Scratch House: lessons learned and moving forward

About a year and 3 months ago, I signed up from Gary Chou’s Orbital Bootcamp (a 12-week course for launching side projects) with a mission: I wanted to motivate people to cook more.

Why? I’ve always believed that cooking is a superpower. Not only does it allow us to take charge of our health, it offers us a pathway into understanding the ecosystems and human systems that sustain us. Homemade food can even catalyze human connections and build community — something that I felt the world could always use a little bit more of.

As a result of these fervently held beliefs, I spent the summer experimenting with a series of ideas. By the end of the program, I had committed myself to building Scratch House, a site that eases people into a cooking habit via a gamified experience.

Scratch House as it looks as of this writing.

Since then, I’ve been working as hard as I can to pump vital nutrients into this project:

  • I dedicated myself to a strict editorial schedule of posting new missions every week for about 4 months straight.
  • I set up various social media experiments to get the word out, including engaging with beginner cooks on Reddit and editing special cuts of video for Youtube and Twitter.
  • I even played around with promotion in the real world, teaching classes at Brooklyn Brainery and hiring a guy to put posters and postcards around NYC.

As the weeks melted into months, my user base grew, but not quite as fast as I’d hoped. The numbers climbed at the rate of a mere 3–5 signups a week. And while I had hoped to lure people into participating with promises of physical prizes, personal support and lots of encouragement, engagement levels stayed largely the same.

Scratch House is built around the idea of missions — weekly cooking challenges that teach people a new fundamental cooking skill. Some weeks, 10 people would complete the week’s mission, and I’d be dancing with joy. Other weeks, I’d get 4, and sink back into an abyss of self-doubt. But it was almost always the same 10 or so users — and, admittedly, they were mostly my friends.

Facing up to the struggles

I have a strong theory as to why Scratch House was having a hard time growing: there’s simply way too much food content on the web already. Supply outstrips demand, such that almost every niche for every kind of food content is filled. In its current form, Scratch House’s value proposition was neither unique nor clear enough to take off in a meteoric way. I was giving it my all, but the market wasn’t materializing.

A taste of the competitive landscape.

Another theory: engagement wasn’t increasing because people’s behavior simply doesn’t line up with what the site had to offer. The site proposed to motivate you to cook weekly by teaching you new cooking skills, but my users reported:

  • Not having time to shop for ingredients
  • Having much easier food options available

In other words, Scratch House wasn’t even coming close to competing with the likes of Seamless and Blue Apron for the privilege of solving their daily dinner needs. I was running up against the gnarly problem of behavior change, and tackling it in a way that was probably too blunt to be successful.

On top of all this, I was experiencing a more immediately felt thing: I was burning out. The relentless drive to put up a mission every week was exhausting and stressful. I was doing it alone, I wasn’t enjoying the process, and I started to dread Mondays — my mission video-shooting days. I needed to take a break.

So in August, I put up my last planned mission, took a deep breath, and stepped back to gain some perspective.

A time to reflect on goals

If my goal were to provide free online cooking lessons for a few of my friends and a select group of Internet strangers, then I was doing a pretty good job of it. Scratch House to date has amassed a sizeable library of missions, and people actually quite liked them for their clarity, humor, pacing, structure, and detail. I’ve had people tell me anything from “I’m really excited for the next one to come out!” to “Wow I’ve never made chicken this good.” It is a joy and a thrill to be able to provide an authoritive yet accessible cooking resource for people out there, especially those who were just taking their first steps in the kitchen.

However… was this truly my goal?

When I joined Orbital Bootcamp so many months ago, I did it because I was tired of working for The Man (or at least a tech startup). In fact, I was ready to start something of my own. Something that would allow me to engage with a topic that I cared about — food and cooking — while simultaneously sustaining myself financially.

It was never my intention to build an entire site just so I could provide free cooking advice to my friends. (I could have done that a lot more easily simply by texting them.)

In fact, months ago, when I started weekly accountability check-ins with my friend Christina Xu, I wrote at the top of the Google Doc:

GOAL: to create a financially self-sustaining independent project that encourages more people to start cooking.

The problem is, I was succeeding at neither.

The question of monetization

In its current state, Scratch House is entirely funded by my freelancing efforts. Which suits me wonderfully for the time being — I have great clients, interesting projects, and good work. But 3–5 years down the road? I would very much like to be the head of my own business, producing something I can truly be proud of.

