Nate McGuire and Tyler Hobbs, co-founders of Recipeas in Austin
Q. Can you explain your product in the simplest language possible?
A. Recipeas is an iOS recipe app that tells you what you should cook with the ingredients you have. We make it easy to search popular recipes by ingredient.
Q. What’s your secret sauce? What differentiates you from the competition?
A. The most significant difference between Recipeas and other recipe apps is our search process. We only ask you about a few ingredients and then give you recipe results that you can actually make from popular food blogs across the web. We determined each ingredient’s initial probability and decay rate so we are able to give users the most accurate search results possible.
Q. Who are your competitors?
A. There are a lot of great food apps out there; we are working to be the best in recipe search.
Q. Are you Bootstrapped, or do you have Venture Capital or Angel Investment?
A. We’ve bootstrapped Recipeas.
Q. Who makes up your team?
A. Nate McGuire (@natemcguire) and Tyler Hobbs (@tylhobbs)
Q. Who are your customers?
A. We built Recipeas for people who need to make something right now using the ingredients they have. It’s not for planning out elaborate meals, but rather someone making dinner on a normal night.
Q. What is your business model?
A. We offer in-app purchases to unlock your search results, and for unlimited results (1000+ recipes) we charge 9.99. We give you a few recipe credits to start so you can view recipes before you buy.
Q. What is the biggest win you’ve had to date?
A. It’s very early on, but we’ve been pleased with the initial launch. We’re working on a few updates, so that’s our main focus right now. We’re also adding new recipes for people to try every day.
Q. What are the most helpful Austin startup resources that you’ve used?
A. Our biggest resource has been being able to talk to people who have built and launched apps and food startups before. There are so many unknowns when you are building new software, if you don’t have the opportunity to talk to people who have done it before you can end up making a lot of mistakes.
Q. What are the advantages of being in Austin for launching your startup?
A. The biggest benefit is that we actually enjoy and can afford living here. That gives us a lot of freedom to work on things that we think are important.
Q. What are your plans for the future?
A. We’ve received really great feedback from users, and there are a lot of new features that we’d like to explore. We’re working on improving sharing recipes with your friends and being able to add and modify your own recipes.
Q. Anything else you’d like to add or say that I haven’t asked you about?
A. We really believe that machine learning can be used to improve and aid everyday activities. With Recipeas, we’ve done just that by applying some sophisticated probabilistic techniques to the very common problem of creating something delicious to cook for dinner.
