This interview was conducted for the Food Innovators by Food-X Podcast. 
Audio Title: Interview with Kitchenbowl Co-Founder Ryan Waliany by Food-X MD Andrew Ive
Duration Transcribed: 0:51:39
Speakers: Ryan Waliany and Andrew Ive
[Transcript]
Andrew Ive: OK. Welcome to Food Innovators by Food-X. How are you doing, Ryan?
Ryan Waliany: I’m pretty good. How about yourself?
Andrew Ive: I’m very well. Thank you. Thanks for changing your shirt by the way, taking into consideration the people watching this as opposed to just listening to it.
Ryan Waliany: No problem.
Andrew Ive: So for those that aren’t going to see it, Ryan just because I told him we would have a video, he dashed off and changed his shirt to look a bit more presentable for the thousands of viewers that we’re going to have for this podcast.
Ryan Waliany: It’s still early in California or in Washington.
Andrew Ive: So Ryan, tell me about your business. What’s it’s called? What does it do? Why is it amazing?
Ryan Waliany: So our company is called Kitchenbowl. It’s a social community to share and discover recipes. And what’s unique about us is we’ve reinvented the recipe format to have animated GIFs for techniques and this makes it really easy for an amateur cook or a novice chef to learn how to make croissants or lemonade and buttered dough because it’s much easier and these short video clips repeat. So the first time you watch it on video or you read it in text, you don’t really know what’s going on. That second or third time it repeats, you’re able to really understand what’s going on and maybe follow it yourself.
Andrew Ive: OK. So let me just kind of boil that down. Recipes online with GIFs that repeat rather than video.
Ryan Waliany: Yes. Depending on the medium, it’s video or GIFs. But for the purpose, it’s a short video repeating itself.
Andrew Ive: So how – typically, how long is the video?
Ryan Waliany: The video is typically 7 seconds, just enough to capture technique but not too long where it’s long form and hard to digest.
Andrew Ive: And so, do you kind of string these techniques together to kind of make one recipe? How does that work? I mean am I going to be pressing play more than I’m pressing …
Ryan Waliany: No. As a consumer, you just swipe left, left, left and every time you go to the next step, there’s either a video or an image describing what you’re supposed to do. And all of these recipes are created by our use community and they are user-generated by bloggers, food enthusiasts, and chefs alike.
Andrew Ive: So when you say swipe left, swipe right, I’m guessing is it specifically for people with tablets then?
Ryan Waliany: So it works in mobile, web, and Apple TV right now. So you swipe up and down on the web. You swipe left and right on a tablet or mobile device.
Andrew Ive: OK. So what’s the consumer insight? What made you think, “OK, there are 20, 30, 50, 100 different recipe websites out there. None of them are doing it right and it needs to be done in 7-second increments whether it’s through a GIF or a short video”? What made you think that was necessary?
Ryan Waliany: Yes. So about two or three years ago, my dad had a minor stroke and I was trying to learn how to cook with my wife and we couldn’t really find anything that works for us. So we tried textbooks. We tried recipe communities. And it was really hard. When you read the instruction say, “Sear a stake until it’s golden brown,” you don’t even know what golden brown means. And so, that’s something that’s lost in communication in books and recipe communities.
And when we saw a website that had animated GIFs for how to make croissants and there was just on recipe on the internet that does this, we were able to make croissants for the first time without having any baking or culinary technique experience. And so that’s when it kind of hit me that if every recipe was in this format, cooking actually wouldn’t be hard.
And so, it’s an issue of communication more than it is that there are thousands of recipe community sites out there. It’s just no one has done it in a way that people who don’t know how to cook can actually follow and learn how to cook.
Andrew Ive: OK. So your father had a stroke. You guys were learning how to cook and you found one site that had very kind of bite size chunks from a – that’s kind of a weird way of putting it given it’s a recipe. But bite size chunks of information that helped you for the first really understand how to cook a particular recipe.
Ryan Waliany: Exactly. And it’s so much work to create this. We tried to hire a chef. It took 24 to 48 hours. And that’s where the inspiration for Kitchenbowl came because if we can use mobile in a product where it can help you capture the steps as you’re cooking, it’s a lot less difficult to create this content.
Andrew Ive: Sorry. I didn’t get that.
Ryan Waliany: What do you mean spent 24 hours working on the recipe? No?
Ryan Waliany: Twenty-four to forty-eight hours trying to film the recipe and create it with a chef. It was just too much work.
Andrew Ive: Why would you – forgive me. Your father has a stroke. You were trying to understand how to do a recipe. How do you go from trying to understand the recipe to having – to filming the cook for 24 hours? I don’t see …
Ryan Waliany: I may have missed something there. But after we saw that this recipe worked for us, we were saying, “Why can’t we bring this recipe to everybody?” Because if everybody had this recipe format, they would be able to cook and it’s no longer an excuse that, “I don’t know how to cook.”
And so, when we tried to create this recipe format, it was just really hard. It’s a 24 to 48 hours to actually create the first recipe.
Andrew Ive: So why would – what made you want to do that? I mean understand the kind of insight you had in terms of the 7 seconds and figuring out how to do it. What made you think to yourself, “I want to try this”?
