I think everyone dreams of starting their own business and being their own boss. But most of us dream big and don’t do anything about it—we’re afraid that it’s too much work or that we won’t be able to “make it.”
So when a friend of mine decided to launch a new venture without quitting his job, I was intrigued. I love hearing stories about how an idea came to be and how they managed to get all the work done behind the scenes.
My friend, we’ll call him C, started a website called Recipe Comparison. What it does is let you compare recipes from different big-time sites like The Food Network and Epicurious to see what differences exist and what makes them unique.
It’s a pretty cool idea. M and I aren’t chefs, but we do like to cook—so this site can come in pretty handy.
Anyway, I decided to interview my friend so he can shed some light on all the work that was done behind the scenes. A lot of you bloggers out there will see some similarities between what his model (and the time he puts into his site):
Q. How did you get the idea for the site?
A. I got the idea by witnessing how difficult it was for my wife to compare recipes across several websites or even on a single website. I then recognized some similarities to problems addressed by other businesses. I think this is pretty typical of most new business ideas in that it builds on something that already exists, taking an approach or solution that worked elsewhere into a new area.
More specifically, I have several friends who either started a company or work for businesses that aggregate web content like classified ads or job or real estate postings. Their solutions find the common “attributes” to search & present that data to the user in a manner that is more friendly and useful than a generic search engine. That’s effectively what I’m doing with
RecipeComparison.com. The biggest difference is that people pay for the products in classified ads, jobs, and real estate. No one pays for recipes, so the economic model is completely different. Advertising alone can’t really support a large company, but it has the potential to make it worthwhile for an individual or family.
Q. How much time do you put into it on any given week?
When I first started, I spent every hour that I could on the site for many weeks. I would work until I went to bed at night and I easily worked more than 12 hours every Saturday & Sunday for many weeks. During this time my wife was incredibly loving and supportive, doing everything from bringing me food to mowing the lawn [WC: Mowing the lawn? She's a keeper!] so I could keep working.
After I felt like I had done enough for other people to be able to clearly understand my vision for the website implementation, I started to get other people to help with various aspects of the development. At that point I switched from being more of a software developer to some combination of a product manager and development manager. That freed up a lot of time, so I could get back to eating dinner away from the computer and mowing the lawn myself :=)
Recently I’ve been so busy with other things that I haven’t put in much time at all, but fortunately the website is at a point where it can live without my constant attention. I still have some other people working on it, which costs money, but doesn’t take my time.
Q. What’s been your favorite part of working on it? Least favorite?
Improving my knowledge and skills has certainly been very rewarding. One simple example is that I decided to administer the linux server myself. Although I’ll never get a job doing linux administration, I’m absolutely certain that knowledge makes me a better manager of other software developers.
My least favorite part has certainly been the personal time sacrifice. I’m glad I devoted myself to creating the business, but there were occasions when I wanted to just stop to spend more time with my wife and my dog.
Q. You mentioned to me that you did several things to cut costs on this endeavor, can you talk about some of those and how much you saved?
First of all, I did a lot myself. As I already mentioned, that takes a lot of time and personal sacrifice, but it absolutely saves on cash that would otherwise be required. I also asked quite a few friends for help.
I’ve been generous in helping other people in the past, so I found a lot of people were willing to return the favor or knew that I would help them in the future. When it came time to actually spend money, I used
oDesk to find people who could do the work for substantially less than you’d otherwise find. In some cases I hired developers in
India or the
Ukraine, and I also hired some individuals in the US to help with data entry. I even hired the teenage daughter of a neighbor to help with data entry.
Q. Five years from now, how will the site be different?
Wow. Five years is an eternity for a website or business like this. I’m scared to predict what computers will even be like then. I know the site has to go mobile, and I have some near-term visions for that already, but can you imagine walking down the aisle of a grocery store and seeing comparisons of recipes on your phone as you walk past certain ingredients? Could that be realistic in 5 years? Maybe. At a minimum I’d like RecipeComparison to become “the Google of recipe search.” Heck, maybe Google would even own RecipeComparison in 5 years. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Q. Would you ever consider selling it off for a chunk of money in the future?
Absolutely. In fact, I created a corporation at the very beginning to facilitate any future investment or sale. I can see quite a few possibilities for investment from or outright sale to a number of companies other than just Google. However, I think that’s a long way off at best. While the economy continues to be bad, it’s unlikely that most or any advertising-based businesses will thrive. I suspect a lot of those businesses (like RecipeComparison) and bloggers will lose interest if they don’t make the money they once dreamed about. However, those who do persevere will hopefully be rewarded when things turn around.
I would like to add that RecipeComparison will soon help some recipe bloggers persevere with the hope that those bloggers will return the favor. Bloggers will be able to add their recipes to RecipeComparison so that we can refer users back to the websites of the bloggers in the same manner that we currently refer users to the big & popular recipe websites. Think of this like a blog carnival for recipes. While most websites are focused on keeping users on their sites, RecipeComparison is in the unique position of wanting users to leave our site and visit other sites. Anyone who is interested can contact us through the website to be one of the early participants.
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Well, that’s it. He’s done some pretty interesting stuff in terms of preparing for a sale from the very beginning and doing a lot of the work himself, but the time spent on has obviously been very high. This is where it helps that C is passionate about cooking and so it doesn’t feel like a job, it’s more like a passion.
Make sure you check out RecipeComparison and play around a little bit with the site. And I want to thank C for answering my questions so thoroughly.
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