Show HN: 7courses - The easy to use online recipe manager.

by templaedhel • 14 years ago

47 47 14 years ago

templaedhel7• 14 years ago

I am happy to announce to relaunch of 7courses.com!

I launched almost exactly a year ago, as a sort of weekend project http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2087598

I've sort of let it stagnate, and gotten a few users, mentioned on smashing magizine, but nothing major. However, I use the app quite a lot, and was getting tired of some small bugs, so decided to recode and relaunch.

The app is 100% JavaScript, node js backend and thick js frontend (jammy.js, model.js, etc). It is a mobile web app, looks great on iPad and iPhone too.

I got enough feedback that I decided to charge for it, but for a day the first 100 signups will get a month free!

The price is very tentative, and I'm open to any and all suggestions. Also, if you would like to give accounts away on a blog etc, contact me, I'd be happy to set something up.

Any and all feedback is welcome, thanks a ton!

alexchamberlain3• 14 years ago

I'm not convinced charging is the correct way of monetising this. Could you not target advertising instead?

jbrennan2• 14 years ago

I'm glad to see some people have the balls to actually charge for a service instead of peppering me with ads. You get what you pay for. If I were looking to use a service like this, I'd be much happier investing in my time in one I pay for rather than a free one.

RyanMcGreal• 14 years ago

Just yesterday I was looking up an online recipe for chocolate chip cookies that I had found earlier. I had my netbook in the kitchen with the recipe up on it, and something immediately struck me.

It's an Acer Aspire One with a small widescreen 1024x600 display, and the mouse touchpad is a bit temperamental. Now, the recipe was on an ad-supported site, and the recipe itself was in a narrow column in the centre of the page with the recipe sections (title, description, ingredient list, directions) stacked vertically on top of each other. The menu was on the left, and the banner ads were on the right.

The entire recipe was pretty small and would easily have fit easily on one screen, but because of the boilerplate and ads, I repeatedly had to scroll up and down to switch between the ingredients and direction. Again, because scrolling is a bit awkward on the Acer touchpad, I was particularly conscious of it.

I found myself thinking: I should develop my own online collection of recipes and display them with the ingredients on the left and the directions on the right.

there• 14 years ago

i have no use for this, but if a customer stops paying the monthly fee do they suddenly lose all of their recipes? is there an export function?

templaedhel7• 14 years ago

You can download your recipes as a pdf at any time.

DannyPage• 14 years ago

How do I go back from the recipe in the demo to the list of recipes? Doesn't seem obvious to me.

Also, I like that you put it at $10/month. It might not stay there, but at least you created a price and can move from that price with a good idea of where to go to next that's a better market fit.

d3x• 14 years ago

Good job, I am working on a similar tool. There are lots of free great recipe managers on the web. What is the main differentiating factor that makes this worth 10 a month?

templaedhel7• 14 years ago

The important thing that differentiates this is that it is solely a replacement for a recipe box or other strategy for storing recipes. Most other recipe managers are tacking added on to recipe discovery tools. 7courses allows for sharing recipes, but is 100% focused on making it dead simple to manage your recipes.

And we have a kick ass mobile web app.

bdfh42• 14 years ago

$10 a month buys a lot of good recipe books.

dreadsword• 14 years ago

Very good looking site! Does it function as a locker for recipes from other sites (allrecipes, etc?), or do you need to manually input everything?

I agree with alexchamberlain - I'm not sure there's enough value to be found in any recipe service to justify $120/year, when multiple options exist.

I hate to fallback on advertising as a business model, though. I'd say offer free accounts to pull in early adopters while you use their feedback to refine your product and keep working on building out features.

adityakothadiya• 14 years ago

I'm not sure charging $10/month is the right way of monetizing this service. It's useful, but you have to think is it valuable and critical enough to pay $10/month? For "consumers", you should target somewhere around $3-$5/month. That too, not all consumers will pay this - so you have to have some Freemium approach. I feel current version of service should be Free and do Ad-based revenue. And then you add more advanced features based on user feedback, and then make that Premium plan with no Advertising.