Ryan Waliany: Well, I mean it hasn’t been done before. And so, it was done maybe one or two sites with two recipes. And there are thousands, tens of thousands of recipes out there and they don’t have animated GIFs. So I can’t follow them and other people can’t follow them as well. There are videos but that’s a little bit too hard to digest because you have to stop and rewind.
And so, that’s when we decided like what if we can scale 10,000 recipes? What if we can scale up to 10,000 recipes? Can we make a significant impact where people would change their behavior and use our platform versus their traditional behaviors?
Andrew Ive: And so, what were you doing at the time? Yeah, go ahead. What were you doing at the time work wise and so on?
Ryan Waliany: So my wife and I were thinking about what our next business was going to be. And so, I was trying to figure out what are the economic opportunities, where can we get some distribution and connect that with some revenue opportunity? And ultimately, it was hard for me to find something that I was passionate about because I didn’t see a clear problem. And so when I saw this was a clear problem, it’s not inherently obvious how to make money with recipes other than delivering ingredients with those recipes.
And so, we saw a clear problem. We latched on to that because we can actually make a difference and we can actually change people’s lives. So if they can cook more then they’ll be healthier. If they can cook more, then they would not have strokes. They would not have these other health problems associated with poor dietary behaviors. And I grew up on fast food and my wife grew up on frozen tv dinners so we had no clue and no idea how to cook.
Andrew Ive: What made you – what were you doing at the time? I mean mentioned you were looking for what to do next. Had you guys being laid off or do you start as you graduated from college, had you …
Ryan Waliany: So previously, I ran a performance marketing company. And so, we grew that to $6 million in revenue in about 18 to 21 months. And one of the things that bothered me about that company is that we were focused purely on how do we get users and how do we make money. And so, there wasn’t a much thought about like how do we provide value to consumer?
And so, I ultimately left that company and resigned because I wanted to make more of an impact and focus on a lot of the technology product that I have been focused on before that. And so, it was more interesting for me to building something that changed someone’s life than for me to make money personally.
And so, that’s why I resigned and that’s why I changed my focus to really how can I help other people with the business that also eventually makes money.
Andrew Ive: OK. You resigned from a company. You kind of were involved to growing to $6 million. And then you and your wife – did you say wife?
Ryan Waliany: Yes. My wife, yeah.
Andrew Ive: You and your wife were in the hunt for what’s next? You never considered taking a job by the sounds of it. It sounds like you guys were in the hunt for what new business as next for you guys. Is that accurate
Ryan Waliany: That is correct. After – being an entrepreneur, there are ups and downs and there are struggles. But once you feel that three of it, it’s kind of hard to not have that – creation is so key to your identity. And so, being able to create and being to innovate and being able to change something at that kind of scale is just such a driving factor in pushing us forward every day. You knew it’s hard but that life that it brings is really worthwhile.
Andrew Ive: I understand the passion and the motivation. I’ve had multiple times before. But how did you deal with the kind of practicalities of life in terms of paying for bills, paying for the silly things like keeping a roof over your head. How did you have the capacity to focus on finding the next opportunity?
Ryan Waliany: So, I mean funny story. So my wife and I got married and then we decided to move from San Francisco. So all my startups in the past I did in San Francisco. I spent maybe 10 years in San Francisco. And when we got married, it was actually cheaper to travel for a little bit like significantly cheaper than rent. In fact, we travelled for 30 plus days. And so, we traveled a little bit around Asia. And when we came back, we decided to – so we decided to come back and find a place where we could live and we could build a sustainable startup.
Andrew Ive: A sustainable startup.
Ryan Waliany: Sustainable as in financially. And so, we look back in San Francisco and the one bedroom rents for around $4,000 at the time. Maybe they’re on 5 or 6 thousand now. It wasn’t sustainable to bootstrap a company. It wasn’t sustainable to go from ground zero to building something again.
And so knowing that, we decided to take the job and move to Seattle. And this time, Seattle , the rents were one third or one fourth the cost of San Francisco, much, much higher quality of living, great taxing with Amazon and Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Dropbox opening offices here. So it was a really great time to move to Seattle and probably still a great time. And by moving to Seattle, we still were able to keep our tech roots but then our cost of living was so much lower than San Francisco. It was way easier to bootstrap.
So no matter what we did as far as like me advising on technical architecture for a few startups or my wife doing some design work here and there, that was way more than enough to bootstrap our business.
Andrew Ive: So you were doing some freelancing and your wife was doing some freelancing just to kind of keep the lights on?
Ryan Waliany: A little bit, yeah. And maybe for about – I mean we were really, really lucky. We decided to take funding a little bit earlier so we didn’t have to do of that.
Andrew Ive: And in terms of getting funding, this was for Kitchenbowl. So OK, let’s go back to Kitchenbowl. You have gone and found yourself a chef and you’ve spent 24 to 48 hours with that poor chef trying to film 7-increments of one recipe, ten recipes?
Ryan Waliany: One recipe.
Andrew Ive: One recipe. So some poor chef spent two days trying to get 7-second increments of a recipe done. Is that right?
