The problem; a step forward

The Problem: A Step Forward

The question of What to cook today? is very common. But for our research, it is not enough to say that it is common, we needed to simplify and be more specific and look for people who really have the same problem and what are other challenges that they could face in that type of situations. In the latest post we have seen different scenarios where people could use our solution. But now, what we need to do is to examine the really problem.

For that reason we designed a survey. The questions were extremely chosen in order to provide useful information.

Age:

Sex:

Nationality:

1. How many days a week do you eat at home?

2. Do you like to cook at home? Which is the moment you like the most of the cooking process?

3. How many times do you have to cook during the week?

4. What do you do before and after lunch and dinner time?

5. Do you choose what to eat according to any requirement? For requirement we mean health food, gluten-free...?

6. How often do you go to the supermarket? Do you use to go each time do you need something or you wait until the fridge is empty?

7. How often do you go to eat out because you don't know what to cook or because you don't have time?

8. What did you eat today? When was the last day did you eat the same?

9. How often do you ask you friends for meal suggestions? Did you try them? If not, why not?

10. What are the main challenges you face to try new meals? 

11. Have you try to use a cookbook? How many cookbook do you have at home?

12. For people with children? Do you plan what to cook before going to the supermarket accoring to the meal plan for the week?

13. Do you plan what to cook every week/month/day?

The survey is already in process and we are looking to post the findings and the conclusion very soon! 
By: Silvia Rubio 

Preliminary startup dashboard

The research:

In order to get findings for our leap of faith questions we have designed the following mini-survey:

We introduce the product to the surveyee. After evaluating the product we present the freemium model asking where is the break-even point between the free and premium app they would find as reasonable. Then various pricing options are presented oscillating between 0.90€ to 3.99€ which are the market prices for such applications.
We will therefore present various models of advertising:
- Pop up advertising
- Fixed advertising between stages of recipe/pages
- Product placement

The research is ongoing until new version of the dashboard is posted

By: Eva Borisova

Spotting trends

Looking through the web in order to find trends on Spanish eating habits I have come across many news articles talking about the increasing trend on unhealthy fast food, many surveys asking about the favorite fast food 'dish' and other similar articles. But it is confirmed that the Spanish consumers are increasingly following a more unhealthy lifestyle due to other environmental changes such as a more busy life, the crisis which makes us work more, those who have less money start to spend less on food and therefore move onto cheaper unhealthy food and other similar cases.
One of the articles showed that 58% of Spanish workers claim to have suffered an increased level of job stress during the financial crisis, according to the Regus Business Tracker survey this trend also leads to a reduced water intake and meals are made at odd times and in an unbalanced way states the article.
Although this trend does not mean that Spaniards are not worried about their health it does mean they need a more efficient way in order to be able to follow a healthy lifestyle in such times as the financial crisis. It is often to find articles in the news with headlines such as: "Fast foods and bakery products double the risk of depression" and "Cholesterol and lifestyle habits determine 90 percent of heart attacks in the Canaries". 
On the other hand we should note that healthy trends have been found in areas such as Catalonia where  Sedentary lifestyle has been reduced since 2010 among Catalans, although obesity increases and the survey conducted by ESCA shows that Catalans are becoming more conscious about their health.
It is also important to note that in 2011 a survey stated that Spanish children are more obese than Americans the children obesity trend in Spain is of major concern and is important for us to note in order to research the parents market in Spain and find a posible target market in them.

By: Eva Borisova

Business Model Canvas New Version

Business Model Canvas updated as of 23rd October

Click on the image to see it larger. Or click here

Explaining the value proposition

Here are some points we would like to add as a extension to our value proposition:

Newness: There is no app like this in Spain. Creates into different meals what customer already has in the fridge adapting to his/her preferences.

Performance: Encourages healthier eating and cooking even though no time/creativity is initially available from the customer.

Customization: totally adaptable to the nutritional/time needs of each customer. Probably with a pro version even more customization will be provided.

Cost reduction: With a programmed menu, new dishes and efficient time utilization this app will save up money for customers as no food will be thrown away.

Accessibility: Available at any app store or on web and accessible from smartphones initially with iOS and Android and later with windows phone. Adaptation to iPads will also be developed. Convenience: any where, any time fast solutions.

by: Eva Borisova

Scenario Study #2: Welcome to Manu's Kitchen

Manuel Payà is a university student in Barcelona. He moved to Barcelona three years ago and he decided to start his college far from his family who live in Amsterdam. He was living in an apartment with three people.  They had a good relation from the beginning, but he realized that it was not easy to share his space with other people. His favorite time of the day was lunch and dinner, where he could be alone and in some occasion be surrounded with his roommates and commented the day. However, since he started to work as an intern every afternoon in a startup, he had to change his lifestyle and cut his time to cook. He had 45 minutes after class and before start working.