Roedou• 14 years ago

I applaud you for tackling this niche, but $120/year seems a high price. For example: this is the same price as a 50Gb plan on Dropbox.

There are some features that could make this really valuable - such as automatic parsing/importing of recipes from other sources, or a tablet app with syncing for offline - but if these (or any other value-adding features) do exist, you really need to expose them on the front page.

Have you looked at http://onetsp.com/ ? Their freemium model allows a limited number of recipes. Pro version is $5/year.

templaedhel7• 14 years ago

Oh wow, I had never seen onetsp before. They compete almost directly with me. I agree on the price, and currently brainstorming different ways to monetize.

alexhaefner• 14 years ago

Well what are your ideas? I cook a lot, and I know others who had ideas for similar services. I can't really see myself paying money for an advanced note taking app. I think you'll have to add more value to be able to justify me paying for this.

It looks great. Very well done.

eurleif• 14 years ago

How is this better than just storing recipes in Evernote? (One thing I thought it might do is automatically scale recipes up or down, but it looks like it doesn't do that.)

bhousel• 14 years ago

Exactly my thoughts.. My wife and I are moving all our recipes into a shared Evernote premium account, and it's really fast and easy to use, and performs decent OCR on whatever we scan.

I can't think of any way that we could improve on this setup, except maybe to sell all our cookbooks and buy an iPad just for the kitchen.

vailripper• 14 years ago

Love the UI. What I would really love though is a site in which I can give a URL to a recipe I like, and it parses everything for me into a common format. Having to manually enter ingredients / directions when much of the time I'd just like to pull the recipe from somewhere else is going to be too much work. Something like that I would pay for, a simple recipe manager, not so much.

templaedhel7• 14 years ago

A parsing bookmarklet is on the horizon, I've begun on the backend for it already.

mstefanko• 14 years ago

I don't think this is near ready for $10/month subscriptions. I agree with adityakothadiya with having some sort of freemium approach. Walking through how I took this at first, I clicked your link and was a second away from sending it to my girlfriend. That's huge, but then I saw the price and immediately closed the window. I just can't imagine anyone paying that much, more than streaming accounts on netflix/hulu. For an online recipe box. Especially when similar free and cheaper solutions are available. Even looking at something like http://onetsp.com/account/signup which i'd say is definitely direct competition, it's free to use, and $5 a year for pro account. Why do you value yours so much higher than this, as much as I like dead simple, you currently have zero defensive edge against competition. Even using evernote, you can do something similar and have a very searchable database of recipe's. Until you have something that puts you clearly above the rest, I'd be extremely careful of missing out on early adopters. First 100 signups shouldn't get a month free, they should get a year free, seriously.

templaedhel7• 14 years ago

Hey, thanks for the feedback, the price will change or be removed for sure. In the meantime, I'd be happy to set you or your girlfriend up with a free account, but can't find your email in your profile. Email me, mine is in my profile, if you're interested.

dp1234• 14 years ago

Recipage (http://www.recipage.com/) is a free solution that has a decent amount of overlap though it is more focused on bloggers being able to publish their recipes.

steve8918• 14 years ago

Sorry to be blunt but $10/month is totally unworkable.

Who is your target audience? It's house-spouses. If both spouses work (like I used to) they would more generally go out to eat, so there's no reason to spend $10/month on something that they would use infrequently. Netflix is $8/month.

If you're a house-spouse, like me, you are notoriously cheap. There is no way I would pay $10/month for something that I currently bookmark on allrecipes.com. Or print out on a sheet of paper.

I just checked out onetsp.com and that's probably more like it, 150 recipes for free and $5/yr. That's more the price range that someone would be looking for, rather than $120/yr.

miles_matthias• 14 years ago

Great mobile version and it looks great added to my iPhone home screen. I was about to sign up but then I saw it was $10/mo. Sorry, I'll stick to using Evernote for my recipes.

durbin• 14 years ago

Everybody is saying $10 is too high of a price point and that was my initial reaction too. However, I think its great that you're looking to build a product and charge people for it. Its easy to coast by thinking that you're doing something right when you have lots of free users. By charging out of the gate, you'll be able to learn how to get money from people a lot more quickly than a company going the freemium route, keep trying.

snowcandy• 14 years ago

I'm not even sure if I would pay $10/year, let along $10/month.

nathos• 14 years ago

I like YumTab [http://yumtab.com/] for grabbing & storing recipes from other sites.

