Our beta is live!
Dear Friends of Parsnip,
We've been hard at work over the last couple months to get the Parsnip beta ready for release—and you can see it here! Putting together mobile & desktop web apps with enough content to illustrate the whole concept was a lot of work, but we're now ready to show Parsnip to the world, and excited to enter a new phase for making Parsnip the best experience for learning to cook.
Our goal now is to share Parsnip with potential users, talk to them and get feedback, and find the highest-leverage ways to improve the product. Over the next months, we'll focus on figuring out a path toward product-market fit and creating enough traction to secure our next round of funding.
Parsnip currently focuses on the mobile experience (it's a device-installable progressive web app) but there is also a limited desktop version available—just be aware you'll get a different experience if you visit https://beta.parsnip.ai on your phone vs. on your computer.
Highlights
If you're seeing the app for the first time, please go play with it! A quick overview:
Our beta has 45 recipes with associated cooking skills & techniques you can learn
The Learn page shows all cooking skills in the app and your progress in different areas
Recipe Progressions are themed groups of recipes with skills that build from easy to more advanced, with contributions from renowned chefs such as Mark Miller, Jasper White, Robert Quintana, and Andrea Lekberg
Earn fun badges and levels as you learn skills and complete recipes
The amazing folks at Italia Like Locals have also contributed recipes with video techniques, such as for making your own fresh cavatelli at home! Videos are great for illuminating techniques, and we look forward to seeing how our users respond. (Side note: you can also book Italia Like Locals for really engaging online cooking classes for your team or organization.)
Some well-deserved shout-outs: we want to thank Allie Hemmings for fantastic food photography on many of our current recipes, and Definery for their incredible work on branding, UX/visuals, and a design that sings!
Challenges
From our early user research and MVP, we found that there was an underserved market for folks learning to cook—especially for beginners—and made a bet that an edtech approach to teaching cooking could meet this need. Now is where the rubber meets the road.
We've observed so far that while it's easy to get folks to try Parsnip, and even sign up, it will be harder to get them to stay. While we still have a lot of work to do to acquire users, a lot of our upcoming work will focus on figuring out what we need for stickiness and retention, whether it's more content, educational material, a stronger community, or something else.
Asks
Please give Parsnip a spin. We've been looking at this for a long time, so your first impression is super valuable. What's working well? What sucks? What can we do to improve the experience?
Even better, send Parsnip to your friends who are learning to cook and ask for their honest feedback. We're particularly interested in figuring out our blind spots and what we've overlooked in building this beta.
Finally, if you or anyone you know has content to contribute to Parsnip, or ideas for distributing the app more widely, please send us a note! We'll be experimenting with many different ways to get Parsnip in front of more users.
Until next time,
Andrew & the Parsnip team