This document summarizes a business plan for an online cooking consultation service that connects home cooks with professional chefs for advice. It outlines the market opportunity, business model, and initial strategy to recruit chefs and launch the service. Key points include generating revenue from tips, saved content subscriptions, cooking classes, and affiliate marketing while targeting the large number of people who cook at home and are willing to pay for online cooking advice and instruction.
4. Me and chef Michael
Working at
a Restaurant in
Pigeon Forge,
TN, 2006
5. One week ago, It happened
again!
1 Cucumber
1/2 Red onion
1 Tomato
1/2 Advocado
1/4 Cup Quinoa
1 Tbl spoon olive oil
1/2 Lemon
Fresh mint to (tast)
Salt
6.
7.
8.
9.
10. Have a question?
Call your friends and
family
(often not the right
time)
Post on a cooking
forum (it often takes
longer than you think
to find a reliable,
actionable answers)
11. People are looking for:
73%
Advice on how to cook better
65%
Help with specific techniques to prepare a
meal
49%
How to fix a meal they screwed up.
53%
Ideas on what I could cook from the items I
17. Business model
Tips from a Q&A session
($5 average)
Premium saved content
($5 average)
Live cooking classes
($20/person average)
Affiliate links: kitchen gadgets,
cook books, etc. ($40 average)
18. Market size
People between ages 18-65 (198 million) who cook
at home at least occasionally (89%)
Active internet users (78%) who want to learn
from a chef online (76%)
Percent of people who are ready to pay at
least $0.5 per minute (34%)
19. Market size
People between ages 18-65 (198 million) who cook
at home at least occasionally (89%)
Active internet users (78%) who want to learn
from a chef online (76%)
Percent of people who are ready to pay at
least $0.5 per minute (34%)
21. Chefs want to teach
95%
89%
63%
Want to participate in live
Are willing to give live
Will inform all their current
Q&A sections
interactive webcam
customers that they are giving
cooking classes online
cooking classes online
Hello,
My name is Daniil Brodovich and I am CEO of Cookstream. I am originally from Russia and my passion for tech startups and cooking brought me to Silicon Valley and I am vary happy to share what we are working on with you.
Cookstream is an educational platform where people can get their cooking questions answered in real time by a professional chef via video chat.
We are making professional chefs accessible by any one from the comfort of their home.
Now People have a chance to learn from first hand experience using latest video streaming technology getting personalized cooking support.
Its an extremely useful tool for people who cook at home at least occasionally and professional chefs who’d like to get their name out and earn additional income.
Despite huge change in American food industry in past 30 years, 76% say that they cook most of their meals at home.
With over 115 million people in the US watching cooking shows on a regular basis, cooking related materials are on is highest pic of demand in the history.
Only last year, there’ve been 60 million cook books sold in the US, what made to $1,3 billion market.
Last time this industry experienced a dramatic change was more than 20 years ago with a wide spread of recipe web sties, online cooking videos and courses making publicly accessible millions of recipes. Since then nothing really changed the way people get cooking help online.
And despite this huge technological advantage most of home cooks still struggle to receive desired support with their cooking related activities.
I personally know a huge difference, being tough by a cookbook or Internet and a professional chef. There is nothing comparable with learning from the first hand experience.
I’ve learned not only the right techniques, secrets of different recipes, but also a lot of insights regarding different ingredients and their effects on the taste and our body.
Getting advice from a culinary professional when it was needed that what made a huge difference in my cooking experience.
But now cooking something nice at home or simply experimenting with new recipes, I don’t have a luxury of such support any more.
It is a great frustrations, than you are up to cook something or in the middle of your culinary creation and you need to spend up to half an hour looking for the answer on web.
Just found a great simple and healthy recipe to try out and…
It had Quinoa as one of the main ingredients, which I am not familiar…
“Sprouted Quinoa cucumber salad”
http://karimamaruan.blogspot.com/2010/10/sprouted-quinoa-cucumber.html
I had one simple question, how long it takes to soak a quinoa in the water to make eat eatable and taste good…
In my first attempt to gain an answer with goggle I got the top result about soaking grains!
I went though a couple of other articles unsuccessfully and change the wording of my question…
https://www.google.com/search?biw=1684&bih=937&noj=1&hl=en&q=how+long+should+you+soak+quinoa&oq=soak+Quinoa&gs_l=serp.1.4.0i7l2j0j0i7l2j0j0i7l2j0l2.49.2435.0.10670.4.3.1.0.0.1.713.1064.0j1j1j6-1.3.0...0.0.0..1c.1.17.serp.HmOuvYqu3Is
http://www.thenourishinggourmet.com/2008/03/nourishing-practices-soaking-grains-2.html
I tried again
And again
It took me a about 20 minutes before I’ve learned literally almost everything about the Quinoa, but steel had doubts how much time it takes to make prepare Sprouted Quinoa right.
The other two options I had, was to call a friend who is likely had no idea about preparation of quinoa or post on a cooking forum and wait till tomorrow, and if I’ll be lucky will get a quality response…
Is that only me
We’ve personally interviewed 114 people who do not work in food industry and surveyed more than 2000 people online, learning everything about their cooking experience and identifying key problems which they face.
We know that this is not a simple problem to a few people like me, but this a huge problem which millions of people face everyday!
And existing options do not satisfy their demand.
But what if there was some one who could help with these problems
And that someone was a culinary professional, or even a professional chef!?
And was always available when I need him
And made this so easy and joyful
As when you are on a cooking website were you found a recipe, you just click to ask a chef widget.
Choose any specific specializations if need
And ask a real chef actually showing him the problems you are facing?!
Have a valuable support which is tailored for your specific needs?!