Ryan Waliany: Yeah. And then there is also the technicalities of how do you convert a video to a GIF and how do you upload it to your website and how do you really streamline that process, going from like a DSLR to your file system to the website or to S3 on the cloud. It’s actually a complicated process. I don’t know how bloggers even stomach the process to do this.
Andrew Ive: So how did you – so Kitchenbowl right now, how many recipes does it have on it?
Ryan Waliany: We have thousands.
Andrew Ive: Thousands. So how many chef suspending 24 to 48 hours to get that quantity of recipes developed?
Ryan Waliany: We have hundreds of chefs but they don’t spend that many hours. Our average recipes are actually created in 30 minutes to an hour.
Andrew Ive: How did you resolve the kind of technical challenges?
Ryan Waliany: And so what we did is we made a mobile app which has your camera and your computer in one device. And so because mobile has that camera capability, it’s a great publishing platform. So if I hold my camera up and as I’m cooking and record this meal that I’m cooking and I type in steps as I’m waiting for it to cook, that process of creation has gone now from 24 to 48 hours to just under an hour.
And so, it’s inevitable hour that I’m already going to spend so why not create a recipe and help build my audience as well? And so, that’s kind of the pitch that we’ve used for bloggers and they’ve really accepted that as first-time bloggers because right now, there’s no great mobile publishing platform for the next generation of bloggers.
Andrew Ive: You keep talking about bloggers. How are bloggers and chefs – are we talking about chefs now or are we talking about bloggers or are we talking about blogger/chef or …
Ryan Waliany: So primarily, Kitchenbowl is composed of food bloggers who primarily share recipes because of food passion. Food bloggers generally have better photos, are more into the story telling about the recipe and less about the technicalities and how great this dish is. Food bloggers are more about building recipes that are mass market so that anyone can cook whereas the chefs might be more concerned about most bleeding-edge recipes or how to sous vide and that’s a little bit different than our demographic that we’re trying to target.
Andrew Ive: OK. So if I can kind of liken it to 80-20, your thinking is that food bloggers are focused on the kind of 20% recipe that 80% of the people want rather than the 80% that only 20% want that the chefs are going to focus on.
Ryan Waliany: Exactly.
Andrew Ive: OK. And those food bloggers are literally the folks creating your 7-second videos, 7-second GIFs?
Ryan Waliany: That is correct.
Andrew Ive: I’m going to keep getting it right or wrong. I don’t know.
Ryan Waliany: I don’t know the real answer either.
Andrew Ive: So how do you guys make money out of Kitchenbowl?
Ryan Waliany: So ultimately, we’re trying to do a recipe to table. So our strategy is actually a little bit different than most. We think of it from a very, very big picture. So I think about three key drivers in running a business. You have distribution, you have engagement, and you have revenue.
So in order to have a scalable business, you need to have these three different variables as linearly independent as possible so that if you increase one, it multiplies the other two. And so we think about distribution on search where you can get like meatloaf has 21,000 searches per month. When we think of engagement as our mobile products or web offerings or Apple TV product kind of get them to come back to the brand. And we think about revenue as how many more meals they’re cooking.
And so, if they cook more meals and they’re able to order those meals through our service, be it partnerships with Instacart, FreshDirect, AmazonFresh, and the various grocery delivery sites out there. We have an opportunity to really connect those dots. And so right now, we’re focusing on distribution and betting that we can use – leverage the existing infrastructure that’s being built in the grocery delivery to build a sustainable business.
There are some other opportunities that we’re thinking about that also might be interesting but they might be a little bit more confidential. We do have significant revenue from a Fortune 500 company right now and that is making us profitable for a few months but I can’t disclose the details of that relationship.
Andrew Ive: OK. You went through a heck of a lot of information there.
Ryan Waliany: I did.
Andrew Ive: So can you slow it down and break it down for us? There are three component parts to your revenue model. You mentioned distribution, engagement, and what was the third?
Ryan Waliany: Sorry. There are three parts to a business; distribution, engagement, and revenue.
Andrew Ive: OK.
Ryan Waliany: And so, those are three variables that we’re working on to try to solve before we move. Right now, we’re solving distribution. We feel pretty comfortable that we’ve created a growth loop and now we’re solving some of the engagement revenue pieces before we have that really sustainable business.
Mael1: OK, very cool. You just sounded like a Silicon Valley guy for a second there. Growth loop.
Ryan Waliany: Yes.
Andrew Ive: Explain.
Ryan Waliany: Growth loop, a little bit of a Silicon Valley twang.
Andrew Ive: Yeah, yeah.
Ryan Waliany: So essentially, our growth loop is that we have mobile publishing with content creation. So if food bloggers create recipes, these recipes are indexed by Google for search. There are 21,000 searches for meatloaf, 246,000 searches for lasagna.
Andrew Ive: So when you say 300,000 searches for meatloaf, you mean on Google?
Ryan Waliany: ON Google.
Andrew Ive: You don’t mean Kitchenbowl.
Ryan Waliany: Not on Kitchenbowl. On Google.
