The world we want to aim through Cookstar business - Why do we need to share our recipes?

Hi I'm Kakeya. In our company we're developing Cookstar, which we can share recipes of your favorite dishes. This is still beta version and we have lots of things that we must improve. But we really think that we want to change Vietnamese home cooking world through Cookstar.
In this blog, I'd like to share with you my thought about this service.

Main concept of Cookstar

Cookstar is the web service to provide "discover" and "pleasure" on home cooking for people of SEA who usually cook at home. The value of this service is that users can find lots of recipes, and can notice the existence and the way to cook meals which they have not cooked yet. Now we focus on Vietnam market.

Trigger that I thought to start Cookstar

Before I established Scuti, I was thinking what business I should do. In order to get ideas, I met lots of persons (mainly entrepreneurs) then I got information that one of very famous and popular recipe share service in Japan is expanding to oversea now. The way to expand is to buy out local services from countries with big population (excluding China and India). At that time I thought this is good for time machine business and we can aim exit of M&A.
(I have one more main reason but I don't write here. If you are interested in it, you can ask me directly with sending me message or something.)

Research before I started Cookstar

Before I started developing this service, I wanted to research if recipe share service would match with Vietnamese food culture. I did 2 things, 1. quantitative survey through research company, 2. visited several families (we still keep that) and talked to them directly. Writing from the conclusion, I came to the conclusion that Cookstar would match with Vietnamese food culture and Vietnamese market would need it.

Quantitative survey

For this survey, I used Q&Me. Research target is 20's - 40's of Vietnamese women without specifying area. Then here are the summary of survey (this survey was done in June/2015).

• Over 85% people cook diner at home.
• There is NO website which over 50% people use to research recipes.
• Over 60% people want to spend less 100k VND / month for cooking lesson or cooking books. But on the other hand, over 35% people can spend over 500k VND / month!
• Over 70% people want to try to share their recipes that they cook.
• Over 85% people get information of recipes online.

Visit families

Fortunately lots of families invited me to research home cooking and to interview with them.

Then I always asked them "How do you usually get information of new recipes?". Then they often answered "Google". Actually it's right but...

One day the other person answered that "I know all of recipes so I don't need to search". Oh I found the God of omniscience and omnipotence here...

Also I asked them "you want to try to share your recipes with the other people than your family?" then all of them answered "Yes!". Thank you for your simile!

Change of generation

Through this survey, I found one more thing (actually I can't say this is the fact but just my opinion). That is there are some gaps among generation.

• Older generation basically had transmitted recipes from mother to daughter but younger generation can get new information online aggressively.
• In younger generation, fewer people want to cook because they have the other things to do.
• On the other hand, younger generation who usually cook hung up decoration on meals such as colors and looking. Also they often try to cook foreign cuisines such as pizza, pasta, sushi, Korean BBQ and so on. In the view point of the foreigner (me), older generation cooks for life but younger generation enjoys cooking more.

Meaning of service name

As a result of survey in advance, I decided to start Cookstar business. When I decided service name, I used TimeTicket (Japanese service). In this service, we can "purchase" 30 minutes of professionals of certain area. We can find one professional of naming (in fact, he's the colleague of the previous company) and I ordered to him to name our service.
Via Skype we discussed the best service name. Cookstar includes 2 meanings. First meaning is that we'd like to produce "star" users who share very good & many recipes on it. Another meaning is to show this service is by Scuti because Scuti is the name of the largest star in this universe too.

Future of Vietnamese home cooking with Cookstar

As I described on the top, we'd like to provide "discover" and "pleasure" on home cooking through Cookstar. With using Cookstar, we'd like you to know "pleasure" when you're admired against your post, to "discover" new & nice recipes that you didn't know.
In 2 years, operation of train starts in Vietnam (I hope so). Then they will use smartphone while they take it, and they check interesting contents on Cookstar.
Also I'll visit several families and ask again "How do you usually get information of new recipes?", then they all will answer "Cookstar".

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About Tomohide Kakeya

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