From your Grandma’s blushing tale of the chutney that won over your Grandad’s heart, to your mother’s trusty chicken soup recipe that got rid of your phlegmy cough, every recipe has a story.

Someone has to tell these stories. Someone has to inspire the iPhone scrolling generation to cook. Someone has to help them to break away from the vicious circle of takeaways, frozen food, and disease. Someone has to empower the next generation to the find their true independence through cooking.

A few months back, we noticed something fascinating on Cucumbertown. Our earliest users, who had written over 120 recipes, started leaving the platform.

They were moving on to create their own food blogs. Seeing the reaction from the audience to the recipe they had written on Cucumbertown, our users realized they had a shot at making this a livelihood.

Cucumbertown was their pedestal. We were the slate, the chalkboard, and the palette that helped them come to this realisation.

If you want to start a food blog, read on…

The story of food blogging isn’t the Cinderella meets the Prince and lives happily every after version. In fact, it’s doing something over and over till your audience loves you and then going back and starting a story again.

The biggest bug, that hits any writer or food blogger is procrastination. The only antidote for it is writing more and overcoming the mental block.

But what if the tools you use to write, make you lethargic?

I had this strange problem during my college days. Somehow the days before the exams were the most appropriate for cleaning my room. You know, those final moments that should be spent studying the most important modules…

Mediocre tools are like that. There is a lot of cleaning up to do before you get down to business. That is why we have developed our tools in such a way that you cannot wait to go back to it.

The RecipeWriter

Imagine writing a story about your grandma’s pot pie or you husband’s favorite pudding on an editor that is not obtrusive and takes care of a lot of things that you don't need even think of.

This recipe blog post on the left is an example of good content that will be difficult for Google to understand. On the other hand, to the right is an example of a recipe blog post that Google, Pinterest and a lot of others will understand.

The difference in both these above examples is a format called schema that enables search engines to understand your recipe data. RecipeWriter takes care of things like this while giving you complete creative freedom.

RecipeCam

The easiest way, to inspire someone to cook is to make a video. But videos are hard. They are costly. It takes roughly $300 to make a good quality cooking video (camera, post production, expertise in editing software, lighting etc.).

• But what if you can do it on your iPhone?
• What if that simple process ends up in an alluring video like this?
• Complete with perfectly organized steps, images, quantities etc.
• What if it’s FREE?

Videos shot on RecipeCam are organized into logical steps and is seamlessly integrated into recipe pages complete with step images and ingredients.

Recipes layouts

If you have clicked on of one of the links above, you would have seen this already. But I want to emphasize how difficult it is to end up with a layout that looks elegant and is useful without putting in a gazillion hours of work.

Cucumbertown’s writing and publishing platform is all about simplicity. It does all the heavy duty work so that you end up with excellent results in 15–20 minutes.

Customization

Tinykitchen.com, twinmommy.com, simplyrecipes.com, allthatsdeclicio.us. These names are a source of pride for the bloggers who own them. It represents them. Do you want to own something like this? And a make a living of it? We can help you. Or rather, we want to help you.

A domain name is just one part. What if you can have your own theme?

Cucumbertown will facilitate all this and more. We can act as your guide if you need us, or give you the tools to run the show on your own, with the least effort involved.

Analytics

This is the most complex part for most food bloggers. There are courses that cost hundreds of dollars to teach you Google Analytics. While it’s thrilling for a math genius, it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

Referral traffic, funnel analytics, goals and bounce rates make most people go crazy.

At Cucumbertown, we are building an analytics system that a ten-year-old can understand. We are building a system that tracks everything from views to monetization. We are still working on this, but soon enough you'll be able to see everything from page views for each recipe to traffic analysis. Personally, the analytics makes me go gaga. Here is a sneak peak of what’s in store.

Monetization

My personal goal is to inspire a working mom who has never published anything on the web to tell her stories, motivate others like her to cook and eventually make this a livelihood for her.

The smile in her eyes, when she gets to do what she likes translates to a happy family and into a connected society.

PinchofYum, a food blog I admire enables the couple to earn around thirty thousand dollars per month and leave their day jobs. NourishedKitchen, SimplyRecipes, SteamyKitchen and Minimalistbaker are other examples. These bloggers took the road less traveled and now we are looking up to these stalwarts to enable a host of others to do the same. We will help you plan everything from ads to doing one-on-one help-outs, to upgrading membership, to diet advice, and so on. We’ll be spending considerable time building the tools and infrastructure to do all of these. Stay Tuned for more on this!

Reposting or bookmarking

Not everyone has the tenacity and spirit to write. In fact, a vast majority are mini creators. Or sometimes curators.

What if the majority of people who follow you can bookmark your recipes and notes? What if they build an authority as ambassadors for great recipes and content? As much I want to spill the beans, I am told the element of surprise is more powerful.

Mobile

The biggest problem with every food blog is the inability to read it well on mobile devices. Even if you follow the best food blog out there, chances are, it won’t have a mobile-friendly view.

If the reading is not optimized for mobile, scrolling to ingredients, referencing the steps, checking out the images, and contributing the ones you’ve cooked, are all very difficult. Your best bet is to read it in a mobile browser like Google Chrome or Safari.

By keeping the design intact and having the content on a single platform, we can build an experience that your audience will love. We haven’t yet started work on this, but you can bet that you won’t need to spend a dime or extra effort to address your mobile audience.

Fan contributions

These are the elements that make a true difference to you life. When a fan sends you an image of something he has cooked, that’s a moment of nirvana for you. When your food blog showcases your impact on people in a powerful but subtle way, neatly arranged and collected under each recipe, trust me, your joy will have no bounds.

Search

You can’t go to most food blogs and search. It’s almost impossible. In fact, it is not even a point that people discuss.

But imagine your food blog with a search like this? Categorized by easiness, time and ratings? To me, these are the features that never get talked about, but makes all the difference.

The Little Bouts of Joy

These are tiny bits that make food blogging fun. These are the little things that make all the difference.

• Rating Recipes- Rating a recipe and showing it in the right section? There’s so much beauty when a user looks at a recipe like this, and it gives them the ability to make a decision.
• Liking them- Oh and the joy of someone appreciating. There’s nothing in the world that beats the feeling of someone craving your recipe.
• Tight Integration with Facebook- If you are one of those who want to publish your recipes to Facebook and to your pages, that’s taken care of. Automagically.

There’s a lot more in our pipeline that keeps us excited about the future. Q&A, tips and tricks and a lot more. This is just the start

Cooking ranks among the noblest professions. It’s a craft that needs to inspire, challenge and exhilarate.

Food Bloggers are the beacons. Our recipes and notes are poetry. We have the responsibility to preserve cultures and keep families together. We can build a world of social connotations that has little to do with that elastic enigma called the stomach. But above all we can help preserve memories, create moments and inspire emotions that will redefine your life.

And if Cucumbertown can become your canvas, inspiring you to create such art, we’ve won the race!