Update 4/28/2021
Dear Friends of Parsnip,
As I'm writing to you and reflecting on the last few months, I've been taking a moment to reflect on the amazing team we've built and the truly astounding progress we've made. Not five months ago, we had no design, no product, and a strong hunch that many people wanted to cook more. Now, we have a beautiful and eye-catching brand, a product that's close to market, an amazing suite of investors & supporters, and—most importantly—a ravenous group of fans that can't wait for Parsnip. I feel incredibly fortunate to be a part of this movement that we've started.
As we gear up for a public beta, our current priorities are:
product (building the right set of features and making them work well),
content (recipes, skills, and the partners that contribute them), and
distribution (building the initial community around our launch, and thinking about increasing reach when we're ready for growth).
The app is about 80% feature complete and we plan to switch primarily to testing & QA in May. We've already begun some preliminary testing and research with strangers from the Internet (!!), and hope to release to a broader group in June.
Highlights
Our new landing page is up at https://parsnip.ai. This is beautiful work by Definery, our incredible design partner (if you or anyone you know needs design help, they are the best of the best!) You'll see more in the coming weeks, including pages about the company's mission and our team.
Mark Miller has joined us as an investor and advisor. Mark began his culinary training at the ground zero of California Cuisine with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse, has authored 11 cookbooks and is considered one of the fathers of Modern Southwestern cuisine. He is incredibly connected in the culinary world, having launched a dozen restaurants and consulted for well-known food brands. Mark has been instrumental in helping us with our content strategy and connecting us to other chefs and food personalities.
We're also fortunate to have Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, the founders of Duolingo, as investors. You may not know that before Duolingo, Luis invented CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA, and founded the field of human computation (where Andrew started his PhD). Given the many conceptual similarities of Parsnip to Duolingo as an edtech product, we're very fortunate to have Luis and Severin on board.
To stir interest and begin building a community in preparation for launch, we posted our landing page on r/cookingforbeginners. The response was phenomenal, with 360 new sign-ups and over 100 folks in our new Discord server within a day. More than the number of users, it was the sheer excitement for the need Parsnip is satisfying that was energizing and awesome to see. As we've kept talking to users, it's become more and more clear that novice cooks are a very underserved market, and we can't wait to bring Parsnip to them.
Lowlights
One aspect of launching Parsnip that we underestimated was the challenge of procuring good content (recipes that are connected to our skills framework)—and especially to have enough content to be interesting to users when we launch. This is a significant current focus for the team, and a bar we need to clear before the product is engaging enough to stand alone for a public release (see below).
Asks
Our greatest need right now is quality content. Since earlier iterations of the app, we've moved away from thinking about content purely as recipes & skills, to a greater emphasis on edtech and eventually to build a personalized curriculum. As a result, many of Parsnip's contributed recipes will be organized into modules that are thematic around an ingredient or cuisine, and have a coherent set of skills that build on each other. For example, we're currently working on one with Mark Miller that teaches salsas: building from a raw, simple pico de gallo, to a more complex spicy salsa that involves fire roasting tomatoes.
Other modules we're working on include shrimp tacos, beef noodle soup, fresh pasta, cookies, and so on. So, instead of perusing an assortment of unrelated recipes, users will be able to pick a topic of interest and grow through progressively advanced skills. We estimate needing 8-12 of these modules to launch to the public, and maybe 20-30 to be able to demonstrate repeat engagement and product traction.
We'd love to find other folks who are willing to contribute this type of content to Parsnip. Do you know any chefs, food bloggers, or folks who just love to teach cooking? As we launch, we can help them get attention for their brand or product. Bonus points if they're able to provide any good pictures of the process & end product. We'll fill in relevant skills & techniques for contributed recipes, but appreciate anyone who can help think about teaching & skill progression.
We'd love to find content partners that are strong in at least one of these areas:
teaching quality: recipes are approachable and communicated in a way that facilitate learning
authority: they have credibility or experience to be teaching this topic
reach: they have an audience or social media following that they'd want to share their Parsnip content with
A second priority we're noodling on in the background is marketing and distribution strategy, both while iterating and refining the product with our early community, and generating more attention and growth once we're ready to hit the gas. As early stage consumer apps can be a wild west, we'd love your ideas on two topics:
We're currently working with two moving targets: (a) the set of core product features and (b) an initial target market. It seems there's a reasonably good match between our value prop and folks at r/cookingforbeginners, but how do we drill down to find the most excited users? And how can we tell if we're going after the wrong market?
Building an excited early community is good, but we also need to think about longer-term marketing strategy such as engaging our mailing lists, growing our social media following, and finding the right avenues to tell more folks about Parsnip. We have lots of ideas here, but we'd love crowdsource some from you, or talk to anyone you know about planning for growth.
That's all for now! Can't wait to share with you what the next month brings.
- Andrew and the Parsnip team