Ann and Maddy Baum share a lot of things in common. They are co-founders of Spillt, a social app for saving and sharing online recipes, they both love cooking at home, and they are sisters.
The pair moved home to live with their mother at the start of the pandemic and found themselves cooking almost every night. Like so many others, they exchanged recipes with their friends through text threads and email chains. This got the two thinking about why no one had created something that would simply help organize your favorite online recipes and show you the recipes your friends were saving.
Before starting Spillt, the two had both been working at a B2B SaaS company. Ann comes from a technical background, having spearheaded the Direct Messaging product at Instagram for iOS, followed by attending Stanford for Business School. Maddy had worked in sales and marketing, so the sisters always felt that their backgrounds were too complementary to not work together.
They felt like they were onto something with a social recipe app, but couldn’t believe that there wasn’t anything out there already that served this purpose. After some initial research, they found a number of apps that either was not widely used or were considered predatory, stealing content from bloggers to display the content in a cleaner and “ad-free” interface. Knowing that the last thing they wanted was to build something that could be considered predatory, they knew the bloggers themselves must be a part of the process.
The Baums direct messaged dozens of food bloggers on Instagram, in an effort to understand the business side of being a blogger. They grew to understand the goals and many pain points of bloggers, particularly regarding monetization.
The app features a “news feed”, which allows app users to see what their friends are cooking along with new recipes from their favorite bloggers and creators. This news feed allows for a personalized stream of recipes that the sisters were yearning for during their months spent cooking during the lockdown. The ability to leave comments and reviews creates a social community for recipe sharing. This is because feedback from friends and strangers alike is made readily available in a more centralized location, rather than happening upon a review online.
