Internet Tech Boston

I’m constantly battling with my wife over the amount papers she prints when it comes to her recipes. I’m amazed at the sheer amount of stuff she prints, files, organizes, and keeps in drawers. I was pleasantly surprised, on a personal level, when I met Paul Jin, founder of Plummelo. Recently added to the Dogpatch Labs startup community sponsored by Polaris Ventures, Plummelo is designed to help the passionate home cook find, organize, and make the delicious dishes that the rest of us have come to take for granted. Let’s hear about this interesting new web startup from Paul himself:

Mamet: What is Plummelo and what prompted you to start it?
Jin: Plummelo allows users to collect recipes from anywhere – from the Internet and the kitchen. Plummelo will automatically create shopping lists, so the user will never have to write another shopping list. I started Plummelo because I was frustrated with trying to remember where I got a recipe from the Internet. Google helps, but do you know how many hits you get when you type in “meatball”? My kitchen recipe folder was no help either. Organizing and rediscovering recipes is a major chore and only the most dedicated have create binders with plastic sheets. It shouldn’t be this hard to keep track of recipes.

Mamet: What’s the #1 unexpected thing that’s happened since you launched?
Jin: How universal the problem is, and how enthusiastic people are to the concept. I was expecting only the cooking enthusiasts and the super-organized to be interested, but the problem of recipe organization is conceptually easy to understand for anyone and because everyone eats, this solution resonated with every person, especially moms.

Mamet: By it’s nature, your user is not near a computer when using Plummelo the most. How does Plummelo bridge the gap between home office and home kitchen?
Jin: I’ve intentionally decided not to address this part of the problem yet. I’ve learned that many people do have laptops at home, so they do take the laptop into the kitchen. I’ve also learned that some are hesitant to do that because of concerns about kitchen splatter and the safety of their laptop, so they just print the recipe. Also, buying another home computer or any display device just to have something in the kitchen is not high in the home financial priority. Several years ago, there was a lot of buzz around internet appliances for places like the kitchen, but consumers didn’t really go for such dedicated devices. So, the solution I wanted to focus on was online organization rather than physical device.

Mamet: How does Plummelo fit into the ecosystem of existing online foodie communities like Food Network and Martha Stewart?
Jin: Plummelo is what I call a meta-cooking website – it sits on top of the existing cooking blogs and websites in the same way that users view them. Users typically frequent more than one recipe website and their natural process is to find the recipes they like and to collect them in some way. It’s relatively rare that a user goes to just one site for everything. Collecting recipes and organizing them is an offline process, and I want to create a simple online version of that. So, Plummelo gives users the freedom and control to collect recipes from where they want instead of being captive to any single site. Because of this last aspect, Plummelo also provides ratings of recipes from across the Web as well as ratings of recipe websites themselves.

Mamet: What does the future hold for Plummelo? What next big steps should we be on the lookout for?
Jin: We just finished phase 1 of our development plan, so now we want to use what we have to create amazing content and to support and engage the Plummelo users. So our next step is to focus on valuable content via the blog and our social network channels (Twitter and Facebook), and valuable content on the website to engage users and visitors. There are 2 more major phases that will add amazing social features and value features. We can hardly contain ourselves with excitement when we talk about what’s in store.