We wanted to experience and observe how this possible customer live, how he took decisions regarding what to cook, what he usually had in his fridge and what were the most common meals he ate. We decided to live with him one week, everyday going to his apartment in lunch and dinner time, be with him in the supermarket, and see how and when he decided what to cook.

He used to go once or twice to the supermarket to get what he needed. He used to buy always the same kind of food and prepare the same dishes. From tuna salad to grill chicken with mushrooms, spaghettis with tomato and cheese or Spanish omelet with bread and tomato. However, he explained us that because he had limit of time at this hour of the day, he did not wanted to experience new recipes and less to go and buy the ingredients he needed to follow what a cookbook specified.

So what we did the following week was to give him a list of different dishes he could make with the same kind of food he used to buy. Additionally, we offer different meals specially created for days with no more than 30 minutes to cook, or if he wanted more healthy dishes. He realized that with the same food he used to buy and with the same time, he could make a variety of more than 12 different dishes he would never try. He did not needed to change his routine and it gave him an easier and a simple way to enjoy his food.

Manuel decided to keep all the different dishes and one week later he was happy with the results. He enjoy better the time to cook and also he was surprise of how many dishes we could make with no additional effort. 

We want to thank Manuel for his time and his contribution to this work! 
By: Silvia Rubio 

Venture risks

The following tables summarize venture risks depending on specific factors:
(These risks are a preliminary view, we are working on more risks and their evaluation)

By: Silvia Rubio&Eva Borisova 

Roger's 5 factors applied to Q-cocino

Relative Advantage: The only application with focus on the spanish market with such characteristics  

Compatability: Used with the latest technology in the market such as smartphones and tablets. It will start in Apple and Android devices and we have future plans to expand in Window’s phone as well as creating a platform on the Web.  

Simplicity: We want to make it as easy as possible (customized recipes in three clicks). The clients will be able to use the app intuitively.

Trialability: The standard platform will be free and following the freemium model we are going to charge only for the premium edition with extra characteristics. We are also evaluating a possibility to have a trial with full use and payable after an x amount of time, instead of a free+premium edition.

Observability: Marketing strategy will be based on word of mouth. As a long term option we would also like to include advertisement in supermarkets or in products where at the same time we will be advertise the brand inside the application. Difficulty because App stores are usually saturated and therefore visibility will have to apply to marketing to lead customers to look for it in the App stores.

Do you want to know more about Roger's 5 factors? click here
By: Silvia Rubio&Eva Borisova

Scenario study: Young with lack of cooking creativity

Potential user profile: Young student and professional

Eduard is a potential user of our product. He is 23 years old and partially lives away from home. He likes to eat home made food (no fast food or pre-cooked food). He usually has many ingredients in his fridge and has the time to cook but ends up preparing the same dishes day after day. This problem arises due to the lack of knowledge about cooking (he does know the basics) and therefore there is an invisible kind of barrier between him and a cook book. He is also a person who enjoys using technologies and owns a smartphone but would not stop to search on the internet for specific recipes which use just those ingredients which he has at home. He considers that most of the recipes require him to go to the store and buy things he never used and innovation with new ingredients is not something he would lik to try when he is hungry just before lunch hour because he does not want to risk cooking for an hour to find out he does not like the dish he prepared.

As he states his preferences are as follow:

- Cooking for beginners level
- No dishes which cook for longer than 1 hour
- No strange ingredients, he wants dishes with the usual stuff: chicken, beef, vegetables, pasta, rice, oregano, parsley and so on
- Easy to use system, he does not want to go through too many recipes and he like the explanations to cook simplified to the maximum, and if photos are available he would be even happier
- He would also like the app to be available on the web or directly downloadable for his computer as the screen is bigger and more comfortable while cooking

We can conclude that Q-cocino would be an app which would adjust to Eduard's needs but we are not sure if he would actually use it on a daily basis.

