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Ask HN: Review my startup - YumTab, universal recipe box, Delicious replacement

14 points by jkkramer ↗ HN
YumTab started as a weekend project to help my girlfriend and I manage recipes we found online and cooked. Many weekends and week nights later, YumTab is close to where I want it to be.

http://yumtab.com/

It's a universal recipe box that saves recipe bookmarks along with things like ingredients, which get extracted from the page automatically. It also has a basic planner, shopping list, and sharing features.

Existing solutions were inadequate. There are a few "universal recipe box" / recipe bookmarking sites out there, but they all suffer from one or more of: restricted site support, need to copy & paste ingredients manually, or cumbersome, ad-riddled interface.

I tried to focus on making YumTab a useful complement to recipe sites for actual cooks, rather than just another source of food porn (not that there's anything wrong with that -- there's just plenty of good solutions already).

The homepage design has gone through many iterations. Comments about that would be appreciated.

I'm more coder than hustler at this point, so promotion & monetization suggestions welcome. I've considered requiring one-time payments, a la pinboard.in (maybe with a free limit of 100 recipes or so) but I'm not sure how well that would work. I'd like to avoid plastering the site with ads.

FYI, it uses PHP on the frontend and Clojure on the backend.

Thank you!

25 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 75.8 ms ] thread
ambirex
That is a pretty impressive bit of coding to be able to pull out the recipes, especially from more free form places like reddit.

I like the thinking about a one-time payment system, but the problem comes in that all your revenue would have to be from new sign ups.

jkkramer
Thanks! Extracting info from the wild web is hard, and that's one of the reasons I did it -- because no one else was. Clojure + some basic machine learning made it feasible.
ambirex
How processor intensive is the scrapping and machine learning? I guess how well do you think it could scale.
jkkramer
Scraping is as you might expect: it has to go fetch the page if it hasn't yet (URLs are only fetched once). One thing I can do to help here is pre-fetch/parse pages from popular sites. I'm already doing this for Food Network and Allrecipes.com.

The machine learning aspects aren't too bad. Most of the time is spent parsing the HTML DOM. I've done some micro-benchmarking but am very curious to see how it will handle under real load. I have a plan for moving from VPS (Linode) to AWS if necessary.

sammville
I think it is a great idea. You would have to pitch bloggers that blog about women and food to get good traffic.. I think they would love it.
dlsay
Cool idea. I love that you create a shopping list. You definitely want to connect this to your phone so you can pull shopping list in the store.

Revenue will be tough. My experience with recipes are that people dont like to pay for them. You will need ads, and therefore scale. That said, if you have the capital to wait and develop real usage, its a great advertising opportunity (person looking at there phone in a store ready to buy).

jkkramer
iPhone app is definitely something I'd like to do. I'm not completely opposed to ads, I'd just like to avoid slowing down the site -- loading time & usability-wise. Which I think is probably doable.

EDIT: To clarify/expand something: If I ever chose to charge a fee, it would be for solving the "disorganized pile of bookmarks & print-outs" problem, not so much for access to recipes, which you can get anywhere. Of course, people may not be willing to pay for that either.

duinote
it is very nice! and a good idea.
komlenic
Wow, I would think there is some serious potential here. Awesome idea - very well thought out.

Monetization without ads might be done (at least in part) via a paid smartphone app? You could offer the full site experience for free, and ad-free, but charge for the app with shopping list integration etc?

With that said, I wouldn't fear advertising on a site like this. It's a great chance for targeted ads, and a few unobtrusive ones would not detract from the service or experience.

I had to dig in and really look for the faq to get an answer to why instructions weren't showing up in a recipe - should you detect when instructions aren't present and put a little note as to why? Even better, let me know that I can click edit and copy/paste the instructions in myself when they aren't automatically retrieved.

Might be an edge case you want to investigate: The first time I tried to use the bookmarklet was on this page, and it did nothing: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/banana_bread/

jkkramer
Great input & tips, thank you. I added a note about missing instructions as you suggest.

Re the edge case, what browser are you using?

komlenic
Great, the missing instructions note is a nice touch!

FF 3.6/win... firebug shows a "source is undefined" error on line 312. while (source.length...

jkkramer
The culprit is apparently FlashHeed, an otherwise helpful script which helps lightboxes show above Flash content. Are you using something to suppress Flash? I attempted a fix, which may require a cache clear (haven't put in static file versioning yet).
komlenic
Yep, cleared cache and now working as expected. That's some timely customer support!
revorad
This is beautiful. I really do hope you won't plaster ads over it. Once you get some traction, selling a premium account for a one-time fee might be a good idea.

If you could show the instructions on a timeline, that will give a quick visual overview on how long a recipe takes, the number of steps involved and if there's much gap or overlap between steps. It could also serve as a way of comparing and choosing between two similar recipes.

If you choose to go with a non-advertising business model, please feel free to email me. I'm building an online shop which might help you sell your product.

knofun
Not to be a jerk, but this was done a while ago with a really similar name:

http://www.reddit.com/r/food/comments/e0odn/hey_reddit_i_mad...

jkkramer
I know. They launched half-way through my development, to my chagrin.

YumTab has a number of advantages:

- Automatic ingredients capture (no copy & paste)

- Planner, shopping list

- Easier to show off recipes you make, follow others

EDIT: oh, I see it's your site. Nice work on it, I don't mean to belittle your efforts. I was pretty unhappy to see the name similarity when I saw it a couple months ago, but I had already committed to my name.

templaedhel
I too recently launched a MVP of this same idea. You can see the yc thread here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2087598 and the site here http://7courses.com

There are several features missing before I do a full launch, I have been working steadily though, and plan to launch it fully (with a normal login system) within a week.

Very interesting product. You focused more on making a Hub for storing recipes, where I just needed a dead simple tool for jotting down recipes I use. There is currently a mobile web app. We should talk/compare notes, you should email me templaedhel at gmail dot com. Nice product.

caixa
Awesome idea. I've been saving recipes to a google doc for a while and have been looking for a product to make it worthwhile to go through and import all of them.

I've had a few issues with images (both URL and upload), but other than that this is by far the least buggy online recipe box I've used.

One suggestion - enable some sort of tagging/categorization system to help with planning meals.

Thanks for your work!

jkkramer
Thanks. I'm investigating the image issues (seems you bumped into it right off the bat).

There is tagging & tag/ingredient-based searching, though it's not integrated with the planner per se. I'll think about that. EDIT: FYI, tags are in the Your Notes section if you didn't notice

caixa
Thanks! Hadn't scrolled down all the way.

Not sure how common it will be for a user to add dozens of recipes at once, but I'm finding it tiring to go back and copy in all of the instructions. For a user like me, the awesome thing about YumTab is having all of my recipes in one place, so copying over the instructions is essential.

Is there any way to make it easier to add info manually, at least while you work on scraping the instructions? For now, I'm having to run the bookmarklet, refresh My Recipes on YumTab, click on the newly added recipe, click edit, go back to the original recipe, copy the instructions, go back to YumTab, and paste it.

For now, allowing manual input within the bookmarklet could help.

jkkramer
I originally envisioned this as a replacement for delicious, and have been thinking about instructions as nice-to-have but not essential (I don't bother adding them myself, I just open the original recipe). However, your goal is probably common, so I'll see about catering to it. Thanks again.
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