And after finishing just simply tip a chef like with lift and become friends with him
Now you have not only one friend who is ready to help, who knows only one specific meal or techniques
Now you have thousands of them, who are the best in their fields and really know what they are talking about!
It is not only a widget which simply attaches to any cooking related website or blog, it is the all new way to learn in the comfort of your home.
Our platform gives opportunity for thousand of chefs around the world to share with their experience disabling any barriers in cooking education.
Here our chef are able to show their cooking contend to the world and finally build their own personal brand.
If you don’t want ask to get you a chef and want to discover the one you like the most, just
At the same time here is the place we our chefs can make a group class or cooking show, inviting up to 10 people to participate and infinity number of watchers.
We all know these famous TV chefs, but its very unlikely they will help you to help with your cooking.
But now you have a cooking star of our own how is always there.
And we are making this available from any devise you will be working on.
We are making professional chefs available from any place they want.
We’ve just showed you how people can get their questions answered and how chefs can use this platform to promote them selves.
But our big Goal is to become a final destination for quality advice in everything regarding to cooking and be available on every mobile device.
We are making our money getting a commission fee from every transaction between our users.
This model is well proven by Lyft and it will perfectly fit into our business model.
Service offering include the product we showed you in the demo, such as Q&A session, Group cooking classes,
Despite the fact that 93% agreed that learning from a professional chef will make them a better home cook, we went though the deep customer segmentation process.
And this is only American market, but we don’t have any boundaries to scale internationally in no time!
I know, you might think It all good, but what about the chef? Are they willing to teach?!
Since we begin working on Cookstream, we’ve got a huge support from local chef communities.
We found out that there is a great number of chefs already share their knowledge with their friends and family.
They would love to help other people too, but till now didn’t an the right place to do that.
The only way was is to set a cooking class, but that makes it to much of a hustle, they need to find place to do so, market the class and so on…
Now finally they have a place to share with their exerience in no time.
We’ve reached to153 chefs with some questions regarding that
With cookstream all they need to begin is a some of their time.
By May 2012 there are 97,000 chefs and head cooks. For their really hard work their mean hourly wage is only $22.4/hour.
According to our calculations, our chefs will be able to earn $30 per hour
http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes351011.htm
These chefs are working hard, but people mostly see only waitress when they receive their food and don’t have a chance to meet the actual author of their meal.
Ok Cookstream people can not only get service from a chef but also keep in touch and become chefs followers, building his online presence.
Usually people do not know if a chef offers any other services or products, such as recipe books.
But when people get to chefs profile on cookstream, they know everything what chef has to offer and likely to become his early custoemers
http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes351011.htm
Our first culinary teachers are:
Catering chefs
Seasonal chefs
Culinary instructors
Line cooks
There is a such great demand when one month ago I posted that we are looking for Intern who would consult people cooking online via live video chat, in less than a week we got 20 likes, almost 50 comment and 84 emails with CV from chefs who what to do it.
Even when we explained that we are launching only in a couple of months and we need some people who test it for now, only one of them said that he is too busy to do it!
Another way how we reached chefs, was via Facebook adds.
25% of chef were willing to go through our survey for free, 90% of them said that they wan to use this service and left their emails to be informed when we launched!
In this sense the cost of getting a chef is only $1!
We can easily scale this model and reach thousands of chefs in no time!
There are hundreds of thousands of popular cooking websites, cooking blogs and communities.
Most the blogs struggle to effectively monetize their visitors due to low price of adds.
We are making revenue share contract, were 10% of the tip amount goes to the cooking websites who agreed to install our widget.
We have our first three websites waiting to put our widget on their websites as soon as we launch and they represent 10,000 visitors per month.
Using blogger forums we can easily rise the number of cooking forums to hundreds.
Our widget become extremely attractive solution, not only for small players, but also for these big guys.
Currently we are keeping in touch with Rafael and his “allthecoooks” platform, which is #1 recipe app on Android. He loves what we are doing and ready to make his more than a million active users know about Cookstream.
Even such giants as All recipes and Epiqueirous are struggling to keep their customers loyal to a site, loosing the battle with Google search – the most common place where people are looking for what to cook.
We are offering the service to which will help their customers on their sites and applications.
We are not competing and we are willing to partner
At this point all what we can be sure that Food and cooking education industry are going to be in constant change and new recipe websites are going to show up.
Cookstream provides services that people always need the most:
High quality advice regarding the food they eat them selves and feed their family.
We will not have to compete with any of them, but we are on the market to help them satisfy their customer needs better.
The team includes Vladimir Vityuk an expert in automation of Business Processes and System integration in largest Russian telecommunication company, Dmitry Golyshev – full stack software developer with years of experience and Daniil Brodovich, a serial entrepreneur in e-commerce space.
Back in September 2012 became winners of Startup Weekend in San Francisco and been burning only $6K cash per month working on it.
We’ve been focusing not on product development, but on market validation, customer discovery, getting necessary skills, in other words building a real company.
Now all our questions regarding product/market fit answered, I am happy to say that we nailed the problem and offer an amazing solution which people have been long dreaming for.
We need only $250K to make sure that we will have the an amazing launch on all devices by December to the mass market and begin generating substantial revenue.
This is very small investment for something, that will increase peoples confidence while they are cooking and make learning to cook finally easy once and for all.
Like AirBnB developed a market for temporarily free bedrooms, we are doing the same with free time of thousands of chefs!
Before only very wealthy people could afford to have a chef helping people with cooking chores.
With our technology we are bringing professional chefs in the distance of a few clicks on any device, making dream of millions of people to come true!
We hope that you are as excited about cookstream as we are and we are very happy to talk more with you about this exciting opportunity!
Thank you