By: Eva Borisova

Business Model Canvas

Click on the image to see it larger. Or click here
By: Eva Borisova&Silvia Rubio&Jack Formica

Market Research and Ideas

To make it easy and be able to find the specific need and how we can approach it with a perfect solution, we decided to do a market research, starting with a methodology called observation. This is what we got:
easel.ly Here we can see different fridges and different food according to its owner. However, we saw that there are simple and very common dishes such as salads or spaghettis easy to prepare and that all the people observed share the same food but different ways. Just as quick fact, do you know that there are more than 8.000 types of salads and more than 5.000 different spaghettis sauces? But what we found was that people are used to do almost the same salad, the same meals over and over again. In the following pictures we can see different fridges and different food we found:

In order to design an application for superior to any similar service already on the market, we conducted surveys and questioned a wide array of potential consumers of Q-Concino. Even though our test subjects ranged in ages between 18 and 26, the majority of them faced similar problems when asked questions on why they didn’t cook. Interestingly, a large percentage of the people asked did want to learn to cook or advance his or her culinary knowledge, but either was never taught or didn’t have the tools necessary to learn (cookbooks, cooking lessons, etc.). Also most of the subjects being young adults either students or just entering the workforce said that the main reason cooking was such a difficult task was because they had very little time to shop and prepare a meal after their studies or work. The final main concern our test subjects revealed to us was that even though he or she had some knowledge in the kitchen, the lack of ingredients within their home made cooking a solid meal very difficult, forcing them to either order out from a restaurant or compromise with a simple snack or meal that lacked nutrition and was very expensive. From this research we looked at similar applications already available to see whether the concerns that were raised through our questionnaire were solved by these apps. Many of the applications were very broad and didn’t take into account for the ingredients available and listed very complex and labor-intensive recipes. Also none of the websites and applications targeted a specific type of person, which Q-Cocino would primarily focus on the Spanish population. With an exception to a few applications, the majority of the services we found we simply cookbooks on your phone, computer or tablet. None of them were interactive and customizable for the consumer to put value to.

Q-Concino would far surpass the conventional cookbook and create a new market for culinary applications. It would solve the questions and concerns that were raised during our research. With focus on simplicity, Q-Cocino would allow for its users to create delicious meals and learn to cook all while not having to put any extra time and effort shopping or looking through cookbooks. The problem we saw in our research allowed for us to create certain aspects of Q-Cocino that no other application had including: * Categories of different types of food (Italian, Chinese, Mexican, Etc.) * Recipes with allergies and dietary concerns (vegetarian, Vegan) * Recipes for those with time restrictions * Recipes with ingredients already purchased * Focus on Spanish culture

By: Silvia Rubio&Jack Formica

Actors, Needs, Context of Use and Solutions for Q-Cocino

A summary of the Actors, Needs, Solutions, and Context of Use

Actors

• Partners from different background are needed in order to find more opportunities.
• Magazines. Presentation of the application in cooking magazines will help us to reach cooking lovers and also in technological magazines in order to reach those people which are looking for new application and the latest novelties.
• Chefs. National famous chefs sponsorship will accredit the usability of Q-cocino.
• Advertising companies will be needed in order to advertise and promote Q-cocino to increase the popularity.
• Social media team. The best way to communicate with the users and get feedbacks.
• Supermarkets. Contracts with the most important supermarkets in Spain in order to offer especial conditions for common customers. 
• Other partners in the food industry.
• Applications provider (Apple, Android) in order to promote our app in their first pages.

Needs

• Time and health. In today’s lifestyle there is no time for cooking, people are looking for fast food in an easy and healthy way.
• Lack of cooking knowledge. People have availability to products but they do not know what to do with them
• Avoid thinking. There is no need to stress thinking about what they can cook, Q-cocino provides a huge amount of recipes with the ingredients you have in your fridge.
• Cheap. Eating at home saves money.
• Natural and fresh. Qcocino can accomplish all the legislation and norms applied to food industry, for example. We will make sure that our partners provide the most secure and natural products to our customers.
• Entertainment. For those who love innovate and experiment with new recipes and cook just for hobby.
• Trend of eating healthy food.

Context of Use

• User Profile:

User profile can be define as spanish independent people who don't have too much time to cook because they study or they work or both. Digital users with smartphones. 

User Scenarios

• Student who has class in the morning and work in the afternoon and just have one hour to cook at home. He does not have time to go and buy additional ingredients to cook different meals.
• Student who has enough time to cook and usually gets home at 1pm and wants to cook something which is healthy but doesn't know what to do. 
• Spanish that used to buy always the same kind of food and prepare the same dishes because he does not know what else to cook. He lacks of creativity.
• Spanish people that want to eat healthy but he does not have time to prepare a weekly or daily plan of healthy dishes and does not have time to go and buy additional ingredients. 
• People that they don't want to change its routine and what they usually buy. However, they want to try different dishes without additional effort. 
• People who don't have time to go to the supermarket and want to eat at home and they don't know what to cook at that time. 