Andrew Ive: OK. So any month or any day.
Ryan Waliany: Every month.
Andrew Ive: So every month, 300,000 people in the United States or global?
Ryan Waliany: In the United States search for meatloaf.
Andrew Ive: Search for meatloaf. OK. Fantastic. So how does knowing that – a lot of meatloaf. How does knowing that piece of information help you or how is that relevant to you?
Ryan Waliany: So when we take these recipes and we create these recipes, we optimize them for search because we know that 2,800 recipes covers nearly 40 million search visits per month in the US.
Andrew Ive: You say 2,800, so you got …
Ryan Waliany: About 2,800 recipes can cover 40 million search visits per month.
Andrew Ive: And you got 2,800 in Kitchenbowl or more than that at this point?
Ryan Waliany: Approximately around there. I can’t disclose the exact number. But we have thousands of recipes there.
Andrew Ive: OK, cool. So …
Ryan Waliany: And it’s 2,800 specific recipes like meatloaf.
Andrew Ive: OK. So you optimize them so that Google finds them?
Ryan Waliany: Yeah, we optimize them for Google to find them. And then now – so food bloggers create this content. It’s indexed on Google. Most of our keywords are actually in the top ten position which is great. And then the consumers now find this on their mobile phone, on their website or under desktop and then they download or use our app.
And so, we try to convert them from using our web application to converting to our mobile application. And then from our mobile application, those producers who create content or food bloggers, they get feedback and they create more content.
Andrew Ive: So the 2 to 3,000 plus whatever it might be recipes that you guys have on your site are optimized from a description and a keyword perspective so that they cover about 40 million searches on a monthly basis within Google.
Ryan Waliany: That is correct.
Andrew Ive: When people make those searches and find you guys in the top 10, they get the opportunity to download your app which then gives them the opportunity of being able to watch your recipes in 7-second increments, give or take, that have been created by bloggers that contribute those recipes to your website.
Ryan Waliany: That is correct.
Andrew Ive: Awesome. So that’s a great way of getting the distribution of your app to thousands and thousands of people. How does that – so then you started to talk about people ordering food from FreshDirect and so on. Is that built-in within your app?
Ryan Waliany: No. I mean we have a new project that we will be launching in about a month.
Andrew Ive: OK.
Ryan Waliany: And so I don’t know how much I can talk about that. But we’re going to be at the future food at South By Southwest and we’re launching a companion app that really focuses on this consumer niche or not necessarily a niche. But right now, we focus on publishing and our app is strictly up to this date been focused about those food bloggers and how can they create more content and how can it be better for them.
Andrew Ive: OK.
Ryan Waliany: And the next companion part of our app will be focused more about consumption like if I’m a consumer and I’m cooking every day, I’m doing that for a reason because I want to become healthier, because I want lose weight, and so really hoping that consumers meet their goals and needs. And so, I don’t know if you remember how I looked maybe two or three months ago but I’ve been cooking every day for the last like 30 to 60 days and I’ve lost maybe 20 plus pounds.
And so, all I’m doing is eating real food every single day and replacing one meal I eat outside with a meal that I cook at home. And so, if we can kind of leverage that and help people keep track of, “I’m going to cook one meal a day or I’m going to cook three meals this week,” they can live healthier lives. And that ties into the Kitchenbowl ecosystem.
Andrew Ive: OK. So I mean I totally get the kind of visions/aspirations of Kitchenbowl in terms of making – reducing the barriers to people in terms of their ability to make and consume good healthy good. Now, a lot of those barriers are mental in the sense of – and I don’t mean insane. I mean mental barriers.
Ryan Waliany: Oh yeah, they are.
Andrew Ive: In the sense that people believe it’s very tough to make good healthy food at home because they’re unused to doing so whereas your recipes are showing them that within 4 minutes, 5 minutes, 7 minutes, 9 minutes, whatever the timeframe might be, you can get a pretty decent, healthy, tasty meal that is also inexpensive. I mean if you go buy the more ingredients from a grocery store, you can get a lot of food for very little money if you’re talking about the fruits, the vegetables, the component parts versus buying a meal in a restaurant.
Ryan Waliany: Yeah. I mean if you compare to eating out which is the millennial alternative, it’s so much cheaper and so much better for you and so much higher quality to eat at home. And it’s almost faster and more convenient. And now – I mean Kitchenbowl, before I started building this habit, before I started learning how to cook, it took me an hour to make the simplest meal. And that meal cost more because I don’t know what I was doing. It was hard to make. The clean-up was awful. And now, it takes me 15 minutes to build a weeknight meal that tastes great and it’s cheaper than eating out.
Andrew Ive: Now, I guess some people would say, “Well, you don’t get the social dynamic eating at home as much as you do eating out at a restaurant or whatever.”
Ryan Waliany: No.
Andrew Ive: I met up with a guy recently in the last kind of couple of weeks and he hosts weekly dinner parties at his place.
Ryan Waliany: Yeah, it’s fantastic.
