This Social Network Presents Amateur Cooks & Pro Chefs; Wants To Be A Tumblr For Foodies

Do you ever wonder what it would be like if we have a Facebook for foodies? Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t started one yet, but an Indian-origin start-up has come up with a social platform for recipe sharing. Meet Cucumbertown.com, a delightfully simple recipe blogging platform that connects amateur cooks and pro chefs with the foodies of the world. On this fast-growing social network, users can publish their recipes without the least hassle and browse through the entire repository of gourmet creations and culinary delights. However, it is the ‘social’ part that puts one’s cooking skills to test. There is a rating system used by the Cucumbertown tribe that effectively makes out whether a recipe is good, average or bad.

But what intrigues one most on this recipe publishing platform is the ease of use. On Cucumbertown, one can write a recipe in a standard format, add images/multimedia and upload everything with a few clicks. Once your ‘post’ is up, the social platform starts buzzing with opinions, conversations and ‘craves’ (similar to Facebook Likes). You can also follow your favourite cook/s and get customised notifications when content is published by your friends. Well, of course, Epicurious has it all, but Cucumbertown is aiming even higher and wants to be the Tumblr in cooking and food space. Here is a snapshot that captures the start-up’s vision and viability.

Who runs Cucumbertown (www.cucumbertown.com): A team of four co-founders, hailing from three continents (two from Bangalore, one from Zurich and one from Pennsylvania). In fact, none of them had met each other during the build-up period. CEO Cherian Thomas worked with Zynga before setting up Cucumbertown in 2012. Other three co-founders include CTO Arun Prabhakar who had earlier worked with several Indian start-ups such as Taggle and TutorVista; Chris Lüscher, founding partner at Information Architects, one of the world’s leading design firms, and Dan Hauk, theme designer of WordPress, Tumblr and the likes. Dan left the start-up in August 2013, but still helps whenever he can.

Although Cherian calls it a labour of love, he is hell-bent on building a global product. The Bangalorean has sought world-class talent and built a strong team – one that has a good understanding of the global market and is totally aware of the challenges to be faced. The start-up currently operates from Mountain View (California) and Bangalore.

What inspired the venture: Pure passion. A die-hard foodie who loves to cook, Cherian has always wanted to blog about cooking, but it turned out to be a cumbersome process. Creating a blog, writing & uploading recipes and putting up images/videos on the site require a lot of technical knowledge. That’s when he realised how difficult it must be for cooks and chefs who may not be tech savvy. “So I decided to build a user-friendly platform, contacted the best guys to help me out and here we are,” reflects Cherian.

What’s the pitch: Cucumbertown aims to be the ‘Tumblr’ for cooking and food space. It offers an attractive alternative to posting recipes and food-related content on WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger and so on. The start-up provides an easy-to-use interface for publishing recipes – so that even an amateur cook can gain traction online and wow readers by sharing his/her culinary creations. “We all know what blogging has done to content publishing. Cucumbertown can do the same in cooking & food space, and leverage the potential of Internet commerce in the process,” the CEO says.

How it works: Cucumbertown is to cooking what Tumblr is to blogging and keeping things easy is the start-up’s USP. One can log in via Facebook or create a new account before using the site. Once there, you can publish recipes, upload images and search the recipe database by cook, cuisine, course, ingredient, cooking time and difficulty level. Search results can be listed based on relevance, popularity or comments. Publishing on the site is especially easy as Cucumbertown provides a plethora of tools, including a recipe editor. Moreover, if a recipe is already up, you can post a different version, showing your culinary creativity.

Claim to fame: Traction and global reach-out. The company claims it is one of the fastest growing food networks, with users from around 40 countries. And right now, it is eyeing further expansion in the US and Europe. Interestingly, Cucumbertown is one of the heavily funded pre-revenue start-ups and has raised money from the same investors who had funded companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Zynga and Google. Till date, the start-up has raised $300K in seed funding. Its key investors include 500 Startups, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Farmville co-creator Sizhao Zao Yang, Maneesh Arora of MightyText, Richard Chen (ex-Google PM), Sonique Player co-creator Tabreez Verjee and Mokriya founder-CEO Sunil Kanderi, among others.

Show me the money: As an early consumer Web start-up that emulates Silicon Valley, Cucumbertown is yet to have a solid monetisation model. “In fact, we will look at revenue generation in 3-4 years from now,” says Cherian. “We are now following a similar model that Twitter, Facebook and others pursued, which means we are currently focusing on how the product evolves and gets accepted in the global market. That’s what our investors also want – once the product gets the final shape, money will come in,” he adds.

Cucumbertown has immense growth potential though, as the food and cooking space is getting bigger month on month. For instance, in November last year, 41% Americans visited such websites, up 2 million in terms of unique visitors from October 2013. These numbers won’t go down all of a sudden and the start-up can expect more traction when it starts expanding this year.

Biggest challenge: Scaling to international markets, especially non-English markets like Germany, while maintaining content and image quality. “We are a small team building a very big product. So we are not thinking about break-even or revenues at this point. The funding we raised would last for a while. Meanwhile, we must ensure that our users have the best publishing tools. That way, they will keep coming back to us and the user base will grow manifold,” explains Cherian.

A word for wannapreneurs: If you have the passion, go for it. And don’t let failures discourage you. In India, shutting down your business may seem like a disaster, but things are quite different across the globe and especially in Silicon Valley. So many people have failed here, but they have found the courage and the means to start up all over again. Both our entrepreneurs and investors should grow a robust risk appetite and must have risk tolerance. Moreover, we should give our ventures adequate time, so that they can generate value in the long run.