A three-person team built a social app, and finally generated a monthly revenue of tens of millions of yuan by "teaching people to cook"?

Recipe management is usually categorized as a "low-creativity" segment. Many products have been on the market for over a decade, maintaining monthly downloads at the level of tens of thousands, but their monthly revenue has long lingered below $100,000. Users are willing to save recipes, but reluctant to pay for them.

It was not until last year that an exception emerged in this track. Launched in 2021, ReciMe saw its monthly revenue exceed 1 million US dollars; in the past two months, its revenue has continued to climb, with the revenue in the past 30 days standing at around 2.78 million US dollars, equivalent to about 18.5 million RMB, which is a very impressive figure across the entire non-game app track.

Monthly revenue changes of ReciMe since its launch | Source: AppMagic

The outstanding performance of ReciMe is driven by only one key action, which was not even included in ReciMe's initial product roadmap, but was deliberately "cut out" by the team through iterations.

Recipes no longer gather dust in your favorites folder

Many people have had such an experience: you come across a dish on short video platforms, with light background music, fresh ingredients and an attractive finished look, you click the favorite button, planning to try it later. But the reality is that there are dozens of similar videos lying in your favorites folder, none of which you have ever actually tried to make.

Laziness may be one core reason; but another undeniable reason is that videos are inherently designed for viewing. All the cooking instructions are in the voiceover, the ingredient measurements flash across the screen in a second, and the steps flow continuously. When users actually get to the kitchen, they have to operate while looking at their phone, and drag the progress bar back and forth with wet fingers to confirm "how much salt that spoonful was exactly" and "what to do next". Cooking videos are great to watch, but not suitable for following to cook.

What ReciMe does is to "translate" such videos into a form that users can easily follow to cook.

When users come across a favorite cooking tutorial, they click the share button inside Instagram or TikTok, select ReciMe, and a structured card will appear in the app a few seconds later, with ingredients clearly listed, cooking steps split into clear actionable instructions, and the ingredient quantities can be automatically adjusted according to the actual number of diners.

In addition to social media content from Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook and other platforms, the app also supports recognizing screenshots or handwritten recipes via taking photos, and can also migrate all recipes stored in other applications (such as Apple Notes, Google Docs, Notion, Evernote) to the app | Source: ReciMe

In ReciMe, the work done by AI is not fancy at all, but extremely practical. Users never lack tutorials, what they lack is the final step to turn the appealing content into a dish served on the table. The app recognizes the voiceover content, and converts the continuous video footage into a step-by-step practical guide, which exactly fills this gap, allowing users to glance at it when they are busy in the kitchen and know exactly what to use next, how much to use, and how to operate.

User reviews of ReciMe in the past year. Negative reviews mainly focus on slow import of long videos, occasional crashes and high subscription fees | The marked red parts are evaluation keywords related to functions

Putting ReciMe together with similar products, the difference of this latecomer becomes even more obvious.

In fact, looking back over the past 10 years, the demand for home cooking has not changed. As the Internet develops, recipes have moved from paper magazines and food blogs to various video platforms, while old products are still staying at the "previous stop".

Take Paprika, which was launched in 2012 and has long ranked top 1 in the paid app list of the food category as an example, it still focuses on "collection": users paste recipes into it, and the app is responsible for classification, organization and storage. However, after noticing the change of recipe content carriers, ReciMe fills in the key link of "save to use".

Source | Paprika

What the team originally planned to build was a social platform

The three co-founders of ReciMe are alumni of the University of Melbourne Business School. During the day, they work in consulting firms and investment institutions, but after work, they who are keen on cooking like to take cooking classes together and experiment with new recipes. During the city lockdown due to the pandemic, offline activities were restricted. In order to share recipes with friends more conveniently, the three of them came up with the idea of making an app, and ReciMe was launched at the end of 2021.

Christine Nguyen, CEO of ReciMe, and Ivy Nguyen, CMO of ReciMe, are sisters, and Will Kent, COO, is Christine's close friend from university | Source: Smart Company

But at that time, ReciMe looked almost completely different from today, it was more like a cooking-themed social app. According to Christine's original idea, users could follow their favorite home cooks in the app, post photos of their finished dishes, exchange cooking experiences, and share family heirloom recipes for others to replicate. Ivy recalled in a later sharing, "At first, it was just a free-to-use social network application."

