One morning in July 2013, Polina Marchenko told her supervisor at the e-commerce company Mirapodo that she was quitting to found a startup. Three days later, she learned that members of the team with whom she was going to work had decided to keep their day jobs instead of working on the product Marchenko envisioned.
“I found myself alone and totally shocked,” Marchenko recalled.
Undeterred, the Ukrainian entrepreneur got down to business towards developing a mobile phone application that would radically simplify how people search for cooking recipes online. As of Oct. 7, the app had been downloaded more than 115,000 times and had 25,000 monthly active users.
The first pancake
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in marketing from the Kyiv University of Trade and Economics in 2007, Marchenko decided to continue her studies elsewhere.
Disappointed with Ukraine’s education system, she eventually won a scholarship the same year to study in a European Studies program at the Viadrina European University in Frankfurt.
“However, in a year I understood that I wanted to study something closer to economics and marketing, (I) wanted to work and integrate (into German society),” she said, explaining why she chose Berlin’s Humboldt University to study entrepreneurship and marketing.
But she had to pay her way, choosing to work for a marketing consultancy during her spare time. Closer to graduation, she found herself helping startups at a business incubator founded by telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom. She started by helping choose startups for the program, and then moved on to help them conduct market research, prepare investor presentations and carry out business operations.
This proved to be very useful afterwards, Marchenko said.
When all changed
While employed at Mirapodo after graduating, Marchenko spawned an app idea that was supposed to solve a personal problem as well – filtering through mega data and reducing the time it takes to find the right recipe and ingredients while browsing the Internet.
Returning home from work, she was simply bombarded with recipe options.
“When you look for a recipe online, you get so many options that sometimes you end up deciding not to cook at all and order out. People just can’t cope with this huge amount of information,” she said.
The app works by sending the user three daily recipes together with a list of groceries they need to buy in order to cook a chosen meal. It even accesses the databases of supermarkets, showing what brand of products, including their prices, that should be purchased.
She took her idea to Startup Weekend Berlin, an event where previously unacquainted people form a team on the spot, work on a prototype of a product for two days and present it to judges. Marchenko’s app KptnCook won the contest. She quit her job the next day.
After the team of five didn’t quit their jobs to join her, two future company co-founders – Eva Hoefer and Alex Reeg — who saw her app at the weekend competition, contacted her. They wanted to take the idea beyond the prototype stage.
Beyond Germany
In about six months the three co-founders with non-overlapping backgrounds in business, software development, and design had created the first version of KptnCook for Apple’s iOS operating system, which was released in January 2014. It has since featured in the Apple Store a few times and is still a top-30 listing in the food category. In total, the app has been downloaded more than 115,000 times, Marchenko said.
The team shares a passion for good food and chooses recipes carefully. They also cook each meal themselves and take pictures that are entered into the application. KptnCook is running joint pilot projects with supermarkets Tegut, Alnature, and Biocompany, and is in negotiations with Edeka’s network of 3,000 supermarkets in Germany.
Connecting to a supermarket’s database makes it easier to buy ingredients, and also gives the startup a potential revenue stream. Grocers and food manufacturers can market their products very carefully to a tailored audience ready to go shopping, Marchenko said.
Operating off their own resources until now, the group expects to raise a seed round of investment before the end of 2014. KptnCook has also entered the U.S. market and got accepted into Plug and Play Retail, a startup accelerator. The admission means that Marchenko’s project is to receive $25,000 in cash and three months of intensive mentoring, workshops, and introductions to investors in exchange for an undisclosed share of equity.
Expansion into the U.S. is an important step for KptnCook, since investors in Berlin are often “either conservative or willing to invest into copy-cat models,” Marchenko said. However, it doesn’t make Germany a worse place to start a business.
Berlin has “great infrastructure for entrepreneurs, events, co-working spaces and incubator programs,” she said, adding the city has a “hip art scene” yet is one of the cheapest European capital, “this is great for bootstrapping startups.”
Andrii Degeler is the Kyiv Post’s information technology reporting fellow. Degeler has been covering the IT business in Ukraine and internationally since 2009. His fellowship is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe. He can be reached on Twitter (@shlema) or [email protected].
