u/RecipeGadget

The biggest thing I learned: most recipe organizers hand you a blank grid and tell you to start typing. Anyone who's done that knows the app dies on your phone within a week. So I shipped it with 460+ free, ad-free recipes already loaded, so people are cooking in their first session instead of data-entering.

What worked:

- Starting with a full recipe library instead of an empty box. The first session completely changes when someone can browse and cook immediately.
- A share extension that lets you send a recipe straight from Safari into the app. No copy-pasting fields between apps. This is the feature people actually use.
- Tap-driven ingredient and measurement entry. About 7,000 ingredient choices and 96 measurement options, mostly tap-based, because typing a recipe is where entry dies.
- Import from photos, camera, PDFs, Word docs, pasted text. People have recipes scattered across bookmarks, screenshots, stained index cards, and PDFs someone emailed them in 2019. Consolidation is the point, not a feature list.

What didn't:

- Onboarding tips that people had to reset a couple times to see them all. Minor but real friction I hear about.
- Only English, no localization yet. A recipe app with global appeal but a single declared locale is a gap I haven't closed.
- Three ratings after roughly four months live. The app is early and traction is hard to read from a number that small.

The thing I keep hearing is that people didn't realize how much they wanted ad-free cooking until they tried it. Recipe sites buried in ads and 800-word life stories before the recipe make people genuinely angry, and an app that just shows you the food feels like relief.

Would love feedback on what matters to you in a recipe app. What's the one thing that makes you keep or delete one?

Been building in the recipe/cooking space for a while and I keep running into the same thing, so I want to hear how other builders think about it.

Most recipe organizer apps hand you a blank grid and a friendly "start adding your recipes!" And that's exactly where they die. Staring at an empty box is not motivating. Nobody's first cooking session is data entry. The app gets opened twice and then it's gone.

The pattern I've landed on: an app that actually earns retention has to be useful before the user contributes anything. If the first session is cooking instead of typing, the whole relationship changes. Empty-state-as-onboarding is the quiet killer.

The other thing that kills these apps is recipe entry itself. Typing out ingredients, measurements, and steps for one recipe is tedious enough that people never do their second one. So import (Safari share sheet, photos of old cards, PDFs) and tap-driven entry instead of a keyboard both matter way more than any single feature.

Questions for the other builders here:

\- how do you handle the cold-start empty state without it feeling like a chore?
\- for anyone who's shipped something content-heavy, did seeding real content upfront actually move retention, or did it just inflate day-1 and nothing else?
\- what's your take on import-first vs create-first as the primary onboarding path?

Not trying to pitch anything, genuinely curious how people who've shipped in this kind of space solved it.

Been building in the recipe/cooking space for a while and I keep running into the same thing, so I want to hear how other builders think about it.

Most recipe organizer apps hand you a blank grid and a friendly "start adding your recipes!" And that's exactly where they die. Staring at an empty box is not motivating. Nobody's first cooking session is data entry. The app gets opened twice and then it's gone.

The pattern I've landed on: an app that actually earns retention has to be useful before the user contributes anything. If the first session is cooking instead of typing, the whole relationship changes. Empty-state-as-onboarding is the quiet killer.

The other thing that kills these apps is recipe entry itself. Typing out ingredients, measurements, and steps for one recipe is tedious enough that people never do their second one. So import (Safari share sheet, photos of old cards, PDFs) and tap-driven entry instead of a keyboard both matter way more than any single feature.

Questions for the other builders here:

- how do you handle the cold-start empty state without it feeling like a chore?
- for anyone who's shipped something content-heavy, did seeding real content upfront actually move retention, or did it just inflate day-1 and nothing else?
- what's your take on import-first vs create-first as the primary onboarding path?

Not trying to pitch anything, genuinely curious how people who've shipped in this kind of space solved it.