it’s interesting information.  “Would you be willing to share what recipes you cook with others?”  This was a rather poorly worded question, but what it means is do you care about people seeing your calendar.  53% say “Yes, with anyone and everyone.”  20% say they’ll share this information with their friends and friends of friends, 9% saying friends only, and only 4% fear big brother watching and wouldn’t be comfortable letting anyone know what goes on in their kitchen.  It’s pretty easy to see that privacy won’t really be a huge concern, however the post-beta version of KitchenPC with social features will definitely include some basic privacy controls.

Luckily, 178 people left their email addresses for me, which will be great as I’ll send them invitations to the upcoming private beta.

Overall, I think I got some valuable data from this survey, but it’s a far cry from any real ammunition for basing an entire business plan on.  I’ve found my mind is pretty attached to my existing business plan and tends to look for the conclusions I want to see from the numbers.  As I’ve said earlier, I think customer driven development is a very valuable tool for certain types of businesses. If you’re spending millions on a prototype, and have a burn rate of $500k a month, you’d better prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have a customer base, show a demand for your services up front, and have the raw data to back it up.  For a site like mine, I think a more reasonable goal is to just get the damn thing online.  It’ll hopefully be useful to a few people, and those people will show their support by coming back.  The real question is agility.  When you do realize you didn’t understand your customer, how fast can you fix it?  Can I figure out what types of people are using my product and devise a marketing strategy to attract more of them?  These are things you have to do with a real, live product and not some half-assed survey.  At least that’s my theory, and I’m sticking with it.

Again, thanks to all of you who took the survey!  It was fun to try out and I’m glad I did it.  I think being an entrepreneur is about trying a bunch of stuff and seeing what sticks, but being honest when something doesn’t work out the way you want.  Who knows, maybe another reader out there will be able to use my data to influence a business idea of their own.