The Story of Pepper

The Idea

The story starts in the summer of 2019. Jake & I had both just graduated college: Jake, Vanderbilt, myself, Penn State. Jake was soon to begin his job in New York City at Trillium Trading, a proprietary trading firm he interned at the summer before. I was about to start a Masters of Accounting program at Rutgers, a job with Deloitte M&A lined up for January 2020 after the program.

It was around midnight in the shed — our hangout spot throughout middle school, high school, and college. It was in Jake’s backyard in Short Hills, NJ. In the shed, ideas flowed and good vibes were plentiful. Sometimes just the core group, sometimes friends of friends — even my cousins from Texas had made it to a shed hangout when they visited me in Jersey.

One summer night, the conversation turned towards potential business ideas as it often did. Jake’s dad, Ofer, an entrepreneur himself, who had moved to the US from Israel when he was very young, had imparted an entrepreneurial-mentality on us since we were young. I remember him first talking about the How I Built This podcast with Guy Raz, who interviews founders on how they built their businesses from the ground up. The first one I listened to was Miguel Mckelvey and WeWork. Next was the story of Patagonia, a bunch more followed.

From there I was hooked on the idea of starting a business.

That night in the shed, as our potential business idea conversation continued, I showed Jake a GroupMe I had recently been added to. It was a GroupMe of my college friends sharing what they were cooking. I’m not sure if it’s a Greek life thing, or just being a college student in today’s times, but I was probably in a hundred GroupMes.

The cooking chat was by far the most active GroupMe with multiple posts per day for a let’s say 30-person group. I was into it, not cooking much at the time living at home; but enjoyed seeing what my friends were making, posting my mom’s meals and answering questions when my friends would ask me about the recipes. Jake was also into it, thought his college friends would be too, and made one for him and his friends on the spot.

This led to a conversation about how much food and cooking content existed across the Internet. Social media, apps, digital media. You name the platform, there was food content on it.

“People love posting their food content — why is it so disaggregated” we spoke about.

We ended the night analyzing the different platforms and the food content that existed on each: Facebook and GroupMe were mainly about groups of friends & community. Text message groups were for family recipes. Snapchat was for quick pictures of what people were cooking or eating out. Pinterest was for discovering visually attractive food & recipes.

I remember Jake and I both becoming focused on one thing as I left to go home that night: It’s interesting that people use all these platforms for their food and cooking content, yet none actually enhanced their cooking experience. Food content was just a by-product that lived on these platforms.

A couple days later, I went back to the shed to keep the conversation going. We made a Google Doc. Cookbook we called it. Very original, I know.

Original Pepper outline from July 29th, 2019

We sketched out a couple ideas for what our solution to the problem looked like. A social app to share recipes and what you were cooking with people you know, combined with the tools that actually helped you become a better chef. The biggest problem in the GroupMe was how inefficient it was. I’d post a picture of the food. Then someone would ask me what the ingredients were. Then how to cook the salmon. Then how long it took to cook. There had to be a better way.

On the Google doc: Newsfeed, restaurants, search. A couple bullets for each. We continued to talk out the idea over the next couple days, putting it through rigorous testing as we always did for our business ideas on whether the idea actually held up. After a week of continued discussions, we felt it did. A couple of the early indications were as follows:

It was clear people love posting what they were cooking and eating. Just check any social media app or digital media site. Or our college friend GroupMe.
The current platforms lacked functionality in that: many were just photos or videos & didn’t actually help you make the dish, a blob of background to read through before the recipe, or the ingredients, recipe, cook time, and other details were scattered throughout a ton of text.
People want to become better chefs. Whether through videos, recipes, or general cooking content, I mean who doesn’t want to be a better chef.
People needed cooking inspiration. So many people cook the same meals every week just because they don’t know where to go for inspiration.
Seeing what your friends and family are cooking is way more exciting than what John from the NY Times is making (with all due respect to John from the NY Times).
Most recipe apps restrict or don’t include any type of social interaction. They were great as recipe databases, but failed in the social aspect.
Food is COMMUNITY. Whether it be with your family, friends, a specific cuisine, diet, or holiday, food brings people together. Cooking communities were simply disaggregated across the Internet, and we felt someone would come up with a platform to unify them. Why not us?