Andrew Ive: He has got like 8 to 10 friends around the dinner table. He cooks them a really good meal. It takes him an hour or so to put together a kickass meal. People bring certain dishes. People bring wine or beer or whatever. And then they spend Friday night jamming as a group of friends without having the waiter kind of hustling them to get out of the restaurant and pay their bill.
So I’m not – I don’t see that there’s – you lose the social dynamic by having a regular meal at home.
Ryan Waliany: Actually, ironically when we first started cooking and doing Kitchenboal, I do make some of user testing. We would post the photos of meals to Facebook and all of a sudden, people started inviting themselves to our house. So we had organic dinner parties and we met so many new people because we just these photos on Facebook and they were just kind of far. And so, that was one of the interesting things that food is social and it brings people together. Recipes are social to some degree because you want to see what people are cooking and doing but at the same time it’s really the social increase in experience that drives a lot of it.
Andrew Ive: It’s funny. The first – when I met my wife after about two or three dates outside, I brought her home and made her kind of salmon vegetable kind of dish and whatever. I was actually quite proud of myself. I was quite proud of the fact that I made her a really good meal for a dinner, dinner at our place or my place rather. So anyway, I’m not sure people want to hear about that. But I’ll move on swiftly.
OK. So we’ve got 40 million searches being covered by your recipes, people downloading your app.
Ryan Waliany: Not my recipes but the top 2,800.
Andrew Ive: The top 2,800 recipes from the food bloggers that you guys have engaged.
Ryan Waliany: Top 2,800 on Google to be clear. So if you looked at all recipes traffic and you broke it down into the different sections, their top 2,800 recipes covers about 40 million searches according to tools that we used for analytics.
Andrew Ive: OK. How do you guys engage with the food bloggers? I mean it sounds like one of those tough marketplace challenges.
Ryan Waliany: Yes. So in Seattle, I met one of these investors who is a reputable investor here. And he’s like, “I get it. My wife would this.” But how are you going to get food bloggers? And so then I spent a day thinking about it and i was like, “Well, I don’t know how I’m going to get food bloggers. This is going to be really hard.”
And so, I googled food photography and I landed on a Business Insider article and had top 10 food photographers in the US audience on Instagram. And so then I just cold called every single person on that list. One of them I got along with really well. We flew her up the next week. She pitched one of her early investors at the time. And we brought her on to the team and she helped us, she had 50,000 followers on Instagram and she really helped us kick start that.
Andrew Ive: Wow!
Ryan Waliany: And so because she was our core audience and because she got solicited every single day and because she is familiar with the good world, she was able to help us create that momentum. And so now, we have tens of thousands of photos shared with the Kitchenbowl hashtag and it’s growing weekly. And we have tens of thousands of followers on Instagram and that’s really where we’ve had a lot of success.
Andrew Ive: That’s amazing. I mean it’s literally just calling up 10 people, finding one where you had a degree of chemistry with them.
Ryan Waliany: More or less. But having the guts to cold call 10 people and then to meet with them and talk to them and to really choose the right one. Unfortunately, it’s hard because the other people that I talked to were not necessarily entrepreneurs and really deciphering their motives was key to figuring out who was the good partner.
Andrew Ive: How did you – give me a for instance. The first person you called, the first photographer you called, what was the pitch?
Ryan Waliany: I was just – I pitched them my personal story with my wife and how we wanted to learn how to cook and there weren’t any tools or formats that worked for us and we found that this works really well. At this time, I think we’ve also had done surveys as we actually asked consumers which format do they prefer and they actually preferred my step-by-step format versus the industry standard at all recipes and the most popular YouTube video.
Andrew Ive: How did you show them the different techniques?
Ryan Waliany: I used to talk on AskYourTargetMarket.com.
Andrew Ive: OK.
Ryan Waliany: And so, I surveyed about 100 to 200 people and showed them the different formats side by side.
Andrew Ive: You showed them a video of recipe and then you showed them the GIF steps 7-second recipes?
Ryan Waliany: I did.
Andrew Ive: And you said, “What do you like best? Why? Why not?” blah, blah, blah?
Ryan Waliany: Yeah. And so consistently, ours was rated – it was a double blind test but ours was rated by far number one.
Andrew Ive: OK. OK. So you called up the first photographer and you said, “Hey, this is me. This is my wife. This is what we’re doing. This is why we’re doing it.” And did they basically shoot you down or was that the first person you spoke to?
Ryan Waliany: Yeah. I mean it’s not actually a shooting down unfortunately. It’s more like they priced too aggressively. So everyone has a price and so I think one person gave us …
Andrew Ive: Everyone has a price. I got to quote you there. Everyone has a price. OK. Keep going.
Ryan Waliany: And so, someone gave us a price for like $5,000 or $10,000 per recipe or more and we were like, “OK, this is not going to work for us.” And so, we really artificially increased the price. Most of them actually had day jobs and Instagram was a hobby so that could be why. Aside from conversation, I met here maybe like a few blocks from my house and she was just afraid of the incorporate. I mean she loves the idea but she has this very corporate brand or not corporate brand and she actually had just on a promotion with Blue Apron.
And so because of Blue Apron, she actually had to delete hundreds of comments off her Instagram post because her audience actually got mad for that promotion.