• For people who:
• Do not know what else they can cook different than what they do
• Do not have time to cook.
• Do not have creativity to cook
• Do not want spend money in restaurants
• Want healthy food.
• Are bored about cooking the same recipes and want to experiment new meals.

• In the scenario of:
• Lunching time
• Dinner time
• At anytime the user is hungry
• At anytime the user want to cook for entertainment. 

Solutions

• Phone app and/or web page with a very simple interface where the user introduces available ingredients and receives a list of recipes which can be categorized through different attributes such as menu type (kids, vegetarian, low fat…) and time of preparation
• Goal - Collect all the easy recipes in order to provide people information about cooking with the ingredients they have in their fridge. Save money and time.
• There are existing alternatives such as Epicurious but in other countries, at the moment there are no direct competitors in Spain competing with Qcocino.
• History – There are some intends to do what we have in mind (Epicurious) but in other countries and they are too difficult. In Spain there is no direct competition, Qcocino will be easier and in Spanish.
• There are indirect competitors such as cook books, online blogs, internet, restaurants, pre-cooked food etc, but these alternatives are time consuming, expensive or unhealthy.
• Resistance to copy - we will look for patents in order to protect the intellectual property of Qcocino.
• Technological risk - All the information digitalized, there may have technological risks such as Internet connection failure.
• Technological complexity - The platform will be very easy and user friendly. It would be like a kind of database of all the recipes where users can filter it by the ingredients they have or want.
• Investment required: Medium level of investment.

By: Senli&Silvia Rubio

Analogs, Antilogs and Leaps of Faith for Q-Cocino

Analogs 

(Companies/Apps/ideas similar to our which have succeeded and our quick analysis about what we can learn form them)

BigOven App 
Lists more than 250,000 recipes, with a powerful search engine that offers many options for finding a recipe you’d like. Free for Android and iOs. Includes the idea of 'social network' rather than closed database and has rating systems. Also includes the possibility of a grocery list in accordance with chosen recipes. Upgraded version seeks to include restrictions to recipes. This app is very similar to our idea, although for the MVP we would look at a first closed database in order to have 'everything' under control. Unlike us they are only targeted at US and english speaking market. We can learn from them that this idea is possible, although we might have to look into the pricing issue, and consider an upgrade version and a free one searching a 'freemium' model.

Epicurious App
With tens of thousands recipes retrieved form the original web it is very much similar to big oven, although includes searched by ingredients (just like we plan to do) and has categories such as 'Barely know how to cook' which are great initiatives we can learn from.

Philadelphia App 
The most similar spanish version with good remarks we can find would be the Philadelphia App. although promoting its cheese and basing its recipes on cheese Philadelphia this app has been highly successful in Spain. This demonstrates how necessary a Spanish generic and personalized app for cooking is.

Recetario App
This android app has been successful in the Spanish market and once again we can see the importance of sociability and user upload content which makes us realize this might be an important idea to take into account. But once more this app lacks the initiative to solve the problem of not knowing what to cook with existing ingredients in situ.

Looking into the future: Campbell's App
This app let's you scan the barcodes of the products available to you and offers recipes. This is a future perspective for our app we will happily evaluate.

Antilogs

(Companies/Apps/ideas similar to our which have failed and our quick analysis about what we can learn form them)


Grocery Gadget Shopping list
Is not a direct antilog but is complex and we can lern from the reviews that simplicity is key.

Other apps which are all too similar to a cookbook and sometimes fail to be personal and miss the point of solving a real problem:

Cocina.es , ElleGourmet, OpeKitchen España...

Although we should note there are still things we can learn from these apps they are too general

We invite you to feel free to propose more analogs and antilogs we might have not thought about!

(What exactly are analogs and antilogs? click here)

Leaps of Faith

(“leaps of faith”: the as yet-untested questions we are banking our business on)

After identifying certain needs we assume our target market has and problems the following three main questions arise:

- Will our target market pay for this application? Even if necessary, maybe putting a price will be a setback

- Will our target market accept possible advertising or even product placement in our recipes?

- Are we able to create such an application which will have enough recipes, with basic products in order to satisfy our customers?

We invite you to feel free to propose leaps of faith questions we might have not thought about!
(What is a leap of faith? click here)
By: Eva Borisova

Is Q-Cocino for you?

To know if Q-Cocino is for you, take our quick test:

• Have you ever had difficulties in knowing what to cook ?
• Is cooking a difficult task for you?
• Do you have availability to products but no idea what to do with them ?
• Do you lack time to look in a cook book or on the internet ?

If you have answered yes to any of the above then Q-Cocino is definitely your app!

Stay updated to our blog to find out more about Q-Cocino :) 

By: Eva Borisova