We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Melanie Carr. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Melanie below.

Alright, Melanie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

Taking a business idea like Dish Dish, an online family cookbook, from idea to reality was quite the journey – full of learning curves and lessons.

Both my husband and myself are from large families that cook and, at times, have been spread all the way around the world. We wanted to create a way for families separated by miles to be able to quickly and easily share favorite recipes online. When my sister-in-law was halfway around the world, even with email, it could take 2-3 days or more to hear back from her if I was looking for one of her recipes for a family get-together.

And wouldn’t it be easier for families to pass down family recipe traditions to the next generation of tech-savvy family members with a digital family cookbook instead of, or in addition to, printed ones?

So the idea for Dish Dish was born. Now it was time to put down on paper how such a system should work – users, sharing, managing a shopping list, adding recipes and details, creating menus, etc.

It took us months to come up with a name for it, delineate processes for the system and create a vision of how it should work. Honestly, when we started we didn’t realize how much detail would be needed in order for programmers to develop the web application.

Next it was time to find someone to build such a thing – interviewing and researching website design and web application companies to find our best option for timing, pricing and experience. And early on we didn’t even know which questions to be asking in order to reasonably assess these options. We learned so much about programming, technology, websites vs. web applications, and digital processes along the journey.

It took us nearly a year from the initial idea to launching the Dish Dish online family cookbook and recipe organizer.

Melanie, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

At Dish Dish, we are all about making it easier for families to enjoy family meals together and pass on meal traditions to the next generation through a digital platform for recipe sharing and organizing.

Families appreciate being able to keep favorite recipes in one place, at their fingertips, for easy menu planning, shopping list management, party planning, and sharing recipes with each other any time.

Remember last year when Aunt Sue made such-and-such dish for the family reunion? Wouldn’t it be nice to have one place where you login and view Aunt Sue’s cookbook to search for that recipe when you want to make it for your own family or friends? Have you found yourself at the grocery store, suddenly unsure of the particular ingredients you need for the dish you’re planning to make this week? Pull it up in the Dish Dish app and you can make sure you have everything you need before leaving the grocery store!

We created a place where members can be friends with each other, which allows viewing each other’s cookbook and searching in it for recipes. Members can add photos or videos to save with each recipe, keep track of a shopping list, edit and update recipes any time, and share them with friends and family. We are proud to have kept Dish Dish an ad-free environment, so when you’re trying to find a recipe, follow a recipe or share it, you aren’t distracted by annoying ads – whether on the website or in the app.

Our members also love the fact that they can save recipes with various tags – such as low-carb, low-fat, keto-friendly, gluten-free, Thanksgiving, large group, quick and easy, etc., so that it’s easy to search by that type of recipe and find the ones that best fit your own dietary, lifestyle or event needs.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Early on after launching Dish Dish, having spent a lot of money to build the system, launch it and promote it, there was a struggle over how to educate people about how the system worked and reach a broader audience without completely breaking the bank. For a little while, it seemed difficult to find a way forward to growing the business and things were tenuous. But we continued to move forward, eventually developing our iOS app and Google Play app, and slowly but surely continued making progress. Finding a way to stick with it and keep doing the little things right, the business began to take off and grow, and it’s been such a joy to watch it become successful.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Since Dish DIsh is a digital service, even though we tried many guerrilla marketing tactics early on with the business – including blogging, contests, review programs, local events, local networking, print and digital marketing, social media promotions – in the end the most effective strategy for growing our membership turned out to be investing in Search Engine Optimization for the site.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://dishdish.us
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dishdish.us