Reflections on building – Christina Ivanova, Noms
In this blog post, Startup Foundation grantee Christina Ivanova shares her experiences in building her company, Noms.
I’m Christina. Together with my tech co-founder, we have been working on Noms since early 2022. With my background as a Michelin Chef and his as a developer with 10+ experience, we decided to create a solution for a struggle many people face on a daily: What’s for dinner?
After many rounds of testing and iteration, we build an app and algorithm in the food and consumer tech industries.
What we do
Noms’ algorithm automatically converts any online video recipe into a step-by-step recipe format. Social media content creators upload their videos to Noms, then our algorithm extracts the recipe information and uses natural language processing to tag, summarise and organise the data into our format, matching each step with corresponding video snippets. This creates very concise recipes with short videos, automatically. Creators can host these user-friendly recipes on the app, gaining exposure to new followers and monetization options whilst offering their followers an easier way to cook.
On the user side, our app allows users to search for recipes by ingredients, customise recipes to suit their needs, cook with clear instructions, grocery shop, and discover new creators. Every feature decision is meant to make daily cooking easier for users. For that, our algorithm normalises recipe data to compare a recipe to another. We use that data to score a recipe based on complexity (and other factors), and also score users based on their cooking habits. With that, we can give users personalised search results, reducing choice overwhelm, and match creators and brands to their ideal audience.
Our journey
It took us a while to build out a complex, suitable, and especially scalable solution, but we’re proud to say that persisting, relentlessly testing, and not hesitating to iterate truly helped us build Noms to the point where we’re at today.
Back in the Summer of 2023 then, we were preparing for our launch but faced a struggle most entrepreneurs are confronted with at some point in their journey. We had to take on side gigs to finance our lives whilst building out the product and preparing for launch.
The Startup Foundation’s Individual Grant I was awarded in Q4 of 2023 was a tremendous support at this point and came right at the point when I needed it most. At that time, in September 2023, we had just started posting on Social Media to grow a presence pre-launch, worked on rebranding our startup entirely, and were mass outreaching to creators to ensure we secured some deals before launching. The product had been completed, and most of our focus went to our Go-To-Market strategy. With the support of the Foundation, here is what we’re proud to have achieved:
Our achievements
Our focus for the three months was outreach and launch preparation. During our funded time, we were able to grow our socials three-fold (we still have a long way to go though), fully fund our rebranding, outreach to almost 200 creators, and most importantly, prepare for a successful launch.
With the launch of our Noms app, we gained more than 2000 downloads within our first three weeks, across 176 countries. We had major platforms of 300,000 followers recognise our work and promote it to their audience. Since then, we’ve signed our first creator and are in discussions to close another 6 to be using Noms as their main recipe hosting platform.
Achieving these milestones in a relatively short amount of time only became possible through the Foundation’s support, which effectively meant I did not need to work on the side and was able to fully focus my energy on pushing Noms forward. In the funded months, I created Social Media content, took care of partnerships and outreach, produced our entire launch campaign, finalised building our website, and prepared us for our fundraising in 2024.
What’s next?
The three-month period and our progress showed us how far we could push our work with a full-time commitment. Up until Summer 2023, we had worked on Noms intensively, but always alongside our studies or other work.
Now that we’ve launched and have our first set of active users and creators on the app, it’s time to grow.
With 2024, we’ve applied to several accelerators, and started outreach for fundraising, whilst now fully focusing on creator partnerships. During our social-media-focused Q4, we saw how much effort building a significant presence would take through content creation alone, and decided to pivot our focus. Now, we are doubling down on content creators, and ensuring to create the best experience for them and their followers, given that the signing of a 300,000-follower creator would grow our user base faster than building our presence of 300,000 followers.
We’re excited to see what 2024 has in store, and how quickly we can grow our product within this year! If you would like to stay in touch with us in the meantime, find us here: beacons.ai/nomsapp
And don’t forget to get the app and make your daily cooking life easier.
Best,
Team Noms
