We’ve previously covered the food recipe social network Youmiam when they first launched their public beta. A few months later they announce their first capital raise of 300.000€ with Patrick Robin, founder of 24h00.com, Thierry Petit, CEO of Showroomrpive.com and Denis Chavanis, former General Director of Nestlé Waters.
According to Théophile de la Bastie, Co-Founder and CEO of Youmiam, the process of raising their first capital among investors was a real test of patience. The whole process lasted six months, with the first tranche of funds arriving when they launched their first private beta among chefs and cuisine schools. Starting conversations with investors early in their development allowed them to deepen their relationship with potential investors, and with a lot of work put into fine-tuning the concept and their positioning in a world of too-many-food-players was a way for Youmiam to distinguish itself from the crowd.
The food-driven social network offers now a unique service to its users, it allows for anyone to create and share a recipe in very easy to follow steps. Sharing a recipe is done with their Youmiam player, a similar approach to what Soundcloud did for music, and the recipe discovery on the website is done with a Pinterest-style food magazine. It’s a great service for sharing recipes with friends and one that is surely marking it’s place in the food scene – have a look at our review of the service.
At the time of their public launch I outlined some of their key challenges. Attracting users was the most obvious and while they’re user base is still small for social network standards it shows how they are growing. Considering that they still only offer a French version of the service is a comforting thought for user base numbers – 4.000 registered users. Speaking about the French version of the website, I previously mentioned the English version as a critical point for growth and we are still waiting for it. Youmiam CEO Théophile said they are working on it which, so hopefully it will come sooner than later. About their mobile offer, there is no smartphone apps for the service but they did something smart that solves the problem of the mobile issue and a wise move in their stage of development. Cooking is done in the kitchen that’s why the mobile issue is important, but the most important thing to do in the kitchen is to take a picture of the food, so the Youmiam service can connect to your Instagram account so when you’re in your laptop you can comfortably write the recipe and pick the recipe photo from your Instagram stream, if you are a cooking aficionado you are probably posting the photos to Instagram anyway – quite cleaver I would say.
Just yesterday the company announced some new features to their website. One of them is to allow follow their Facebook friends and invite those not on Youmiam – something that will impact on their users growth. Another improvement is the enhance simplicity of the interface, Youmiam is greatly based on UI simplicity and their latest update shows their commitment to this vision.
Youmiam is the first startup that comes out of the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator Paris to raise capital from investors. For Théophile this marks a huge milestone for the company and one that came out of the team’s hard work in the past months. Only now he says that they are fully launched, and looking ahead Théophile says he wants to bring Youmiam on the international level. They sure have all the required ingredients, and following they success recipe up until now we are surely wanting to see Youmiam on more screens around the world!