Andrew Ive: OK.
Ryan Waliany: And so, that was actually something that we learned was not necessarily the best thing to do is to pair yourselves with the right – we had to prepare ourselves with the right blogger because there could be bad clash as well.
Andrew Ive: OK.
Ryan Waliany: And so, she was not willing to do another brand.
Andrew Ive: OK. So you found a blogger. You flew her up. Nice person you wanted to do business. Is she now part of the team or how is she associated with Kitchenbowl.
Ryan Waliany: Yeah. She is our community adviser right now. She is instafamous and so she gets flown all around the world for free.
Andrew Ive: Instafamous. Is that a thing?
Ryan Waliany: Instafamous. She hates that word.
Andrew Ive: Is that a thing. Is that a thing I’ve missed?
Ryan Waliany: It is. I mean surprising how much people get paid for cost. I mean these popular Instagrammers get paid sometimes over $1,000 per post. And so, it’s quite a lucrative business if you’ve created a brand and you’ve created a position for yourself. But again, your audience backslashes.
Andrew Ive: When you say, “Your audience backlashes, if they think you’re trying to commercialize your relationship with them?
Ryan Waliany: That is correct.
Andrew Ive: OK. So she is instafamous. She is traveling around the world. Is she promoting Kitchenbowl even it’s subtly or not at all.
Ryan Waliany: Yes, she helps out. She helps us get some brands and relationships. She does off and on contracts with us. She also in one month, she’ll help us out again and she’ll go off again to maybe London or I think recently, she was in Malaysia with one of our food bloggers and he met up with them and then she’ll come back and help us again. So she has kind of always been there. She was there for the first 6 to 9 months of Kitchenbowl, really making sure that we had the right footing and then we had time to bring in someone who could be a full-time in Seattle person. She is also from LA and so Seattle had really hard feeling.
Andrew Ive: When did you – so when did you start Kitchenbowl?
Ryan Waliany: I started Kitchenbowl – like my first experiments in maybe December of 2013. I did not start Kitchenbowl as – we started Kitchenbowl as a product in about March of 2014.
Andrew Ive: OK. So almost two years now.
Ryan Waliany: Almost two years now.
Andrew Ive: And you’ve survived that time by freelancing or has Kitchenbowl started to pay you a salary because you started to get revenues or what’s the …”
Ryan Waliany: We have a minimal salary or moderate salary for Seattle. So we raised funding initially in May so we only actually had to go two months building a prototype before we were able to close our first angel round.
Andrew Ive: May of 2014?
Ryan Waliany: May of 2014. So we raised a small amount in May of 2014 and then we raised our larger round in April of 2015.
Andrew Ive: OK. So May of 2104, was that mostly friends and family and related?
Ryan Waliany: No. People I didn’t know but they had a similar – they were like-minded and had similar experience. So I was on this networking site called CoffeeMe. Now, I think they moved into Weave. And so, it’s a professional networking app where you can just meet random people. And I just happen to meet this guy. I wasn’t trying to get money at this point. I wasn’t planning on raising any capital for our venture. I was thinking of doing it to bootstrap route.
And this guy met with me and said, “Hey, we would be interested in investing.” And I’d be like, “Oh, OK.” And I had to just meet with him and his partners. And lastly 30 days later, we had a check in the bank.
Andrew Ive: Nice. OK. That’s awesome. And then maybe just under a year, so 11 months later, you did a bigger round?
Ryan Waliany: Yes.
Andrew Ive: I’m guessing that that was planned. That wasn’t sort of a random stranger in a chat box type situation?
Ryan Waliany: That was more planned. And I met with a tone of people for that. It’s very interesting the dynamics of our space.
Andrew Ive: What does that mean?
Ryan Waliany: It means that there are a lot of people on the recipe community space. So it’s funny when you go to an investor meeting and before you say anything, they are like, “I just rejected your competitor last week so we’re probably going to pass on you too.
Andrew Ive: Nice.
Ryan Waliany: It’s a really interesting dynamic in that it’s such a small world that that was one of the most interesting conversations I’ve had. I’ve actually got rejected because my competitor pitched them and that was unsuccessful. So I think that was just very unique for me.
Andrew Ive: So, are there investors who are focused on the recipe category?
Ryan Waliany: Typically not. If you’re raising on recipes, it’s really hard. You have to be raising on a bigger vision and you have to raising changing consumer behavior.
Andrew Ive: OK. So let’s say for example, the kind of investors you were talking to for Kitchenbowl, were they mostly tech investors who are focused on investing in the tech community? Were they food-based investors who are focused on the food community? What – where are we drawing from?
Ryan Waliany: I have investors from four different sites completely or maybe even five. We have media investors who are purely based on SEO and content search distribution and advertising. We have investors who are based on the food space who own a winery in Argentina and they’re really big into food. We have an investor who is really big into consumer and travel. And we have the former CEO of All Recipes who is into recipes himself. And we have Food-X and SOS who are more focused on food as well.
So we have a wide range of investors from all walks of life really. So there are a lot of different ways we can take a business like Kitchenbowl. And so that’s what got us a lot of diverse interest.
