Strava for cooking

Strava is a social network for serious-yet-amateur athletes. It’s also a vertical social network with some powerful characteristics:

• Single-player tool with multiplayer social feed
• The more you use the app, the more likely you are to do the atomic behavior.
• Doing more of the atomic behavior is actually good for you.

I believe there’s an opportunity for a vertical social network built for serious-yet-amateur home cooks. Initial target users would be fans of influencers like J. Kenji López-Alt, Binging with Babish and Alex French Guy Cooking. (All of their audiences have significantly increased during COVID.)

Similar to Strava, you’d start by offering single-player tools. For Strava that’s been route planning and segments; for cooking that might be a database of web-crawled recipes with a Gantt chart interface to manage the timing of a multi-course meal. As a user base develops, you’d start adding in multiplayer social features.

There are plenty of ways you could monetize. Affiliate links are one avenue (cookbooks, kitchen equipment). Paid subscriptions (pro features in app, weekly recipes from celebrity chefs) is another.

At-scale, Strava for cooking would become the go-to place for cooking inspiration, recipes, videos, kitchen equipment, and internet socializing about food.

This idea originally appeared in RFS 100. There’s some additional feedback on the Strava for X concept here.

First published on November 21, 2020