Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking (parsnip.ai)

Thanks! Our whole goal is to tackle the pain of "not knowing where to start" and building up the confidence and knowledge to go and try stuff in the kitchen.

If building a new product means creating a painkiller and not a vitamin, then this is the pain that we identified among many, many beginner cooks: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/app-store-launch-stats

I believe because they're targeting users under 13. I also saw this and got very concerned, until I read the beginning but of the Privacy Policy.

I'd love a clarification, say, that they don't somehow do this for adult users of the app.

Makes it easier to sell your firstborn if they have that information already /s

My co-founder handled the privacy policy so I've pinged him to provide a response. We'll get back to you as soon as possible!

EDIT: lynndotpy was right; it's required by law under COPPA if we have users under 13. It's the same reason that sites ask people for their age/birthday to check if they're under 13.

We want kids to be able to learn to cook too!

Thanks. Our goal is to make learning to cook as easy as possible, and that includes making onboarding as easy as possible :-)

Re: MacOS app: is that the same toolchain as iOS, or totally different? Our iOS app is built in Swift but I'm not an iOS developer, so actually not super familiar with the ecosystem.

I’d much prefer a website—I don’t really download apps anymore, and an application for Mac seems overkill.

EDIT: so apparently we are actually on MacOS, just in an iPhone sized frame. Have you tried searching the app store?

http://apps.apple.com/us/app/parsnip-level-up-your-cooking/i...

Our main thesis is to teach the "hows" and "whys" behind recipes so that you can substitute and adjust as necessary for your own dietary preferences instead of having to find recipes that satisfy them.

It's more of an edtech approach where we try to get the right knowledge into your brain in an empowering way rather than outsourcing decision making to an algorithm.

There are many ways to get there but our initial thesis is to target beginners in English-speaking countries. Eventually we want to teach intermediate/advanced cooks and any cuisine to anyone regardless of where they lived.

These countries (USA, Canada, UK, Aus, NZ) have similar food cultures, a high reliance on processed foods (especially US), and relatively higher cost of labor and food vs. the rest of the world, so have a higher demand for learning to cook. The best way to see the trend and these countries is on Google Trends:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to...

Fun game: try putting something (or someone) popular on the right side of that graph and see if you can find a higher trendline

It would be great if more people would develop at least basic cooking skills. You'd be surprised how many people wouldn't even know what to do with a bag of rice if they were given one.

There are lots of ways to skip directly to a recipe all over the Internet. Tell me more, what are you trying to find?

Our recipes are actually pretty simple and not particularly special in any way. It's about the journey, not the destination ;-)

Thank you so much! In true HN fashion, you've not only identified an issue but provided a solution to it. We really appreciate it!

Android is right here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tapforce.p...

Can you share a bit more about what made you think that? It's probably a bug or issue that we need to fix.

One thing that I'd like to suggest is to make the questions a bit less ambigious / more straight forward.

E.g. One of the questions is "Which part of an upright blender is the most dangerous?". My initial reaction was the blades but apparently the answer was steam. In this case, I'd suggest rephrasing the question to "Which part of an upright blender is the most dangerous with hot liquid in is most dangerous".

After completing "Scrambled Eggs", I unlocked the recipe but after competing "Avocado Toast" the recipe was not unlocked and I'm not sure what to do to unlock it. What am I missing?

This doesn't help your wider problem, but here's the recipe section of my website. I believe it has more of a content style that you're looking for.

https://www.benovermyer.com/recipe/

There are dozens of variants of this app, here's one built by a friend of mine: http://getrecipecart.com/

Like colpabar said, I think this is somewhat of a problem for experienced cooks but it's not the main issue faced by beginners, nor a big pain point. I believe this is true because I saw at least 20 startups build some version this in 2020-2021 and they mostly perished in the idea maze.

people make comments like this often and it makes me wonder if you actually really need it, because you can very easily find several extensions that do just that. As an experiment, I copied your comment into google verbatim, and found exactly what you are looking for.

I am in the process of writing my own scraper for recipe sites that grabs only the recipes and parses them into a machine readable (searchable) format. Turns out you don't need much for parsing, because an incredibly large percentage of these sites use wordpress, and either the tasty recipes plugin or wprm (wordpress recipe maker) plugin.

The only tedious part at this point is writing the different search crawlers for each site - some are reusable while others are not.

I had assumed that this would have been much more difficult, but after a weekend of writing the cheerio utils for pulling the recipes only from tasty or wprm tags, I found myself nearly done. The frontend and search engine tuning will take much longer.

It would be really cool if recipe sites could just include a recipe instead of a useless blog post punctuated by ads every 4 sentences, but these people clearly don't want me using their site in the "right" way. Oh well.

Isn’t Google responsible for this? They rank results based on how long users stay on the page, plus how much they scroll. Forcing all those “when I was a girl in Sicily…” stories at the top of a recipe that nobody wants.

I’d add a browser extension that reroutes from or preloads content from sights that load as you scroll like the link for this does.

I've found that a lot of the recipe sites I use have a button that takes you directly to the recipe (after all I'm told that the life story is for SEO purposes). I just am so used to skipping over the cruft that I skip the button as well.

I remember there being a very good extension that did exactly this.

It got review bombed by food bloggers, and they ended up taking it offline.

Thanks for sharing about willingness to pay — the bete noire of consumer apps :)

One of our eventual goals is to transition to a creator-driven system where anyone can teach others about how to cook, and monetize that too. There is so much food knowledge hiding all over the world waiting to be shared.

Ooh, that's a great question. We're building in the open and writing about it at https://parsnip.substack.com/ so if you subscribe, you'll see the answer in a future issue!

Otherwise, if you're a seed investor I can pitch you? :-D

What did it force you to do that you didn't care about? I don't have any other language skills but it offered me ways to test out to higher levels and such. I figured that would get people with knowledge to a better spot.

Yeah, it doesn't seem good for that at all. It bogs you down in things that are very easy (or even encourages you by gamifying flawless performances.) Even if you test out of units, the farther you move along, the more you realize that Duolingo sets up a very specialized arbitrary mapping of translations from English to the target language as you learn. If you've skipped ahead, you'll be missing questions because you translated "waste" as "malgastar" instead of "desperdiciar." Couldn't be more frustrating.

I honestly don't know. It's just me from the team that uses HN.

Truthfully, one of them is an angel investor who saw us of his own accord and decided to say hi. But maybe the others just really like the app?

Our idea is that as a beginner/novice, trying to find the right free cooking video, and getting better through repeated trial and error,

is inferior to

knowing that you have trustworthy information, a path to improvement, and the ability to track your progress over time.

Re: meal service without delivery of ingredients...yes! That's basically what experienced home cooks already do. But there's a few steps before we get there. Here's the vision: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/vision-part-one

We actually think recipes are mostly unimportant, but teaching the underlying principles are what's important. Measurements are more important for pastries but less important for stovetop/oven cooking.

The recipes we have right now are pretty easy for any English speaker to use. Our main content creator is from Australia, lives in Canada, and makes fun of the Imperial system all the time :)

In my opinion the ad-based business model is mostly dead. We'll have to find a new one.

We're building in the open at https://parsnip.substack.com/ and you can subscribe if you'd like to follow along with how we figure out the business model!

Right now we're mostly focused on beginners and don't have more advanced content / more international cuisines yet. But we have some baking and Ukrainian dishes landing soon!

Is that what you mean by recipes tied to skills, or something else?

Native iOS, native Android, and Firebase.

At this stage of a product, iteration speed matters more than anything else.