The importer/parser is quite smart, and while the planner & shopping list manager are pretty basic, they get the job done.

lwhi• 14 years ago

Slightly off topic, but I wish there was an XML format specifically designed for recipes.

scottkrager• 14 years ago

http://microformats.org/wiki/recipe-formats

gallamine• 14 years ago

How does your service compare with another service, http://www.pepperplate.com/? My wife and I are trying to settle on a product. We're considering that or just using Evernote, but Pepperplate lets you scrape from many different recipe sites.

revorad• 14 years ago

This looks nice. You might want to add a time-limited free trial.

I wouldn't take the pricing advice on HN too seriously because even if you charged $10 lifetime for something, you will find someone complaining that it's too much. "If only it were $3.33, I would totally buy it for the whole family."

Don't decide based on what the competitors are charging. Because the answer to that is ZERO.

Decide based on what kind of business you want to be in. If you want to scale it to the moon and make it up on volume, then sure give it away for free or cheap and work on optimising for premium upgrades or advertising.

But if you are looking to make money from the get go, then don't even think of charging less than $10/month or you will end up losing money.

tjic• 14 years ago

I spend several hours in the kitchen most nights, making my own asian dumplings, ravioli, bread, vinegar, etc.

I dehydrate food, have 100+ spices on hand, and more.

I clicked the link, saw the price, and immediately clicked "back".

I have no idea what the features are, or how wonderful it is.

UTTERLY unrealistic pricing.

Offer it free, suck me in, and THEN push me to upgrade, and you might get $2/mo or $5/mo from me.

...but putting a high price like that right up front means that you don't even get my email address.

jeffclark• 14 years ago

Old marketing pro once told me: "it's really easy to lower your prices, but fucking impossible to raise them".

I agree with tjic's sentiment, especially the "free trial" bit.

EXCEPT, that maybe instead of charging $10, make it APPEAR as if your intention is to charge $10/month "but signup now to get it for $x FOR LIFE".

dmix• 14 years ago

> "it's really easy to lower your prices, but fucking impossible to raise them"

I think this is true for big companies with huge customer bases.

But when you're just launching a startup, it's not that risky to experiment.

bigiain2• 14 years ago

I think it's also "really easy to get yourself pigeonholed in the '_way_ too expensive' category, where people don't even _consider_ buying from you" (think "Photoshop")

halostatue• 14 years ago

Not to pile on the pricing, but bigoven.com (community, recipe management, etc.) is ad-driven with a Pro membership for $15.99/year. http://www.bigoven.com/pro

Also worth considering is that MacGourmet Deluxe cost me ~$50 (and I might have gotten it cheaper in a bundle) and with the iOS app at only $5…I couldn't possibly justify using a service that can't import my existing recipes, etc.

bigiain2• 14 years ago

Agreed.

I clicked the link, started reading down the landing page while forming the thought "this sounds exactly like what $girlfiend was asking for a few weeks back", until I got down to the $10/month, and just hit close.

She would even _consider_ that sort of price as reasonable.

prawn• 14 years ago

Why not try Pinboard-style escalating pricing instead that starts dirt cheap (yearly or lifetime) and grows with the userbase?

alexchamberlain3• 14 years ago

When you edit the recipe,its done WYSIWYG style. Which js library did you use?

templaedhel7• 14 years ago

It's handwritten code on top of jquery UI. There are a bunch of form elements (text inputs) that have been styled, and you can drag and drop them to rearrange.

warmfuzzykitten• 14 years ago

What distinguishes this HN post - added by the company in question - from spam?

Show HN: 7courses - The easy to use online recipe manager.

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