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Wednesday, March 3, 2010
The Pitch
Dogpatch startup Plummelo links shopping lists to recipes
By Brendan Lynch
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Plummelo Inc.
Web: www.plummelo.com
Email: paul@plummelo.com
Founded: 2008
Employees: 4
The Pitch: Plummelo is looking for angel funding to add social networking features to its website and to partner with a grocery store chain.
Plummelo has developed a web browser plugin that enables users to collect online recipes at its web site. The site generates a shopping list automatically from the collected recipes. Over the long term, the startup wants to use the shopping lists to allow grocers to show consumers targeted advertising.
By clicking a browser plugin, Plummelo users can save recipes from other websites. The site saves a link to the recipe and scrapes the ingredient list to compile a shopping list, which the site uses to create a “contextual advertising environment,” according to its founder and CEO, Paul Jin. The startup plans to generate revenue by selling targeted advertising to grocery stores, wine sellers and kitchen product stores such as Williams-Sonoma, Jin said. “It could be anything related to cooking,” he said.
Jin said “personal pain” gave him the idea for the startup — trying to figure out what to feed his family. Plummelo is designed to fix the disconnect in the chain of events from choosing a meal to shopping for ingredients to cooking, Jin said. “We always ask that dreaded question, ‘What’s for dinner?’ We found that we’re woefully unprepared,” he said.
The startup has completed Phase 1 of its launch, according to Jin — the site is live and functional for users. Now, Plummelo is looking for about $750,000 in angel funding to complete the second and third phases of its rollout. Phase 2 includes adding a built-in social media component to the site, so users can share recipes and other cooking information. Phase 3 involves integrating the consumer-facing front end of the site with a back-end delivering the targeted advertising, including one grocery store chain as a customer. Jin said he expects Phase 2 to take about three months.
Plummelo has set up shop at Dogpatch Labs Cambridge, a Kendall Square startup incubator run by Polaris Venture Partners. Working in the same space has allowed for a deeper exchange among the 12 other startups than is usually possible. Working in separate offices, busy entrepreneurs might forget to ask each other questions over a quick coffee, Jin said. “Here, you’re with each other all the time,” he said.
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