Welcome to Friends of Parsnip
Dear Friends of Parsnip,
Welcome to our inaugural stakeholder e-mail update!
The Parsnip team is wrapping up our angel round—and we're thrilled that our investors & advisors comprise an awesome cohort with broad networks & expertise to help us tackle the challenges ahead: a professor at CMU Tepper, machine learning professor at UBC, a former GM of one of Thomas Keller's restaurants, several experienced founders, growth marketing gurus, folks at Microsoft / Microsoft Research, and one of the Duolingo founders. We're looking forward to having you all over for dinner once we get a real office!
As we turn a page on fundraising, we're also transitioning toward more regular stakeholder updates. Expect about a monthly cadence for this newsletter, with more or less frequency depending on how much help we need at any time.
Current focus
Our overriding focus right now is building the next release of Parsnip, aiming for a public beta by May 2020. This will be an incredibly beautiful experience compared to the demo we showed you earlier, and we can't wait to surprise you with it!
The market for cooking content is crowded, and to differentiate from other cooking apps, our product experience doubles down on core hypotheses from our earlier investor memo: (1) learning skills as you cook, and (2) tracking your skill progression. Hence, our next release will be less about having a high number of recipes (probably no more than a few dozen), but instead tight integration between recipes and skills. Building the relational content by hand also gives us the understanding we'll need to automate the process with machine learning later on.
After launching, we'll iterate and improve on the experience until we can find 50 users who are cooking with Parsnip continually over a 3-4 week period, demonstrating traction and preliminary product-market fit. Hitting this goal may take anywhere from a few months—if we're lucky—to much longer, and will mark a shift of our focus from product iteration to growth.
Recent highlights
We've made fantastic progress on visual & product design work with Definery, our incredibly talented design partner. A sneak preview of their work: our new logo (above) with our mascot, who we've affectionately nicknamed "Snippy" (for now).
We've built the framework for a cooking "curriculum" that ties together recipes and skills, and a corresponding database structure to run our app. This data now runs on a live Firebase instance, setting us up to iterate faster on the product & design.
We're currently heads down on building a full-stack prototype that integrates our new designs and revamped data backend.
Kitchen fires (lowlights)
Nothing to report right now, but the future surely holds plenty of surprises in store, so we're just carving this section out. 😁
Asks
Here are a few issues we're actively thinking about and would love your advice on.
Finding a community builder: as a consumer product, building a community will be incredibly important for Parsnip to iterate on product, as well as an important distribution channel later on. As we launch, we'll need someone who can help build our community, handles social media like a wizard, and enjoys thinking about distribution of consumer apps. If anyone comes to mind—especially if they have a huge TikTok following—please introduce us!
Content strategy: Many of you have seen the recent launch and blowup of Recipeasly. Simmering under the surface are a few important issues. First, the ad monetization model is broken for content creators, with about 70% of global ad revenue going to Google and Facebook. Second, restaurants operate on increasingly slim margins over the last decade, with additional financial pressure from food delivery, many out of business altogether from COVID. We see an opportunity for an entirely different business model here, where food bloggers & restaurateurs can contribute original content to Parsnip, with a huge value-add from our gamification, skills-based learning, and future AI systems, and in turn be compensated for their work.
In short, finding partners to contribute content, and developing a business model that provides value to them, will be a focus area after launch. Do you know anyone—food blogger, social media influencer, cooking educator, restaurateur—who we should talk to?
Financial accounting: Our burn rate is minimal right now, but we'd like to get to know a financial accountant who is familiar with early stage startups. When would be the right time to engage them? When should we transition into looking for a dedicated Head of Finance or CFO?
Future seed raise: Our next fundraising round after demonstrating some traction with users will likely be an institutional seed round. We want to get to know any good seed investors in advance—especially those who share our vision, whose funds target the right stage and focus areas, and who are willing to lead. Please keep in mind anyone who may be relevant for an intro.
Finally, once we launch this next release of Parsnip, we'd love for you to test drive the app yourselves, provide feedback, contribute your own favorite recipes, and share with your friends.
Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Please get in touch!
Until next time,
Andrew & the Parsnip team