Andrew Ive: How are you – are there varying degrees of involvement with those investors? Are they all involved? Are none of them involved? Do they sort of there when you need them? How are you working with your investors?
Ryan Waliany: Ironically, I thought that investors would be a lot more involved and they would be more I guess in my face as you might put it. However, I feel like I’m the one actually – because our investors are so great and this is a very big contrast to maybe my past ventures, I actually find myself wanting to talk to them more than they want to talk to me. And so, it’s really interesting when the table is turned. And so I think I talk to my investors so much for advice and help that they rarely come back to me and check on me and see how I’m doing.
Andrew Ive: That’s a good way to go I think.
Ryan Waliany: Yup.
Andrew Ive: So, I’m going to just have another 5 or 6 minutes. We’re going to try and keep this one to just under an hour. But interesting in what’s your personal favorite recipe?
Ryan Waliany: I mean there’s a few. I mean that there are two that I made that I really like. And I’m a bit of a masochist I think is the right word. So when I try to learn a recipe or when I try to cook a recipe, I try to do something really ambitious. And so the two that I like were a chocolate soufflé, so I’ve done chocolate and cheese soufflé and then I’ve also done an Eggs Benedict.
And so luckily, they’ve turned out well and you can find those recipes on Kitchenbowl. But those are my two favorite recipes.
Andrew Ive: And do they – does Kitchenbowl include nutritional information or generally not?
Ryan Waliany: It does not but we’re working on that.
Andrew Ive: OK. So take me to a typical morning for the founder of Kitchenbowl. What do you find – I mean obviously, 8:00AM in the morning, you’re still running around in your t-shirt. I saw that when I first called you. But what’s a typical morning of a founder of kind of tech/food business all about.
Ryan Waliany: Well, it changes basically on the day of the week. So on a Monday, I’ll wake up early, maybe 8:00AM.
Andrew Ive: Oh, that’s really early. Oh yeah.
Ryan Waliany: Depending if I’m jetlagged or not. I \unfortunately have to deal with emails and communication for at least 2 to 3 hours or half a day at least on a Monday. We do a big team brainstorming in the afternoon in a demo. And so then everyone shows us like what they’ve done in the past week and small incremental improvements and the mechanically give feedback and see where I can help out.
And then we kind of just dive in from 1:00 to 5:00PM. I try to block off my time. So 8:00 to 10:00AM, I try to do emails, 10:00 to 12:00, I do meetings. 12:00 to 1:00, I do lunch. Typically, I try to bring lunch to be healthier. And then 1:00 to 5:00, I block that off as focus area or focus zone. So that’s where I can like really think about critical business issues.
And then 5:00 to 7:00 or 5:00 plus, I don’t plan anything because something happens and I have to go to a mixer or I have to meet people or my work carries over into the night. So I try to keep a schedule but as a founder, it’s really hard.
Andrew Ive: So given you’re being a founder now for just about two years, I’m wondering …
Ryan Waliany: Much longer now, it’s like nearly ten.
Andrew Ive: What’s that?
Ryan Waliany: Nearly ten.
Andrew Ive: Nearly ten. OK. I was going to say, in the last few years, do you figured out any kind of hacks to make yourself more efficient, to make your productivity – I mean what are some of the kind of insights you gained around that?
Ryan Waliany: Yes, a few things. So I studied psychology and computer science when I was in college. So I studied something called the Yerkes-Dodson Law.
Andrew Ive: The which?
Ryan Waliany: The Yerkes-Dodson Law.
Andrew Ive: The Yerkes-Dodson Law.
Ryan Waliany: Yeah. I’m maybe butchering it, It has been many year.
Andrew Ive: OK.
Ryan Waliany: But essentially it says that there is an optimal level of engagement or awakeness for each activity. So if you’re doing networking, if you’re doing task that are very finite, that are easy to do but there’s just a lot of tasks, you want to do this when you have the lowest level of awakeness. I don’t know if there’s a better word for awakeness. But you want to do those when you’re tired, when you’re on coffee. Those are the best times to do those tasks. And so, that’s typically why I try to do them in the morning or afternoon.
And then when you’re doing like really hard problem-solving and core thinking task, you have to be really aware and concentrated. And so that – you might only have 4, 6 hours a day of pure concentration and that’s when you want to do problem-solving, you want to be writing diagrams on how architecture works or you might be writing code.
And so, I try to optimize the types of works I do depending on my level of awakeness. And so that is pretty key for optimizing productivity.
Andrew Ive: So if you for example were a morning person, you’d be trying to focus your most kind of creative tasks in the morning.
Ryan Waliany: Exactly.
Andrew Ive: And more sort of administrative mundane, slightly more sort of repetitive things when you’re more tired in the end of the day or vice-versa. If you’re a night time person, you’d be focused on the creativity side at night time. Is that …
Ryan Waliany: That is correct. That’s really, really important. I’ve worked with a lot of different functions in the company now and I’ve done marketing, I’ve done sales, I’ve done engineering as a technologist, I’ve done a lot of different areas and it does not work the same. If I am sleep deprived trying to solve some architectural problem on Hadoop or Kinesis, or Lambda and AWS, it’s just I can’t do that without concentration.
