Cook-e
When COVID hit and there seemed to be an indefinite lockdown, I realized this was the best time to launch whatever I wanted in the cooking space, because everyone had no other choice but to cook food.
As mopUp couldn’t be done at this time anyway, my choice of going back to solving the cooking problem seemed like my best option.
But this time, I decided to put all my learnings here at once. I learned about UX design, how to conduct interviews, storyboarding, and prototyping.
I decided to talk to a minimum of 50 potential customers to understand their habits when it came to cooking. These 50 potential customers were people from the age group of 23-30, living in the USA, Canada, Italy, Singapore, and Australia. All of them were Indians, and I was sure that I wanted to be building for Indians. Talking to a variety of them led me to a few conclusions:
Regardless of the lockdown, most of these people cooked at home, because
Healthy food at restaurants was expensive
Indian food was scarce
My target market would be Indians living outside India
My product would be a completely SAAS product
Quickly doing a bit of market research led me to believe that there could be a small business opportunity here.
Market Research
Total Addressable Market (TAM) in Dollars:
The global online population who wants to cook at home.
TAM Users: Approximately 466 million people are interested in cooking globally online.
Subscription Cost: $4 per month per user.
TAM in Dollars: $4 x 466,000,000 = $1,864,000,000 per month.
Serviceable Available Market (SAM) in Dollars:
The global online population who wants to cook regularly at home.
SAM Users: Approximately 280 million regular home cooks among the global online population.
Subscription Cost: $4 per month per user.
SAM in Dollars: $4 x 280,000,000 = $1,120,000,000 per month.
Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) in Dollars:
Indian population living outside India.
SOM Users: Approximately 15 million Indians living outside India are interested in regular cooking and willing to pay for Cook-e.
Subscription Cost: $4 per month per user.
SOM in Dollars: $4 x 15,000,000 = $60,000,000 per month.
Summary in Dollar Terms:
TAM: ~$1.86 billion per month
SAM: ~$1.12 billion per month
SOM: ~$60 million per month
These interviews also led me to break down the process of cooking into 3 distinct steps:
Decide what to cook
Get the ingredients required to make the recipes
Cook
Based on the interviews and storyboarding, a feature list was developed:
Search recipes with ingredients you already have
Add recipes to an in-built calendar that automatically generates a cumulative grocery list
The in-built calendar adds up the total calories and the macros that are being consumed daily
Alexa's skill to help people cook. The skill will help people on a step-by-step basis.
Competitor Analysis
Figma design of the app
GitHub of the app
https://github.com/janalakshman/getCooke
Video of the app
With the help of Prakash, my tech lead at Wipro, we were able to launch and build the app and get it out. What was lacking severely was a dataset of recipes. I wrote down the initial set of recipes which I copied shamefully from the cult.fit website.
With the recipes, the features, and the app, we successfully launched it on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. With close to 100 weekly active users in a month, we decided to close the entire thing down, after frustratingly being unable to get a co-founder who’s interested in cooking, figuring out recipes, and being unable to figure out a way to monetize it.
Learnings
Cloud-based design softwares are the best. Figma was such a beautiful find. When I was strapped for cash, I wanted to learn to design. With Adobe membership costing a ton, Figma was a life-saver. It also helped me get feedback from people quickly.
React and React Native. Learning to code was damn fun.
If I don’t have subject matter expertise on a problem I want to build a company on, find someone who has it.
I am super passionate about designing and building great human-computer interactions.