Hi everyone! Super excited to be here on Product Hunt. If you're an adventurous home cook (or aspire to be) we'd love to hear your thoughts on our service and vision for the future of cookbooks!
Alta Editions is a web-based subscription cookbook service. Our mission is to connect home cooks with great authors, books and recipes by making popular cookbooks easy to access, search and share online.
We work with publishers large and small to license premium cookbooks from their backlists (i.e. books they no longer spend marketing💰 on), parse them, tag them with rich metadata and then import them into our CMS. Unlike with traditional e-books, we publish in a responsive web format and preserve print layouts so that our books are functional and beautiful on all devices.
Here are a few links to preview some of our books:
* Olives and Oranges by Sara Jenkins - http://www.altaeditions.com/oliv...
* Indian for Everyone by Anupy Singla - http://www.altaeditions.com/indi...
* Truly Mexican by Roberto Santibañez - http://www.altaeditions.com/trul...
The subscription is $4.99/mo after a 30 day free trial (we created a special $1.99/mo lifetime deal for Product Hunters here -http://www.altaeditions.com/prod...). Members have unlimited access to our growing library (non-members can view up to five pages of each book for free). We release a new cookbook each week (coming soon: Gloriously Gluten-Free; The Glory of Southern Cooking; and the James Beard award-winning Olive Trees and Honey) and help guide cooks to the most interesting and useful recipes, cooking tips and food stories.
We just launched our subscription service (details are here - http://bit.ly/altalaunch) so this is early days for us. We're working toward a future where you'll have a huge library of gorgeous, high quality cookbooks available to use anytime, anywhere, and more importantly, a service that provides highly personalized recommendations for interesting and delicious recipes you'll love cooking and sharing with family and friends.
Happy to answer any questions, and would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Thanks!
-Chris
@csmcbride Love the concept!
Just signed up, here are my first impressions:
Would love to see curation based on user diets. I recently switched to Paleo, and would love to quickly filter books/recipies based on the type of diet it follows. I'm sure veggies and vegans would love this too.
The inclusion of paid books in the "bookshelf" frustrates me. I'm happy to pay the monthly subscription cost; however, to pay that, then be prompted to purchase another book makes me feel nickel-and-dimed .
Native app will definitely be useful, as I imagine the majority of users will be on a tablet. (Curious about this data!)
Who's your target customer? I see great value in this as a way to save time and save money, by replacing my current time saving hack - services like Sun Basket or Blue Apron.
Great start - excited to spend more time w/ my subscription. Happy to provide more feedback.
@nnezhat Hey Nicolas, thanks for signing up and for your feedback. We're super excited to have you as a member.
We think personalized recipe discovery is a huge opportunity and not something any publisher, media company or app has made any real progress with. We've been doing a lot of thinking about how to best match cooks with varying skill levels, interests and restrictions with recipes, which also have a complex set of attributes (to say the least). Rich metadata is a big part of the solution, but so is learning about user preferences, so we're actively working on both of these things. Expect to see some progress on this in the coming months.
Thanks for your feedback on the paid books. We realize it's confusing and not a good experience. It's something we're actively working to address.
Short term our target is people who actively cook and love reading cookbooks (skewing older and female). We believe they'll see the most value in our service since they appreciate the level of quality cookbooks provide. Long term we want to serve any and all cooks who love to explore new flavors and cuisines and at the same time want to save time searching for each day's ideal recipe.
-Chris
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@csmcbride Thanks for the response! Love the forward thinking - expecting to see great things! Congrats.
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As a home cook myself, I think this beats searching on Google for recipes. There are other recipe apps but I find the targeting and approach interesting. Any information on the list of books available? (At the current PH offer the yearly payment would roughly buy 1 of the books so that's valuable already)
@piero_ruiz Hey Pedro! Thanks for your comment. I listed a few of our current books in my comment below. They're all published by top cookbook publishers and the authors are well known chefs. You can see our full list of books on our bookshelf here: http://www.altaeditions.com/book....
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Love this, are there plans for a native app? The benefit being a reduction of friction during the payment process with in app purchases.
@mikedizon Definitely. We see a big opportunity for innovation in the cooking space with native apps. The payment process is way easier as you note, but the exciting part for us is tapping into geolocation and notifications to match cooks with great recipes when and where they're most likely to want/need them. As an example, if we know you're in NYC and it's springtime and you're near the Greenmarket we could alert you to recipes that include ingredients just coming into season.
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Compelling solution and eager to have one or more of the cooks in family try it. I haven't tried it yet but suspect traction will depend on UX, breadth, depth and quality of recipes, searchability & personalization, as other reviewers mention
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@csmcbride Not seeing the special $1.99/month lifetime deal for Product Hunt members at the URL above... pls confirm. Thanks!
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@csmcbride And registration page is returning error message
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