We loved the idea. We talked to our friends and family. When we spoke about it and explained our vision, it resonated with people. A social app to share recipes with people you know.

Unfortunately it wasn’t the right time. Jake was starting his full-time job. I was starting a Master’s program and studying to become a CPA. Like many of our other ideas (Chopsips, chopsticks that doubled as a straw to sip your soup, and a social investing app, Hi Public), we tabled the idea. It was really good, probably the best we’d ever had, but a lot of life is timing, and this wasn’t it.

Life has a weird way of working itself out

Fast forward to March 2020. I’m 2.5 months into my new job. Jake had been at his job for about 8 months. COVID hits. I had just moved into New York City in January to live with Jake and our other camp friend. I was bummed to go home to say the least.

I don’t remember exactly when it was — probably April or May, when my phone rang. It was Jake, and I had never heard him so fired up in 15 years of knowing him. I do remember exactly what he said.

“Matt, remember Cookbook. I’m moving forward with it. I want you to be part of it with me.”

Shit. Didn’t think that’s what he was calling me about.

We spoke for a bit, and I told him I needed a day or two to think about it. I had just started a demanding job at Deloitte, and my biggest thought was whether I could really commit to something like this and balance the job, the CPA exams, and now starting a company. I told him I’d come to the shed the next night to talk about it.

I thought about it that night. Working at Deloitte was a dream of mine. I had been fortunate enough to be associated with the company since my sophomore year of college when I attended their national leadership conference. The next summer I interned, and I returned full time in Jan 2020.

But starting my own business was also a dream of mine. I knew that if Jake and I put our minds together, and really gave something our all, we could turn it into something special. Combine that with the fact that I thought a social cooking app was a really amazing concept, it felt like a no brainer to at least try.

I remembered something Ofer had once said to us when talking about how he left his law firm to flip real estate full time:

“Sometimes in business, you have to take the risk and worry about the consequences later.”

And that’s what I did. I’d figure it out. I told Jake I was in. And our social food app was born.

The First Step

I’m in. Now what?

Jake had a family friend that specialized in making app V1s. Version 1. Probably a good place to start.

We also knew Cookbook wasn’t going to be our long-term name. We knew we needed a better, more original name if we were going to take the next step.

Cookbook. Voila. Simmer. Pepper.

We thought about Facebook and Snapchat. Two syllables. Comes off the tongue nicely. But it was something Jake said that always stuck with me.

“Pepper is a strong enough word to hold down the gravity of what this app can become.”

We didn’t want something that sounded gimmicky. Pepper it was.

We sketched out the most basic form of the app. Newsfeed, explore, recipe upload/post, notifications, and profile. We got in touch with the guy who made V1s, who told us it would be $1,000 for his company to make it. Reasonable.

He came back a week or two later with the V1. It was cool. Simple, but damn cool. We showed our friends & family, and they agreed.

The Next Steps

So we had a V1. And now we needed to make an actual app. Small problem.

Neither Jake nor I knew how to make an app. Jake did have a computer science background — he Minored in it at Vanderbilt. Unfortunately though, we were going to have to look outward for someone to make the full app. We had to find an iOS developer, and we had to raise some money.

We put out a request for proposal on a few different sites, summarizing the idea and what we were looking for. One person responded in the first 24 hours, Boon Chew of Tappallo Media.

From the minute we started talking with Boon, it was a match. He loved the idea. He saw our vision. He had the experience building successful apps (iHeartMedia, DiscoveryGo, Timehop, and Grailed amongst others). He told us how much it would be to make what we described, and we told him we’d figure it out. Remember the lesson from Ofer from earlier, say yes and figure out the rest later.

