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http://www.paprikaapp.com http://www.paprikaapp.com I've always been big into cooking and when the iPad came out I figured it would be the perfect replacement

http://www.paprikaapp.com http://www.paprikaapp.com I've always been big into cooking and when the iPad came out I figured it would be the perfect replacement for the massive stack of printed recipes I had collected over the years. But after trying out the iPad recipe apps in the store, I realized that most of them did not allow you to enter your own recipes, and the ones that did were incredibly cumbersome to use. (E.g. having to enter recipes from an external website, or having to fill out 24 fields to get a single recipe entered.) So the idea for Paprika Recipe Manager was born, and a few months later, it is now available in the App Store. The basic premise of Paprika is basically an Instapaper for recipes. It comes with a built in web browser that lets you save recipes from the web. (Which is mostly how I discover my new recipes.) We designed the app to be as simple as possible to create and save recipes. Some of the other apps in the store require you to enter ingredients one at a time, specifying quantity and units separately, and then entering your recipe directions one step at a time. This makes the process for entering a single recipe way too cumbersome and takes up too much time. We took the opposite approach and basically give you two big text fields for your ingredients and directions. Entry is completely freeform and you can basically put in whatever you want. This also makes it very easy to save recipes from the web (since they can be presented in all sorts of arbitrary formats). Features include: - Ability to type in your own custom recipes in a fairly easy manner. - Ability to save recipes from the web. - A grocery list that lets you add recipe ingredients as well as your own items. - Fully customizable categories, search, favorites, and emailing recipes. - Preventing the screen from turning off while cooking. Here are a few promo codes to get you guys started: E7LL36X4EJYP 7A7M9LXXLRJJ LLK9KAWAYXLJ Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated. The response has been fairly positive so far (in terms of ratings and reviews), although there is definitely room for us to improve. I'm especially interested if anyone has thoughts on marketing and promotion. I've done the standard tasks of posting a press release and emailing a bunch of websites/blogs...but don't really know where to go from there. Has anyone had success with a Youtube teaser, or Facebook/Google ads, or buying ad banners on other sites? Edit - Whoops, managed to post this with a bad url the first time around. Fixed.

derefr 16y ago
Whenever I get to thinking about what a Platonic-ideal recipe manager app should have, I go off on the tangent that, since a recipe is just a set of cooking instructions—a program—written to be interpreted by a human, a recipe manager should work a lot like a source code manager. You can branch your recipe, try out a variation, then enter the results (whether it was better or worse than the original), and go back to the original if you didn't like it. I imagine this idea would only be useful for "chefs" as opposed to "cooks"—i.e., people who develop their own recipes, rather than using recipes they find in books/online—but that seems to be somewhat close to your target market, if your differentiating feature is the ability to enter custom recipes.
ugh 16y ago
You really seem to have captured how people usually go hunting for recipes, i.e. they type something into Google and browse the myriad available sites. Giving people the ability to easily structure and sort what they like seems like exactly the right thing to do. I would think that it would be an excellent idea to continue on focusing on exactly that instead of adding shiny features. Recipe apps have to fight proven and battle tested procedures already in place in any kitchen worth its name for collecting and organizing recipes. (I know: 1. Print it out. 2. Put it in transparencies. 3. Put them into a folder. Easy and robust.) I can think of several things that could help you streamline that process and fight the good fight against paper. Apps have benefits but they are slight so it’s not easy. You could try to further automate the recognition of recipes on sites you don’t yet know. Try to prefill if you can, the standard selection process of the iPad is not all that much fun to use. If everything else fails don’t force your users to go through that tedious selection process, allow them to save the webpage wholesale. Lower, lower, lower the boundaries of saving a recipe. You are already on that path and I encourage you to follow it. Great app!
- stevenwei 16y ago
  Yup, that's exactly how I go hunting for recipes, and exactly how I collected recipes pre-iPad (print them out, stick them in a folder). The goal was to build a tool that suited that workflow the best, while removing the drawbacks of organizing printed stacks of paper: searching through your collection for a specific recipe or a specific category of recipes (e.g. all chocolate desserts). Thanks for the thoughts, I totally agree on the importance of streamlining recipe saving.

derefr 16y ago

Whenever I get to thinking about what a Platonic-ideal recipe manager app should have, I go off on the tangent that, since a recipe is just a set of cooking instructions—a program—written to be interpreted by a human, a recipe manager should work a lot like a source code manager. You can branch your recipe, try out a variation, then enter the results (whether it was better or worse than the original), and go back to the original if you didn't like it. I imagine this idea would only be useful for "chefs" as opposed to "cooks"—i.e., people who develop their own recipes, rather than using recipes they find in books/online—but that seems to be somewhat close to your target market, if your differentiating feature is the ability to enter custom recipes.

ugh 16y ago

You really seem to have captured how people usually go hunting for recipes, i.e. they type something into Google and browse the myriad available sites. Giving people the ability to easily structure and sort what they like seems like exactly the right thing to do. I would think that it would be an excellent idea to continue on focusing on exactly that instead of adding shiny features. Recipe apps have to fight proven and battle tested procedures already in place in any kitchen worth its name for collecting and organizing recipes. (I know: 1. Print it out. 2. Put it in transparencies. 3. Put them into a folder. Easy and robust.) I can think of several things that could help you streamline that process and fight the good fight against paper. Apps have benefits but they are slight so it’s not easy. You could try to further automate the recognition of recipes on sites you don’t yet know. Try to prefill if you can, the standard selection process of the iPad is not all that much fun to use. If everything else fails don’t force your users to go through that tedious selection process, allow them to save the webpage wholesale. Lower, lower, lower the boundaries of saving a recipe. You are already on that path and I encourage you to follow it. Great app!

stevenwei 16y ago
Yup, that's exactly how I go hunting for recipes, and exactly how I collected recipes pre-iPad (print them out, stick them in a folder). The goal was to build a tool that suited that workflow the best, while removing the drawbacks of organizing printed stacks of paper: searching through your collection for a specific recipe or a specific category of recipes (e.g. all chocolate desserts). Thanks for the thoughts, I totally agree on the importance of streamlining recipe saving.