Twitter
Advertisement

Cucumbertown opens a social network to food bloggers

Founded three years back by four angel investors from Silicon Valley, Cucumbertown is looking to take the world of food blogging by storm.

Latest News
article-main
FacebookTwitterWhatsappLinkedin

Founded three years back by four angel investors from Silicon Valley, Cucumbertown is looking to take the world of food blogging by storm. On the eve of the launch of the food portal, Cherian Thomas, its CEO & co-founder, an ex-Zynga engineer, spoke to Beryl Menezes about future plans. Excerpts from the interview:

What was the idea behind launching such a platform?
Cucumbertown is a platform for publishing recipes by authors. Think about it like Wordpress, but for recipes. So we are not launching a blog, but the platform where a number of users,  including chefs and amateur cooks, blog.

How is this blog different from the established ones in the market that are built on similar lines?
Cucumbertown makes the experience of recipe blogging so simple that any one from your mom to my sister and my wife can write about a recipe in less than five minutes. Such frictionless experience is not available right now in other platforms where people write it in free text or rather in a MS Word like environment.

Who is the brainchild behind this platform?
Cucumbertown is being built by four people in three continents, none of whom has seen each other. While it is the first entrepreneurial stint for co-founder Arun Prabhakar, Cucumbertown’s other co-founder from Switzerland Chris Luscher is a serial entrepreneur and a partner at world’s leading design firm Information Architects while the American co-founder Dan Hauk ran a venture BrewTrackr to record beer tastes across the world.

How did the group of angel investors come together?
After Cucumbertown picked up some traction in terms of users, it got noticed by investors in Silicon Valley. Most notable was my former colleague and the creator of the game Farmville. Zao Yang, the co-creator of Farmville, got to see this project and introduced me to other investors in the Valley. In Silicon Valley investments happen by the way of introductions.

How much time from conception to final launch did the process take?
Cucumbertown as an idea was moulded over three years. The company was launched on July 3 and the software platform was opened to a small group of users. The site was opened to public on October 17.

How do you plan to publicise the website and draw in new bloggers?
Facebook is one channel for spreading the news. Cucumbertown intends to grow as a standalone product that will have a very high value proposition for people who love to cook to come in by word of mouth and publish their love for cooking.

What is the viability of such a business model which is free?
Software models like this work on ‘Freemium’ services where the large subset of users use it for free but a small subset of highly popular users in the system pay for additional services such as analytics, additional software services.

Do you plan to go in for an ad-based model later?
We are not very focused on the ad-based model, though we don’t reject it either. Cucumbertown intends to be the platform for recipes and food where consumers can order ingredients or food items for recipes they intend to cook.

Any expansions in mind in terms of content in the near future?
Diversifying in terms of content is largely dependent on the demographics of the users joining the portal. Even at the private beta stage, Cucumbertown has recipes bloggers from the US, Switzerland, Germany, Middle East and India.

What has been the main learning from this experience that can help budding entrepreneurs?
When it comes to building software companies in this digital age, geographies offer very few obstacles. We are now at a crossroads of building a business that requires very little capital, but can bring in transformative change that spans boundaries and geographies.

For more details, log on to http://http://www.cucumbertown.com/

Find your daily dose of news & explainers in your WhatsApp. Stay updated, Stay informed-  Follow DNA on WhatsApp.
Advertisement

Live tv

Advertisement
Advertisement