TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

Ask HN: Review my startup - YumTab, universal recipe box, Delicious replacement

14 pointsby jkkramerover 14 years ago
YumTab started as a weekend project to help my girlfriend and I manage recipes we found online and cooked. Many weekends and week nights later, YumTab is close to where I want it to be.<p>http://yumtab.com/<p>It's a universal recipe box that saves recipe bookmarks along with things like ingredients, which get extracted from the page automatically. It also has a basic planner, shopping list, and sharing features.<p>Existing solutions were inadequate. There are a few "universal recipe box" / recipe bookmarking sites out there, but they all suffer from one or more of: restricted site support, need to copy &#38; paste ingredients manually, or cumbersome, ad-riddled interface.<p>I tried to focus on making YumTab a useful complement to recipe sites for actual cooks, rather than just another source of food porn (not that there's anything wrong with that -- there's just plenty of good solutions already).<p>The homepage design has gone through many iterations. Comments about that would be appreciated.<p>I'm more coder than hustler at this point, so promotion &#38; monetization suggestions welcome. I've considered requiring one-time payments, a la pinboard.in (maybe with a free limit of 100 recipes or so) but I'm not sure how well that would work. I'd like to avoid plastering the site with ads.<p>FYI, it uses PHP on the frontend and Clojure on the backend.<p>Thank you!

11 comments

komlenicover 14 years ago
Wow, I would think there is some serious potential here. Awesome idea - very well thought out.<p>Monetization without ads might be done (at least in part) via a paid smartphone app? You could offer the full site experience for free, and ad-free, but charge for the app with shopping list integration etc?<p>With that said, I wouldn't fear advertising on a site like this. It's a great chance for targeted ads, and a few unobtrusive ones would not detract from the service or experience.<p>I had to dig in and really look for the faq to get an answer to why instructions weren't showing up in a recipe - should you detect when instructions aren't present and put a little note as to why? Even better, let me know that I can click edit and copy/paste the instructions in myself when they aren't automatically retrieved.<p>Might be an edge case you want to investigate: The first time I tried to use the bookmarklet was on this page, and it did nothing: <a href="http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/banana_bread/" rel="nofollow">http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/banana_bread/</a>
评论 #2136235 未加载
templaedhelover 14 years ago
I too recently launched a MVP of this same idea. You can see the yc thread here <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2087598" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2087598</a> and the site here <a href="http://7courses.com" rel="nofollow">http://7courses.com</a><p>There are several features missing before I do a full launch, I have been working steadily though, and plan to launch it fully (with a normal login system) within a week.<p>Very interesting product. You focused more on making a Hub for storing recipes, where I just needed a dead simple tool for jotting down recipes I use. There is currently a mobile web app. We should talk/compare notes, you should email me templaedhel at gmail dot com. Nice product.
ambirexover 14 years ago
That is a pretty impressive bit of coding to be able to pull out the recipes, especially from more free form places like reddit.<p>I like the thinking about a one-time payment system, but the problem comes in that all your revenue would have to be from new sign ups.
评论 #2135759 未加载
revoradover 14 years ago
This is beautiful. I really do hope you won't plaster ads over it. Once you get some traction, selling a premium account for a one-time fee might be a good idea.<p>If you could show the instructions on a timeline, that will give a quick visual overview on how long a recipe takes, the number of steps involved and if there's much gap or overlap between steps. It could also serve as a way of comparing and choosing between two similar recipes.<p>If you choose to go with a non-advertising business model, please feel free to email me. I'm building an online shop which might help you sell your product.
dlsayover 14 years ago
Cool idea. I love that you create a shopping list. You definitely want to connect this to your phone so you can pull shopping list in the store.<p>Revenue will be tough. My experience with recipes are that people dont like to pay for them. You will need ads, and therefore scale. That said, if you have the capital to wait and develop real usage, its a great advertising opportunity (person looking at there phone in a store ready to buy).
评论 #2135740 未加载
caixaover 14 years ago
Awesome idea. I've been saving recipes to a google doc for a while and have been looking for a product to make it worthwhile to go through and import all of them.<p>I've had a few issues with images (both URL and upload), but other than that this is by far the least buggy online recipe box I've used.<p>One suggestion - enable some sort of tagging/categorization system to help with planning meals.<p>Thanks for your work!
评论 #2137456 未加载
rguzmanover 14 years ago
It is a good idea, I like it, looks well done.<p>Small feedback: my account confirmation email went to spam.<p>This may be useful: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/371/how-do-you-make-sure-email-you-send-programmatically-is-not-automatically-marked" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/371/how-do-you-make-sure-...</a><p>And also: <a href="http://sendgrid.com" rel="nofollow">http://sendgrid.com</a>
评论 #2136356 未加载
knofunover 14 years ago
Not to be a jerk, but this was done a while ago with a really similar name:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/food/comments/e0odn/hey_reddit_i_made_a_site_to_save_all_my_favorite/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/food/comments/e0odn/hey_reddit_i_mad...</a>
评论 #2136608 未加载
jkkramerover 14 years ago
<a href="http://yumtab.com/" rel="nofollow">http://yumtab.com/</a>
sammvilleover 14 years ago
I think it is a great idea. You would have to pitch bloggers that blog about women and food to get good traffic.. I think they would love it.
duinoteover 14 years ago
it is very nice! and a good idea.