u/joosebox

iPhone, iOS 18 and up, US store only right now.

It sits on the share sheet. Same move you'd use to send a video to a friend, except you pick ReciReel and about two minutes later you've got the recipe: amounts, steps, nutrition, equipment.

Free for three imports, then one a month. $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year if you want fifty.

Weak spot is a cook who works fast and never says a number out loud. It estimates there. Treat that number as a starting point.

The thing I can't figure out is which platform people actually save cooking videos on. Everyone I ask says something different.

iPhone, Food & Drink, free with a paid tier. It turns a saved cooking video into a recipe with the amounts filled in, which is the part reels leave out. Live about two weeks, a handful of ratings, install count in the low double digits.

Rough numbers since launch, because I know vague questions get vague answers:

Impressions: under 100 total Impression to product page view: roughly 80% Product page view to install: roughly one in five Ratings: a handful, not enough to matter yet

The ratio is what confuses me. An 80% impression-to-page-view rate is far higher than anything I have seen quoted as normal, and my read is that it is not a good sign at all. It suggests nearly everyone seeing the app is already looking for it by name, arriving from a link or a direct search, rather than finding it while browsing a category or a generic term. The listing converts people who already know about it and is invisible to everyone else.

If that read is right, the bottleneck is keyword surface rather than creative or copy, and rewriting the subtitle again is wasted effort.

Three things I would like a second opinion on.

Does a very high impression-to-page-view rate on tiny impression volume reliably mean branded traffic only, or can it mean something else I am not considering?

For a category where the obvious head terms are owned by enormous incumbents, is there a sane way to compete for the long tail, or is the honest answer that a small app here gets its discovery from outside the App Store and the listing exists only to convert?

Is a handful of ratings enough to suppress impressions on its own, or does that only start to matter further up?

Happy to share more detail if it helps diagnose.

I shipped an iPhone app that turns cooking videos into recipes, spent a week promoting it, and the most useful thing I did was stop reading my own results and start measuring the room. No link here, this is the data, not a pitch.

The baseline problem. My posts were landing at 1 or 2 points and I assumed my writing was the issue. So before rewriting anything again I pulled every post from the previous few days in each sub I'd posted in and scored the distribution. One sub: 91% of all posts, from everyone, finish at one point or less. Two others were around 70%. My "failures" were sitting exactly on the median. I had been about to rewrite copy that was performing normally.

If you take one thing from this: score the room before you judge your post. A 1-point post in a sub where 91% of posts get 1 point is not a signal about you.

The gates are mechanical and usually invisible. One sub removed my post and I spent a while assuming it was the writing. It wasn't. That sub requires ten points of karma earned inside the sub itself before you may post about your own work, plus a specific post structure. Neither appears on the rules page you see when you hit submit. Another counts its 30-day promo limit from your last app post even if that post was removed, so a removal costs you the next month as well.

Sitewide karma does nothing for those. I have about 4,900 comment karma and 15 years on the account, and it was irrelevant, because the gate was sub-local.

Comments are not a growth channel. I answered a lot of questions in other people's threads on the theory it would compound into installs. Measured over 36 hours: 101 comments, 78 of them at or below one point. The posts, meanwhile, produced every real conversation and every single person who asked to try the thing. If your time is limited, the post is worth more than twenty comments.

The one that cost me most. Almost everyone who engaged asked to see it work before installing. I didn't have a demo video ready. No amount of copy fixed that, and I lost a week of interest to it.

Curious whether the baseline thing matches what others here see, or whether I picked unusually brutal subs.

The gap is the same every time: a splash of this, a handful of that, "just until it looks right", and the one number you actually needed was on screen for half a second or never said at all. So you save the video, and a week later you open it and you're still watching a stranger's hands instead of cooking.

I built ReciReel around that specific gap. You share a cooking video in from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or Facebook and it gives you back a recipe with quantities, ordered steps, equipment and nutrition. It's on the App Store, iPhone only, five months of solo work.

The part I found interesting as a problem, and the reason I don't think this is just a transcription wrapper:

The caption is a trap. It's the cheapest thing to read and it's wrong constantly. Creators write "recipe below" and then list four ingredients out of nine, or give a version that doesn't match what they actually did on camera. If you build off the caption you ship confident nonsense.

The amounts are usually visual, not spoken. Someone tips a container, and the quantity lives in how long they tipped it and how big the container is. That has to come from the video itself.

Being wrong is worse than being incomplete. A missing step is obvious the moment you read it. A wrong quantity isn't obvious until it's already in the bowl. That asymmetry drove most of the design.

Where I'd take input: the recipe world is full of people who have tried some version of this and given up. If you know why a previous attempt at this failed, I'd rather hear it now than find out myself in three months.

You share a cooking video into it and it gives you back the recipe, including the amounts, which is the bit reels almost never say out loud. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook. It's called ReciReel, it's on the App Store, iPhone only, and I made it.

