Cucumbertown launches RecipeWriter, moves towards becoming a tumblr for cooks

Cucumbertown is a 500 Startups backed company with its roots in India and US that started back in 2012. Cucumbertown aims to be the tumblr for cooks and is a community of cooks who are building connections around their shared love for cooking. The company has been taking steps to improve the experience for cooks and a step further in this direction, Ct has now launched the RecipeWriter. "What makes the RecipeWriter so very interesting is that fact that it intuitively adapts to each individual’s writing style. It is an editor similar to Microsoft Word, which people can use without any great prepping or technical know how," says Cherian Thomas, the co-founder of Ct.The way the RecipeWriter works is by sectioning each recipe into unique sections (name of recipe, brief description, ingredients, steps, tips, etc.) so that the writer is not confused about the process to follow and ensures a structure to all content and increases readability. There is automation within the editor which can autocomplete ingredients based on the letters being typed, autonumbering steps, autosaving text and an auto spell check. Talking about the platform, Cherian says, "What this ensures is that each recipe has a structured, perfectly aligned look and feel, without coming across as impersonal or formulaic. A food blogger who is not on Cucumbertown, will need be extremely good with page layout, design and writing and will also have to spend a great amount of time to do this. The RecipeWriter accomplishes the same in minutes."

The metadata captured by the Writer makes the content search engine optimised by default and the visibility of recipes increases. Ct has always had a high focus on design and Cherian believes the user experience to be the defining factor about the editor. "Since there have been several collaborations with the users to establish the stability and simplicity of the content, it is a truly democratic tool that still maintains the personal style of each individual author," he says.

Ct is still far away from becoming mainstream but with an Alexa rank of 11,000 in India, Cucumbertown seems to be growing. They haven't disclosed many details but during our interaction with Ankit Jain, the growth hacker at Ct (awesome startup employee), he mentioned Ct has grown 15x in the last one year. They're building a 2-sided network (with cooks on one side and the consumers on the other), and the editor is a start to get down the road of long form content. "Think about it like this. We built an editor so compelling that people are addicted to publishing the kitchen journals now – for fun. The same way Medium is getting people on board. We’ll now evolve this in meal planning, kitchen tips and stories," says Cherian. Ct is developing a set of tools to become the place for the next generation of food bloggers and build an ecosystem around it.

Website: RecipeWriter from Cucumbertown