The Startup Magazine Q&A Session with Nick Holzherr Founder of Whisk

Today at The Startup Magazine we have had a fantastic interview with Nick Holzherr, who is the founder of Whisk.
Whisk is a mobile app that allows users to purchase the ingredients for any recipe they find on the internet via online supermarkets. The user adds recipes they find to a virtual basket within Whisk. When ready to purchase the users select the number of portions they want and Whisk, understanding the user’s dietary requirements, tastes and demographics accurately selects suitable items from the online supermarket.

Whisk analyses what perishable ingredients are likely to be left over by looking at the ingredient amount difference between what is needed from the recipe and what is available in store pack-sizes. It then suggests recipes you could cook with the leftovers, displaying what additional store items may need to be purchased in order to make the meal.

1) Who is Whisk aimed at?

Whisk is designed for anyone who likes to cook and we expect a varied target audince. Our core target market is women aged 25-45 as they are the ones who use online recipes the most. We hope we can make home-cooking more accessible to lots of people!

2) Where did the idea for Whisk come from? & How long has Whisk been in the making, and who is the team behind Whisk?

Craig, my co-founder, and I both have a passion for cooking and love tech. Craig initially started experimenting with supermarket API’s and after meeting at a hackathon, we worked remotely together over a period of 2-3 years.

After building test versions and doing a lot of research with our different stakeholders, our appearance on The Apprentice made it possible to launch Whisk – a business that is ambitious in terms of how many big players it attempts to bring together into a single seamless e-commerce transaction.

We’ve now raised funds and have a great team behind us – propelling our progress.

3) You are a startup based in Birmingham, how have you found being a tech startup away from London? (it will be really interesting to have your thoughts on the startup scene in Birmingham)

Personally, I think in tech you can be based anywhere and make it successful. Birmingham has really cheap rent and an educated, clever work talent pool to hire from (a large number of universities and a large business environment). In terms of burn-rate – working in Birmingham is great.

There are loads of great startup scenes around the world and I guess every founder wonders “what would be be like to found the company in X or Y instead?”. I personally find the US scene especially intriguing. Having been to SXSW however, I think they have the same ideas (a lot of the time) and often even the same speakers at conferences. Being part of the tech scene we have no excuse not to take part in scenes remotely.

That said, a lot of our clients are in London. It’s only an hour and half on a train and I can easily commute down for meetings.

4) What has been your biggest challenge so far at Whisk?

Every business has loads of challenges so it’s hard to choose a single one. Our technology is rather complex. Our ambition is to pull in the entire world’s recipes and analyse them, pull in all the grocery supermarket’s store items daily and analyse them and then match them based on the demographic information of users. That’s a lot of data – and because we are creating e-commerce transactions we need to make accurate suggestions. Getting all the commercial deals and partnerships into place while making all the technical stuff happen has been a big coordination exercise that’s been loads of fun but also a challenge!

5) In the coming year, what would you like to achieve with Whisk?

We’d like to have our “add to whisk” button displayed on the majority of on-line recipe sites and have our apps downloaded on loads of people’s phones. We’d like to have thousands of people creating shopping lists and checking them out every day. We’d like to have integrated all the large supermarkets in the UK.

6) If you could give one piece of advice to someone thinking about starting a business, what would it be?

Explain your proposition clearly and simply – and make sure at that level – it’s useful. I also feel strongly about the need for revenue – work out clear and simple revenue models that are realistic, and ideally, already proven. A great way of getting there is to ask people experienced in the industry you’re entering to give you advice.