What I actually want tested is where it falls over, so please throw the awkward stuff at it rather than the clean stuff:

Videos where the cook never states a quantity and only shows it Anything with an accent or background music loud enough to bury the narration Long videos where the recipe is buried in the middle Recipes that are mostly technique with barely any ingredients Non-English cooking videos

I know roughly how it behaves on the videos I picked, which is the least useful sample there is. What I don't know is what happens on whatever is sitting in your saved folder.

If it gets something wrong, the useful report for me is the link plus what it should have said. Wrong quantities are more interesting to me than a missing step, because a missing step you'll notice and a wrong quantity you won't until it's in the bowl.

Free to try without paying, so you can get a real recipe out before deciding anything.

Five months solo, and it came out of a problem I kept hitting myself: you save a reel, go to cook it a week later, and realise nobody in the video ever said how much of anything. A splash of this, a handful of that, and the one number you needed went by in half a second on screen.

The app is called ReciReel. You share a cooking video into it from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or Facebook, and it gives you back a proper recipe. Ingredients with quantities, steps in order, equipment, nutrition. It watches the video rather than just scraping the caption, which matters because the caption is usually where the amounts are missing.

Who it's actually for: people with a camera roll or a saved folder full of food videos they have never cooked once. That was me. I had about two hundred saved and had made maybe four of them.

It's on the App Store now, iPhone only. Free to try, paid if you keep using it.

Two things I'd genuinely like input on from people here who have shipped consumer stuff:

Pricing. I went with a free tier that lets you get a real recipe out of it before paying, on the theory that nobody will pay for something they haven't seen work. I don't know if that's generous or just leaving money on the table.

The demo problem. Almost everyone who asked me about it wanted to see it work before installing, and I didn't have a video ready. That cost me more than any wording on the listing did. Recording one this week.

Happy to answer anything about the build.

I shipped an iPhone app that turns cooking videos into proper recipes, and spent the last two days trying to get it in front of people on here. Posting the numbers because I couldn't find anyone else's.

Baselines matter more than your copy.

Before deciding my posts were bad I sampled every post from the last few days in the subs I'd posted in. In one of them 91% of all posts finish at one point or less. Two others were around 70%. That's everybody, not just the new guy with the app. If you don't know what a normal outcome in a room looks like, you'll read the room's baseline as a verdict on your writing.

Most app subs mechanically gate promotion, and it's rarely on the rules page.

One sub needs 10 karma earned inside that specific sub before you can post at all. Another removed my post with a bot inside two minutes for not having enough prior comments there, even though its written rules explicitly permit self promotion and I'd used their designated promo flair on their designated promo day. A third allows promo one day a week and caps self promotion at 10% of your total contributions, which I only found by reading their wiki rather than their rules page.

So participating first isn't etiquette. It's the door.

The bit I didn't expect.

Eleven comments in the subs where my app belongs, being useful, mentioning it where it genuinely fit: three points total.

Then I answered someone in a cooking sub whose blanched green beans had gone slimy. Nothing to do with my app. Never mentioned it. That one comment is at ten and still climbing, and it's the only thing I've written all week that anyone actually thanked me for.

The variable wasn't the audience or the writing. It was that I wanted something in one place and not the other. People feel that even when the comment is good.

What I'd tell myself two days ago: go be genuinely useful in the places where you already know things, and let the app come up when it comes up. It's slower and it's the only part that worked.

Happy to answer anything. Not linking it since this sub doesn't allow links, and honestly that's rather the point of the post.

Shipped a consumer iOS app in July that runs a model call on every single use, and the thing I underestimated wasn't build time or marketing. It was that my free tier has a real per-use cost attached to it.

Normal SaaS free tier: another user on the same server, basically rounding error. Mine: every free import is money out the door whether or not that person ever pays. So "generous free tier to drive adoption" stops being obviously correct. Past some point you're just buying strangers a service.

Where I landed, for anyone in the same boat:

Free is 3 uses up front, then 1 a month after that. The 3 is deliberate, it's enough to actually judge whether the thing works on your own content rather than a demo. The 1 a month is deliberate too, it keeps the app installed and occasionally useful instead of becoming a dead icon, and a dead icon converts at zero forever.

The part I got wrong at first was thinking of the free tier as marketing spend with no ceiling. It isn't. It's closer to inventory. You can decide how much of it you're willing to give away this month, and that number should be a decision rather than an accident.

Two things I'd genuinely like other people's take on.

First, does anyone gate on quality instead of quantity? Full quality on a small number of uses versus degraded quality on unlimited. I went full quality on a few because a bad first result is unrecoverable, but I've never seen anyone put numbers behind that choice.

Second, if your costs are per-use, how are you handling the person who burns their free allocation on something your product genuinely can't do? They leave with the worst possible impression and it cost you money to give it to them. I don't have a good answer for that one yet.

App is ReciReel if it matters for context, turns cooking videos into written recipes, but the economics question is the actual reason I'm posting.