But if I am sleep-deprived and networking, I, actually better at networking when I’m completely sleep-deprived than if I’m fully awake because networking – like having full concentration when you’re networking is maybe not the best for me.
Andrew Ive: Sounds good. OK. One last thing, we’ve got about 2, or 3 minutes left. If there was somebody who was about to kick off their first business, what would be the one thing you wish somebody would have told you when you became a founder way back when?
Ryan Waliany: Yeah. I mean it’s hard and there are a lot of things that you don’t know that you don’t know. So there are things that you know that you don’t know and you can ask for advice. There are things that you know that you know and you can do those well but the things that you don’t’ know that you don’t know, those are the things that kill you.
And so, I would worry a lot about the things that you don’t know that you don’t know and figuring out how to learn about those things earlier than later. And so, those things I think ultimately hurt my first startup that I was doing back in college. And so, I was maybe 19 or 20. We had a lot of press and traction but ultimately, I didn’t know exactly what I was doing and that led to a lot of disaster. We had very, very successful talks and very lucrative and many opportunities but not having advisers and not knowing what I was doing really, really hurt that opportunity.
Andrew Ive: I don’t know if you’re right. No. I’m sorry. I have to say that because it was like you don’t know, you don’t know. Anyway, how do you – it sounds really – I get what you’re saying. I actually totally agree with you. But how do you figure out what you don’t know? It’s one of those things where until it bites you in the ass, you don’t necessarily get – you didn’t know it, right?
Ryan Waliany: Yeah, yeah. So there are two topics, exploration versus exploitation. So exploration is when you’re discovering new things. Exploitation is when you’re doing what you know and you’re repeating it to get the best result.
And so I think as habits – humans of habit, we tend to do things that we do well over and over and over again. And so, we do a lot of exploitation. And so what you really have to do is how do you add exploration to learn and observe new things that you might not be very comfortable with?
First, it causes insecurity on ourselves because if we’re tackling something we’re not familiar with, it causes fear. And so, we have to constantly put ourselves out there, meeting new people who are different than ourselves, read books that are hard to read and different than our expertise, and really try to learn new things. And so the more we try to learn new things, the more we get over our bias to just exploit what we already know.
Andrew Ive: I wonder if there’s a way of bringing together that two concepts you brought forward. One is picking certain times of the day based on your own personal preferences in terms of whether you’re a morning person, whether you’re an evening person. And picking those times of the day when you’re more productive to focus on things which are outside of your comfort zone. It sounds like you only sort of discover those things that you don’t know and that you need to know if you’re prepared to kind of push – be uncomfortable. To push yourself outside of that comfort zone.
Ryan Waliany: Yes.
Andrew Ive: So maybe pick a time of the day when you’re actually going to proactively try and figure out what’s making me uncomfortable about my business, what am I least comfortable in and start trying to figure out how address those things.
Ryan Waliany: Yes. It’s really important to – and when you’re at your peak concentration, that’s the best time to do it.
Andrew Ive: Awesome. Ryan, I really appreciate your time today. Where can people find out more about Kitchenbowl and about Ryan and the Kitchenbowl team?
Ryan Waliany: Yeah. You can check out our website, Kitchenbowl.com. Feel free to shoot me an email at Ryan@Kitchenbowl.com if you have any questions. I try to reply to every single email even if it’s to my detriment. I think that’s basically the best way to reach me.
Andrew Ive: And what about on the social media side?
Ryan Waliany: @R-W-A-L-I-A-N-Y on Twitter.
Andrew Ive: Sorry. One more time?
Ryan Waliany: @RWaliany on Twitter. I rarely use Twitter and I rarely use social media. If you want to follow Ktichenbowl, we’re really active. It’s @Kitchenbowl.
Andrew Ive: So it’s @Kitchenbowl on Instagram?
Ryan Waliany: Instagram, Twitter and every platform that exists on social media.
Andrew Ive: OK. So Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, @Kitchenbowl.
Ryan Waliany: Yeah.
Andrew Ive: And so if consumers, customers, clients, potential app – do you guys do advertising? I don’t even know.
Ryan Waliany: We test out everything. So we do a lot of tests. We don’t – we haven’t scaled any advertising yet.
Andrew Ive: So if somebody wants to talk about advertising or somehow sponsoring or somehow maybe even investing or whatever, they should either engage with you directly which is Ryan@Kitchenbowl.com?
Ryan Waliany: Yeah, Ryan@Kitchenbowl.com.
Andrew Ive: Or via social media.
Ryan Waliany: Either way it works.
Andrew Ive: Awesome. Thank you for your time today. If anyone does have any questions for Ryan, send him thousands and thousands of emails. He has already said he does reply to all of them.
Ryan Waliany: Very sweet. I just wonder if she responded to me in Malaysia another day.
Andrew Ive: All right then. Thank you so much. Really appreciate your time. I’m going to press pause and then I’m going to come right back to you, OK?
Ryan Waliany: All right. Sounds good.
Andrew Ive: All right. One second.
[End of transcript]
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