Bagged the fame of ‘Editor’s Choice’ app at Google Play, #1 social community for culinary enthusiasts, with a whopping 150K recipes, and more than 10 million users worldwide…. Silvia Curioni now comes to your kitchen.
Silvia Curioni is a wife who started off with a simple idea to cook something different for dinner. What to cook that is nutritious, healthy, simple and delicious? She got the answers to these questions, all with one app; Allthecooks app.
Available for iPhone, iPad and Android devices, this app takes the blues out of the kitchen and can even lead you to create a sumptuous blueberry pie there.
Here is the exclusive interview with Silvia Curioni, the creator of Allthecooks app, who shares her journey to becoming a successful woman entrepreneur of today!
Interview with Silvia Curioni – Allthecooks app
Allthecooks app is an absolute success on iOS and Android platform. It already has 150K recipes and a huge fan following. So, how did it all start?
It all started 2 years ago. My husband and I kept running out of ideas on what to cook for dinner. We used to wonder what other people were cooking in their homes, check social networking sites to see what our friends were cooking for dinner to find ideas on what to cook. That’s when we thought of Allthecooks app.
We started it as a part-time project for one and a half year. Only four months back we both decided to go full time and invest heavily on the project. The cool thing is that after one month of working fulltime, we had our first iPhone port. Now we are working on our website and Windows 8 platform.
Did you face some challenges while developing the Allthecooks app for iPhone, iPad and Android? How did you overcome those challenges?
Our biggest challenges were more about how to create a company and other business related issues. There were some challenges we faced on the technical side as well. We consider that quality is the key, so sometimes we implemented the same feature over 10 times! We also try to implement every little feature our users ask for; such repeated implementation takes a lot of dedication and efforts from our team. Learning different programming languages are the least of our problems because most of the things are very well documented on those platforms.
Silvia you are a software engineer with years of experience in software and application development. Have you been an experimental foodie or a culinary explorer as well that inspired you to mix passions for creating Allthecooks app?
Yes! I am half Italian and Italians are born foodie (laughs). I grew up eating the most amazing home cooked food, my sister, who is a chef in Milan, invents incredible dishes. I learned how to cook a good meal with her and my parents, learned to evaluate and appreciate gourmet food.
Would you give our readers some tips to use this app and enjoy a much healthier lifestyle?
My favorite part of the app is the homepage itself. You open the app and you have dozens of recipes suggested to you. All recipes are uploaded with pictures sourced from real users. It has a great tool to “decide what’s for dinner” which is exactly why we built this app for!
Another great feature is the ability to search recipes by ingredients. If I have, for example, carrots and eggs in my fridge, I can search recipes by those ingredients. The app will suggest which recipes I can cook with those input ingredients. I also follow many cooks in the app. Some are specialized in vegan food, others in BBQ food, or healthy food, etc. I receive a notification every time the cooks I follow upload a new recipe which is great!
I believe homemade food is always healthier than any processed food. Our goal with this app is to teach people how to cook and to make them see cooking is fun and therapeutic! One day a user made a comment at a risotto recipe saying he could not believe how easy it was to cook a risotto, and that he would never cook “risotto from a box” again. Avoiding processed food is a big step towards a leading healthier life!
Are you planning to connect to top globally popular chefs and adding their recipes and tips via Allthecooks app?
Yes! That is exactly our next step. We did not have a strong website before (we were a mobile first service). But, now that we have redesigned our website we are ready to welcome famous chefs to our app. I believe it is a great opportunity for both parties: the app will receive great recipes from those popular chefs, and they will get even broader exposure since we have more than 10 million people using our apps.
The allthecooks website is very interestingly done. There is a distinct layout difference in the way home page has been formatted and the internal page displays. What was the thought behind these different layouts?
Our main goal is to deliver quality. Our design is based on that. We wanted a clean and easy to use app design. You don’t have to spend much time in browsing and finding a recipe because you will get suggestions on the home page. Or, you can choose to browse recipes by categories. We have South American recipes, European, African, Asian… you name it.
What are your plans to expand the social community of Allthecooks? Will you expand Allthecooks app for Windows and Blackberry?
Definitely! Next on our roadmap is the Windows 8 and Windows mobile app. We are already working on it. We already ported the app for Blackberry 10, but haven’t published it due to their corporate site being “difficult”.
Allthecooks app for iPhone, iPad, iPod and Android
There are thousands of recipe websites and equal number of apps as well. How is allthecooks app different from the others?
We are a social cooking app. Not only you can find recipes using our app, you can also talk and follow cooks from all over the world. Every recipe has a Q&A section, where you can ask anything about a recipe. It usually doesn’t take more than 5 minutes to find an answer to your questions/queries.
You can see that most recipe photos are sourced from people who actually tried the recipe; some recipes have over 500 photos. To pick the best photo to represent a recipe, we actually create cook-off competitions where the photos getting maximum votes are selected as the cover photo for that recipe. It works great!
Social network, mobile apps and blogging platforms are opening up huge opportunities for people to share their culinary specialties with their friends and followers via these networks. How do you think this burgeoning social network-bred foodies and cooks would boost Allthecooks app in five years down the lane?
Our app gets 10 million downloads. Chefs who are already famous on YouTube, Twitter or any other social networks can attain much more audience and exposure by posting their recipes and linking their videos to our app. At the same time, it is a huge opportunity for our app since those people would bring their original and great recipes to our app. Video recipes are a big part of the app right now. If we can count on chefs to link their YouTube video recipes to Allthecooks app, it will definitely boost user experience and engagement in our app. And chefs can boost the fan base of their YouTube channel.
As a successful entrepreneur, share some valuable tips for our readers on staying focused and moving ahead with their plans for successful entrepreneurship.
Users are your compass. Reach to them, listen carefully, have an open channel to talk with them. Just make them happy and try to reach out to as many of them as possible.
The most valuable lesson I learned is we should never give up. You don’t grow a company in a day. It takes time, it might takes years, if you believe in it, don’t give up, if you work hard, your work will be paid off.
Technology breakthroughs will continue to happen. We should follow our passion and continue studying and trying new things around that passion.
Thanks a lot for your time and sharing your tips, ideas and future updates on Allthecooks with us and our readers.
Click here to find thousands of recipes now from allthecooks.