We were fortunate enough to put some money together. A friends and family round. To this day, and for as long as I live, I will be grateful to have been in a position to raise money from people around me. They trusted us when we had little more than an idea and vision — and also were in a financial position to be able to support us.

From Two to Three, and More

At that point, Jake and I were the team. But we needed some design help to really flesh out what the app would look like.

I had a friend of a friend who I knew had some app design experience. I remember hearing that he started something cool in college, and I reached out to him to tell him what we were working on.

There wasn’t a moment that he formally joined the team, but he started doing enough work with us that the team had turned to three. Eli Silverman, what a guy. We were lucky to have him working with us.

We fleshed out the app designs and got to work with Boon and his team.

By January 2021, we had a solid, functioning app. Boon and his team were crushing it. But we needed to raise more money if we were going to really make this app special.

In those couple months, we went from a team of two, to three, to seven. My younger brother Jake and two of his college friends (shout out Kayla Menkes and Brandon Wexler) joined to help on the Marketing side. Even though we knew we weren’t launching for a while, we wanted to build up our social media channels for whenever we did. We brought on Spencer Rappaport as CFO, bringing his expertise from Morgan Stanley to help get our finances in order, and also create our financial model we’d be able to show to potential investors.

The Pitch

The first week of January we had the opportunity to pitch an investment to local angel investors. Jake, myself, and Spencer prepared for weeks. We created a pitch deck and some financial projections. We rehearsed, over and over, not realizing at the time they’d be way more focused on the Q&A than our scripted deck. We were confident in our product, our vision, our deck, and the business model, but it was the first time I was ever in this situation. The first time for all of us.

We nailed it. They loved the presentation, our responses to their questions, and we closed the investment days after the call.

The Grind

Now, the real work started.

What is Pepper? A social food app? A social restaurant app? A social cooking app? Instagram for food?

We needed to hone in on what made it special; what made it different from other social platforms and recipe apps.

Since January 2021, we’ve had our ups and we’ve had our downs. We’ve iterated, developed incredible new functions, brought in two new team members (Ben Karpas to focus on user relations, and Lior Schinagel as our Head of Product), and talked to other entrepreneurs, investors, entertainers and famous chefs; just about anyone that we thought could help.

We launched the Pepper beta on TestFlight on May 26th. Since the launch, we’ve had ~2k downloads, ~2k on our waitlist, and at the time of this writing, are set to launch on the App Store on Labor Day.

I am so incredibly proud of our team and our product, and even more grateful for the opportunity to work on something myself and the people working on it are truly passionate about. We are creating a product that empowers all chefs and makes it easy to engage around cooking and recipes. We know that every chef deserves an audience.

What is Pepper today?

Pepper gives users the ability to post their favorite meals and recipes; create personal digital cookbooks; seamlessly view standardized recipe steps and details; and search for specific dishes based on ingredients, dietary restrictions, difficulty, and more. We are at the intersection of social and meal/recipe discovery; a community of chefs engaging around cooking and food.

Pepper is a place for chefs of all skill sets and backgrounds to create, share, and discover food with family & friends around the world. We’ve stayed true to that mission throughout.

We streamline the process of finding your next meal, sitting down at the dinner table to eat it, and sharing it with your friends & family when you’re done.

Pepper is built to celebrate the everyday chef making familiar dishes. To celebrate the seasoned chef sharing new creations. To celebrate friends and family sharing special recipes. To celebrate food photographers, creators, consumers, and everyone in between. To celebrate you. And maybe, just maybe, change the way you think about sharing food.

I ask you to join us on this journey of revolutionizing the way we share food.

I’m proud to announce that after beginning this journey in the summer of 2019, Pepper is now available on the App Store for download.

Thank you to my team, our investors, and my family & friends for believing in us. It’s been one of the greatest honors of my life to be a part of this team.

– Matt

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