Keaton Taylor

A Brief Introduction

Mealthy Recipes is a startup building digital products and appliances to make the lives of home cooks a little bit easier. Along with a website and native mobile apps, it’s become a highly engaged multi-platform online community.

Structuring a New Kind of Recipe Company

We wanted to build a first-of-its-kind, community-driven recipe product—a platform for home cooks that offered support, suggestions, and feedback without the trade-offs. We wanted to steer away from advertising and data revenue, to focus on the experience. We wanted to combine this online community with a repository of healthy recipes and the best tools out there to execute on them. We brought in experts from organizations like AllRecipes and Buzzfeed Tasty to help us identify our core market and create top-tier branded content. We worked with some of the core team that designed the original Instant Pot to design our spiral slicer and Multipot Pressure Cooker. We were all in on being a multichannel product and appliance organization like no one had done before.

My Role

As the Lead Product Designer for Mealthy, I led and grew the design and (for a time) engineering teams. I was involved in high-level strategy and implementation of every feature in the products through the V1 launch. Being the first designer and transitioning to design lead is filled with pitfalls along the way. For example, you have to define processes and tools for everyone who comes after you. When we started work on Mealthy, I chose to work with Sketch and Abstract for designing screens. I knew that with a small team it would be imperative that we all pitch in where we could so I biased toward designers who could write some production front-end code. These decisions would come back to haunt me later but served as simple enough building blocks to move forward building our team.

What Problems Were We Solving?

Designing a recipe product in an already well-saturated market was not the the most fun or most groundbreaking project I’ve ever worked on - but Mealthy felt really special. As anyone who has worked on editorial platforms based around recipes can tell you, the traffic is, by its very nature, transient. Other recipe brands had long focused on broken media models demanding and monetizing the user’s attention and trading off privacy and security. We did not want to fall into that trap. We refused to become ad-saturated and filled with editorial aspirations instead of a product focused on what people wanted to do - find a recipe!

Beginning with research

from the start, I worked with our CEO to do competitive research to understand the landscape of recipe products on the market and compile user demographics assumptions. Working with our CX Researcher and editorial partners, we surveyed Mealthy team members and contacts who had worked at places like Buzzfeed and Allrecipes - compiling competitive analyses to understand the landscape of recipe products on the market. Based on this anecdotal data, we had a good idea as to what our target audience looked like:

• 30 - 40 years old
• Mostly females (~70/30 split)
• Household Income ~$100k per year
• College Educated (at least some college in most cases)
• Health conscious and digitally savvy

As time went on, we found we were more or less spot-on with our expected demographic with some variants that we didn't account for - people who like kitchen gadgets, gift recipients, meal-prep enthusiasts, and more generally transient traffic.

The Work

Soon after getting rolling, I recruited and hired my favorite front-end engineer. Ryan applied his years of startup experience to help the CEO and me define and scope MVP and V1 feature sets and sort them into epics. We used those epics and feature lists to start sketching out wireframes for some of the high exposure features like the Recipe Detail, Profiles and Saved Recipes. With some of the demographic and messaging guidelines planned out, we began working with a brand designer to help flesh out our logo and some other visual branding guidelines.