French startup Youmiam released a new version of its recipe sharing website and just announced that it has raised $410,000 (€300,000) from ...
French startup Youmiam released a new version of its recipe sharing website and just announced that it has raised $410,000 (€300,000) from angel investors Patrick Robin (24h00), Thierry Petit (Showroomprivé) and Denis Chavanis (former managing director of Nestlé Waters). Youmiam makes it easy to browse, create and share recipes online.
It’s a full-fledged social network that is very reminiscent of YouTube or Soundcloud, because recipes are very shareable — you can embed your recipes on your blog or website. On the website itself, you get a profile with your recipes, recipes from others that you have shared (remiams). And of course, you can follow your favorite cooks and build a cooking social graph.
When you first load the site after signing up, you are presented with a beautiful grid of appetizers, entrées and desserts. It looks a lot like Pinterest, but with food and only food. If you click on a dish, you get the list of ingredients as well as the time required. A recipe is basically a slideshow — each slide represents a different step in the recipe.
If you want to create a recipe, you just have to fill out forms describing your recipe step by step. You can’t write long paragraphs of text, just short sentences. It makes recipes very readable.
Finally, one of the most important feature is certainly the search feature. If you have an idea but don’t know how to cook something, you can just search for it. Yet, you can also search by time, ingredients, types or keywords (#easy, #summer, #chocolate…) to try something new.
Youmiam’s take on the recipe website is quite different as many recipe websites bet everything on SEO and content farm strategies. With a good reward system, Youmiam could make creative cooks stand out and get better recipes than your average recipe website.
In 2013, the team of five participated in the 3-month Microsoft Ventures program in Paris (formerly Microsoft Spark). Part of the first batch, Youmiam is actually the first company to raise money. It also received $34,000 (€25,000) from 101projets, a project to foster youth entrepreneurship led by Xavier Niel (Free), Jacques-Antoine Granjon (Vente-privee.com) and Marc Simoncini (Meetic).
With today’s funding, the company plans to release an English version (coming in February), mobile apps, as well as a new recommendation engine. Now that the product is starting to look good and will target an international audience, the team will have to tackle a difficult problem: creating a flourishing community around recipes.
Still, daily active user (DAU) count is trending downward according to Moore’s findings. That’s also to be expected after a high-profile launch, but Moore has found that people answering questions is dropping at a quicker pace than is the number of those doing the asking. He ascribes this to increasing specificity and difficulty in the type of questions being asked as people get used to the service, leading to harder answers. If Jelly can’t provide answers for the questions that members are asking, that doesn’t bode well for long-term viability.
To make sure that people are happy with both the question and answer part of their Jelly experience, it may be useful for the startup to look at what kind of questions are being asked most frequently, and somehow encourage more answers for the more popular types of queries. Once people do answer, they keep coming back to answer more, after all.
It’s early days yet for Jelly, and this data may not be providing a complete picture, coming as it does from these unexposed API endpoints. But it’s probably fair to infer that the trends Moore identifies are at least on the right track. Jelly has an interesting model, and one that requires a different kind of engagement from other popular social tools like Twitter and Facebook, but it’s still working out its place in the market, so we’ll be watching to see how community interaction develops in the coming weeks.
