We built an AI cooking app you talk to. 240 downloads later, here's what we learned about apps.

every cooking app is solving the wrong problem

there are literally millions of free recipes online. you can google "chicken parmesan" and get 100,000 results in half a second. so finding recipes was never the problem

the problem is the moment you're standing at the stove, hands covered in raw chicken juice, and you can't remember if the recipe said cook it to 155 or 145 degrees.
or you want to know if you can swap heavy cream for something lighter.
or you just need someone to tell you when to flip the damn piece of chicken

that's the moment every cooking app fails you. they give you a static page of text, maybe an image, and maybe even a video and then say "good luck"

so my co-founder Alex & I built Recie, an AI cooking companion you can actually talk to, hands-free while cooking.

let me give you an example:

you're making pasta from scratch for the first time
your hands are dusted in flour, dough is sticking to everything
and you realize you have no idea how thin to roll it

instead of washing your hands, unlocking your phone, and scrolling thru a recipe page, you just say "hey chef, how thin should this be?" and get an answer

you never stop cooking
you never have to wash your hands a million times to touch your phone

we also built chef personalities, like Angry Chef, who roasts your cooking mistakes while teaching you - or Seductive Chef, in case you want to get flirty in the kitchen

people love the bits of entertainment they get from different personas

but here's where i'll be transparent with the numbers:

240 total downloads, 1,218 lifetime product page views. our best month was february: 73 downloads at a 17% conversion rate. march was rougher: 20 downloads with near-zero marketing execution because we hadn't yet launched the voice agent. right now we're in the middle of an april test trying to hit 500 product page views just to get statistically meaningful conversion data.

we have one paying subscriber - it's alex, my cofounder. so yea

what we learned so far: carousel content on instagram, tiktok, and pinterest gets views but generates almost zero link clicks. instagram shows our carousels to around 90% followers only - basically zero discovery. tiktok users swipe thru an average of 1.9 slides out of 5.

the one thing that actually worked was linkedin founder-led content that got 99 clicks and 12% engagement, more click-thrus than everything else combined.

the takeaway seems to be that people click on stories about people, not on slideshows from accounts they don't know yet

we're two college students at Northeastern, no funding, building a team slowly. the app itself is polished (5.0 stars, 20 ratings), the voice agent genuinely works, and the core experience is something people respond to when they actually try it. the gap is entirely distribution

if you want to try it: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6756591012?pt=126942809&ct=indieHackers&mt=8

my question is: for B2C apps where the core value is experiential (you have to use it to get it), how have you driven downloads to get people using and sharing it with friends?

thanks for any feedback!