ReciMe sizzles, jumping from 20,000 to 400,000 users in 2023

Australian recipe app startup ReciMe has reported to have grown its user base twenty-fold in 2023 alone. This rapid growth saw the platform go from 20,000 to over 400,000 in the space of 12 months.

Co-founder and head of product at ReciMe, Christine Nguyen, announced the news, alongside a string of other large milestones reached this year.

This included launching a premium subscription tier, which has resulted in $60,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and increasing the businesses’ recipe base from 5,000 to 20,000. According to Nguyen, all of these recipes have been user-generated.

Nguyen also highlighted the release of ReciMe’s recipe important tool that allows cooks to build out their own ReciMe library.

“2023 has been a huge year for ReciMe. As a team, we’re not the best at looking back and celebrating our wins — but it is something that we want to work on in 2024,” Nguyen said.

From lockdown project to 400,000 users

ReciMe started as a lockdown project with Christine, Will Kent, and her sister Ivy. It was launched officially in November 2021 and within 12 months had raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding from the Alice Anderson Fund, Even Capital and Tractor Venture’s co-founder Jodie Imam.

ReciMe allows users to easily create, save, and share recipes from one platform. According to the company, it targets less experienced cooks looking for recipes, as well as recipe creators.

“When we started ReciMe, our number one goal was to provide a platform where anyone — whether they’re a Michelin-star chef, or an enthusiastic home cook like our mum — could publish their recipes,” Nguyen said during ReciMe’s pre-seed raise.

“There is a big tailwind right now in the creator economy where creators around the world are monetising directly from their fans. We’ve spoken to cooks who today find it very difficult to make a living — we’ve created a platform where they will be able to sell premium content directly to their biggest fans.”

During the funding round, Nguyen said that she and Ivy’s parents immigrated from Vietnam in the 90s, and it was cooking that helped them keep that connection and heritage alive.

“During lockdown, we started writing our family’s recipes down for the first time — and when we wanted to start sharing those recipes with our community, we realised that our options for publication were limited,” Christine said.

“Physical cookbook publishing is expensive and complex; and online solutions (blogs, Instagram, TikTok), while great for building communities, just aren’t designed for recipe sharing or consumption. The more we looked into it, the more confident we were that there is a real opportunity to completely reinvent the online cooking experience.”

How it did it and plans for the future

According to Nguyen, there were two key ways that ReciMe was able to scale its users so quickly — word of mouth and TikTok.

“While the act of cooking is often a solo activity, other people often want the recipes after, which lends itself nicely to ReciMe,” Nguyen said to SmartCompany.

“[And] we’ve been able to create quite a strong brand on TikTok across multiple different accounts with over 100,000 followers.”

Nguyen said that they knew that for this kind of rapid growth to work, they had to stay on top of the tech.

“Luckily we brought on Nic Pacholski as our CTO at the start of the year who was the first engineer at Sweat (the fitness app) who knew all about scaling with the users,” Nguyen said.

While introducing a subscription model into the mix was a daunting task for ReciMe, Nguyen says they first tested it on a small cohort to see the impact on engagement and retention. Now that it has been released across the platform, it’s doing well.

“There’s a subset of features on ReciMe that lend themselves nicely to a premium subscription model, meaning that a cohort of power users love them and also they don’t impact our viral coefficient, and the ability for users to refer one another.”

After such a massive year, one has to wonder what goals ReciMe is looking to kick in 2024.

“As a team, we’re doubling down on the US market, which is the largest market for ReciMe in terms of users and revenue. Part of the team is relocating there early in 2024 and our entire focus is on acquiring US users given they have stronger retention and a higher willingness to pay,” Nguyen said.