CookShare
CookShare
CookShare is an app idea i’ve been looking at personally, partly as a genuine app to develop and partly as a chance to practice skills.
The inspiration came when my wife and I moved to Sydney and were living with my sister and her boyfriend who were active users of a shopping list app called Bring. Bring, in short, is a shared shopping list that either of you, from any device can add, edit and delete items from the list.
We then both thought, well this is great but i’ve forgotten what days I’d said i’d cook and what i’d cook, would be great if the app showed us this and that was the seed of an idea that I have been investigating.
Note: this is a work in progress and ongoing project of mine
“Stay on the same page as your partner, house mate or holiday friends for all things cooking & shopping. Use a shared calendar to make sure no meal overlaps or wasted resource on over buying of ingredients. See the who, when and what for your upcoming meals, use this to put together the perfect grocery list.”
Step
Conclusion
Where to start?
- Problem Validation – Once the idea was there, it was time to see whether it was just us or whether the problem existed elsewhere, this involved;
- Asking friends
- Asking wider audience – instagram poll
- Internet research
- Friends & family agreed it was a problem, sisters boyfriend had already been considering the idea without the know-how to progress
- Instagram poll (see right) – engagement % low but that was to be expected based on my typical instagram engagement & the fact most of my followers are in a different time zone however 80% of replies agree with the idea and were interested in the app if it existed
2. Market / Competitor research – Looking to answer questions such as:
-
- Does it exist? is the market saturated? is there a gap in the market? how big is the market?
- Many competitors out there split between shopping list apps and meal plan apps, a busy market
- Sharing isn’t common
- Lots of feature overlap
- Most are a freemium model or adverts as form of monetisation
3. Feature brainstorming
- Spit balling ideas
- No plan or limits, whatever comes to mind gets written down for planning further on
- Involved more looking at features that competitors have
- Talking to friends who had come across the problem as to what they think would be good
The fun part!
- Lots of ideas from the very basic to the blue sky thinking, is it even possible ideas
- Start to get a loose idea in your head of the order of development while doing feature brainstorming
- More research completed – idea validated further that the USP of sharing meal planning isn’t prevalent elsewhere
