Saffron
Cooking App
This was supposed to be a quick feature to add that several people were wanting, but after coding the initial version a number of edge cases became apparent. It ended up taking a little over a month to get it to a place where my mom and I were happy with it.
Here's what the end result looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDq5dTJAekI
This next week I want to do some more marketing, but I'm not 100% sure what that looks like yet.
I think I'm going to wait on doing more Facebook Ads until I've tried some other marketing channels. Creating a good Facebook ad will take some iteration and I want to see if another opportunity is more fruitful with less effort.
Sponsoring a YouTube channel is probably the first thing I'll try next.
I wrote a blog post on how Saffron's recipe importer works behind the scenes: https://www.benawad.com/scraping-recipe-websites/
I posted it on HN and it ended up doing very well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23142220
This resulted in a nice little spike to Saffron!
metrics from the past 2 days:
- 389 sign ups
- 1,500 recipes added
- 3 subscriptions
I didn't initially write this post with the intention of it bringing a lot of traffic to Saffron. I was getting asked a lot how Saffron's recipe importer worked, so I wanted to create a resource I could send to people. And I was doing some interesting technical things behind the scenes so I figured I'd post it to HN.
Even though HN is not necessarily Saffron's target market, this blog post has been the most successful thing I've done to market Saffron.
I think part of this is because I know where/how to talk to developers better than cooks.
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HN's traffic is unbelievable. I've posted a few days ago, got to seventh place on home page for a few hours. Had 9k visitors. My all time (1 and a half week) total visit count was less than 1k before that.
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It truly pays off to provide something that adds value ... you're pretty good at that ... I like your YouTube channel as well! Good Job + congratulations on your launch!
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Nice job. I follow you on Youtube and your videos are great! Keep up the good work.
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Congrats @benawad! Saffron looks awesome - congrats!! I love to cook and have been separately working on a google doc to capture all my grandmothers recipes - so i have recipe apps on the mind :-D
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@csallen, Can we have Ben invited to the podcast and interview?
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HN is the current SlashDot (last decade) if anyone remembers.
Kudos on the post. I'm also going to share regularly with HN once I've gotten a base.
It's a tech product so I'm hoping people will be curious about things I wanna share.
Keep posting!
Attempt #1 didn't go too well.
This is what I tried:
- Conversion campaign
- $50 daily spend for 2 days
- 20 ad sets (10 interests x 2 creative)
- all placements
Results:
- 105 Outbound clicks
- 1 Register
These are the videos I used for the ads: https://twitter.com/benawad/status/1255184172957794307
CPM: $3.05
Video Average Play Time: 2 seconds
Outbound CTR: 0.30%
Cost per Outbound Click: $1.01
0.30% is a low Outbound Click-Through rate which means the ad wasn't compelling. I'm going back to the drawing and creating 2 new ads.
1 out of 105 registered could mean the landing page needs work, but not sure if I have enough data yet to make that decision
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Hey, that's cool! I'm a marketer myself and I recently found a very cool app - https://www.adbeacon.com/ , which helps us track our advertising statistics, optimise them and start improving our income. I like the fact that with a fairly simple interface that is easy to understand, you can find something useful and important to you. Don't miss out on valuable tip!
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Hey Ben, there are a few things wrong here:
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The structure: the conversion optimization process is important. 20 ad sets with a $50 budget is way too much. They will never exit the learning phase because there's no chance they will get the 50 conversions/week needed. It would be so much better to aggregate all those interests under a single ad set and let the algorithm do its job.
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The creative: this is what make or break a campaign. I'll be honest, your creative isn't great. Keep in mind that on average you have 3 seconds to get your audience attention so you need to come up with something that immediately hooks your audience. I'd test it some sort of UGC because that's what works on FB/IG right now.
There are also other variables at play: who are you targeting, how good is your landing page, etc.
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In regards to the structure, does it matter if I put all interests under a single adset if I'm using CBO?
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Hi Ben,
Just wanted to say I really like your youtube channel, very informative, keep up the good work.
Perhaps a good marketing strategy for Saffron would be creating a cooking youtube-channel/blog, that your mom/you (whichever cooks better) can operate it.
This way she can actively promote Saffron in the youtube videos/blogs.-
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Thanks! Might try that at some point, but felt like cooking youtube/blogs were oversaturated, I would need to think how to bring a fresh spin to it.
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After working on Saffron on and off for ~2 years, we finally felt like it was ready, so we added monetization (a subscription) and launched on Product Hunt.
It didn't get 1st of the day or anything, but also didn't flop.
This lead to our first paying customer!
1 Comment
I love the calendar portion of the app as well.