Everyone else likes our ideas, too
There’s an article in the June 25 New York Times, titled “Readers Are Key Ingredient as Virtual Kitchen Heats Up.” As you can imagine, we read this with great interest.
The “virtual kitchen,” of course, is just where we expect to be living for the next few months, and the article has a number of statements which read like validation of our own homework on the topic. For example, author Bob Tedeschi justifies the activity in this space with these points:
recipe searches are among the most popular online endeavors for women, and major advertisers want to be there to greet them.
“When people want to find a new recipe these days they go to the Internet, more so than cookbooks, magazines or anything else,” said Kenneth Cassar, an analyst with Nielsen/NetRatings. “The Internet has fundamentally changed the way people do that.”
And, Tedeschi goes on to point out, they’re not just searching a recipe database: they’re “looking for friends as much as they are seeking recipes,” which translates into buzzwordese as “social networking.” We had a similar argument in the first version of our business plan (which, I should add, got us in to the finals of the Tufts Business Plan contest.)
Of course, what would really be nice would be if this sort of article had emerged as we launched, or when we were talking to investors. (Don’t think a PDF isn’t going to find its way into the Subversion repository of our business plan.) (Yes, our business plan has a Subversion repository. We’re engineers, not MBAs.)
It’s not just the Times, either. Just this morning I was reading my “Ruby Inside” feed and found a link to this Liverail tutorial on building Facebook Platform apps in Rails. Guess what they’re using as an example in the demo? A recipe sharing application. I suspect a lot of the companies currently creating Facebook Platform apps are seeing tremendous amounts of member churn as the fickle Facebook audience adds and removes their apps, but even if only a small percentage of that audience sticks around, it’s still a significant jump in membership, and when you count your membership in dozens (as we do at this early stage), that kind of growth can be a huge jump-start.
It’s nice to have the Times and unrelated Rails tutorials validating our first idea as a good one, but we know as well as anyone that good ideas will only carry you through the business plan; ultimately, we need a good implementation, and that’s still in progress. More on that in the next few weeks.