ReciMe also achieved good results in the cold start stage. The three-person team used their spare time to gather about 2,000 home cooks and thousands of recipes, and the number of registered users once maintained a 50% month-on-month growth. In July 2022, the three of them officially went full-time on the project; in October, when ReciMe secured a $500,000 seed financing, it already had 15,000 users.

CMO Ivy Nguyen's answer to ReciMe's initial positioning | Source: LinkedIn

The turning point was hidden in the data. The team gradually found that users' high-frequency behavior was not following and liking posts, but the smart import function. On the other hand, with the end of the pandemic, the demand for online social interaction declined. In 2023, the team removed all social functions in ReciMe, and rebuilt the application around the single point of "import recipes from social media". The team revealed that after the reconstruction, the number of subscribing users and revenue increased by 20 times compared with before.

Around the new solution of "import recipes from social media", ReciMe's growth efforts are mainly focused on social media platforms such as TikTok.

At the end of 2024, two consecutive demo videos of ReciMe on TikTok attracted a large number of users. The opening of the two videos showed neatly arranged rice balls and exquisitely plated farfalle pasta respectively. After showing the production process, the creator immediately took out their phone to demonstrate how they found the dish on social media, and successfully recreated it after importing it into ReciMe.

The two videos got 11,000 and 63,000 views respectively | Source: TikTok

This type of video clearly conveys the message that "video recipes can be 'converted' into step-by-step instructions that you can follow", and the demonstration-as-education effect was immediate. Both videos got over 10,000 views. In January 2025, leveraging the overseas users' motivational mindset of "new year, new start", ReciMe saw the first double growth of downloads and monthly revenue, with monthly revenue exceeding 1 million US dollars.

Monthly download changes of ReciMe since its launch. The growth in January 2026 is not marked, which is affected by the seasonal peak of subscriptions at the start of the year | Source: AppMagic

After the initial verification of the marketing method, from June to August 2025, multiple videos with real people appearing on camera on TikTok maintained the view count between 15,000 and 42,000, pushing the monthly revenue up to 2 million US dollars again. After that, ReciMe started to cooperate with more cooking niche influencers with larger follower bases.

Entering 2026, in addition to the subscription peak at the beginning of the year, the number of downloads and revenue have continued to climb in the past two months. According to data from DataEye, it is most likely caused by concentrated ad placements.

From the end of last year to the beginning of this year, ReciMe cooperated with multiple niche influencers, whose Instagram posts got around 2,000 likes, far higher than the usual hundreds of likes (below). At the beginning of the year, ReciMe redesigned the app interface | Source: TikTok, Instagram

Changes in the number of ads run by ReciMe in the past year | Source: DataEye

From a single recipe to a whole week's meals

However, the fluctuating growth of revenue along with marketing nodes can hardly be attributed to the single key action of "converting recipe videos". After all, importing recipes is a one-time operation, which cannot retain users for a long time. Therefore, in the past two years, ReciMe has carried out a large number of function iterations, embedding the function into a complete diet planning workflow.

In 2024, based on the function of converting video recipe tutorials, ReciMe added the "Meal Planning" feature, which allows users to drag recipes into calendar cells, arrange breakfast, lunch and dinner, and plan in advance, avoiding the decision fatigue of "what to eat tonight".

To achieve this goal, the team also polished all the details, converting operations that require swiping to view into click interactions as much as possible, to make the cooking steps presented more quickly and intuitively, reducing users' browsing time; recipes support filtering by dimensions such as cuisine, cooking time, difficulty, etc. Later, the "Grocery List" (smart shopping list) function was added, completing the pre-cooking shopping link. Based on the selected recipes, the app can automatically categorize the corresponding ingredients by supermarket sections (such as fruits and vegetables, meat, seasonings, etc.), support manually marking purchased items, and sharing the list with multiple people. In addition, ReciMe also allows users to select existing ingredients at home, and intelligently generate recipe suggestions.

Related functions | Source: ReciMe

These individual functions are connected to form a complete closed loop.

Adjust the portion size according to the number of diners, make a meal plan for the next week, combine all ingredients into a shopping list sorted by supermarket shopping route, and in some regions, users can even order ingredients directly in the app for door-to-door delivery. These recipes can also be compiled into a cookbook, and users can invite family members to edit together. In March 2025, ReciMe added the "essential" calorie calculation function around diet planning.

By continuously extending to the upstream and downstream of the cooking process, ReciMe's usage scenarios have expanded from "saving and guiding" to "what to eat every week, what to buy, and what to adjust next