The possibility of monetizing Scratch House directly crossed my mind more than a couple times. There were 2 possible avenues I could take, both with its own problems:

  • Charging for content — This was the most obvious approach, but didn’t make sense for a few reasons: First, quality food content is available everywhere on the Internet — beautifully produced videos were being made available for free by top content providers like the Food Network and Fine Cooking. Charging for access to content would instantly kill off Scratch House as an attractive alternative for those looking for easy ways to learn how to cook. Secondly, I wanted to make learning to cook accessible and approachable. Putting up a paywall seemed like the philosophical opposite of that. Lastly, I surveyed a few top users and asked if they would be willing to pay for this kind of content. The answer was decidedly “No, I would just go to YouTube.”
  • Seeking sponsorships for weekly missions — This was another possible approach, but in order to do this, I needed to grow my audience to a formidible size. My social media experiments taught me that this was easier said than done, and at the rate I was growing, it would be 10–15 years before I’d have enough subscribers for a potential sponsor to even be remotely interested. I didn’t have 10–15 years of runway; I had maybe like 3–5. So sponsorships seemed intractable at best.

When your product turns out to live in the crowded food media landscape, and you’re basically producing content that is a slightly different version of what already exists, making money is tough. Heck, even getting people’s attention is tough (as I discovered).

Is Scratch House, in its current form, really the best way to fulfill my dream of creating a financially self-sustaining project that also motivates people to cook?

The answer is mostly likely “No”

In the beginning, buoyed by enthusiasm and determination to make this work, I refused to see what some of the fundamental issues of the project were. But the more I look at the facts objectively, the more I’m starting to see the flaws and mistakes:

  • I got bogged down in content — Initially I had envisioned Scratch House as an RPG-style cooking game, where you’d go on quests, earn points, level up, and be a part of a story. This would have been an exciting and unique direction, but I abandoned this idea earlier in the process due to lack of game-development resources. I continued to call it a weekly cooking game because that’s what drew people in, but in truth very little of it had to do with a game. There was still no theme, no story, no game mechanics, no reward mechanisms beyond a weekly prize that few users even knew about. It became mostly about the content, to the detriment of the project itself.
  • I didn’t enjoy making content as much as I thought I would — This is kind of a major problem, and a hard lesson learned. Often times, it’s the dream of some exciting end-product that gets you fired up to start something. But then you quickly realize that, in order to get there, you have to go through the daily slog of producing something, one tiny bit at a time. This day-to-day work is ultimately what will either make or break you. You really have to ask yourself at the start of a project, things like, “I may like cars, but do I like to fix engines?” Sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t. For me, I realized I love designing interactions, I love being in the kitchen, and I love writing, but I absolutely have not grown to love making videos (despite trying). And that’s kind of a dealbreaker when your project is rather largely composed of videos.
  • Some projects need more than one person to succeed — Intially I set out to build a game, and I couldn’t do it for lack of a team of illustrators, game developers, story writers, and game designers. The prevailing sentiment I felt at the time was “Start light, try things out, be scrappy and use what you have.” So instead of going out and seeking collaborators (also, because I was scared to do so), I scaled back to doing what I could with what I had: make cooking videos in my apartment by myself.

Now, in retrospect, I think this last thing was the biggest factor in bringing Scratch House down. Being forced to scale back my ambitions due to lack of resources has been a theme of my year. Can’t afford a developer? Hack Wordpress. Can’t hire a talented videographer? Learn iMovie and get cozy with your iPhone. Don’t know how social media works? Ask friends for advice and then learn to to do it yourself.

To be fair, i achieved quite a lot, learned how to be scrappy as hell, and was able to move very, very fast by myself. People are always amazed when I tell them Scratch House was made by a team of one (and they are always quick to reassure me that my videos look just fine). On the other hand, I ended up scattered between various roles, was never quite satisfied with what I had been able to achieve on my own, and eventually, as the single source of fuel for this project, I ran out of steam.

Does this spell the end?

So where does that leave me and Scratch House, my little experiment in building an independent life for myself? Is this the end? Do I now go back to a stable job and put this all behind me?

The answer, if I may put it ever so eloquently, is a definitive:

HELLZ NO

I may not have succeeded thus far in achieving my goal, but I did something else incredibly valuable in the past year: I achieved mental and financial equilibrium.

That is to say, I finally got used to not having a full-time job to anchor me.

My finances are more or less stable. My societally-driven guilt is under control. I’m slowly retraining myself to derive authority and satisfaction from the things I decide to make, rather from a salary and a role in an organization. I’ve dug myself a cozy little nest of endurance and I’m ready to play the long game of independence.

What am I cooking up next?

Having learned what I did about making content, not working alone, and not driving myself into a corner making videos, I’m ready to put these lessons to good use. Scratch House is not dead — it’s undergoing a metamorphosis, one inspired by another one of the ideas I had experimented with last summer at Orbital Bootcamp.

Preparations are already well underway, with a secret prototype being sent out this month to friends and family. (If you’re interested, shoot me an email or sign up for updates!)

This time around, from the get-go, Scratch House will have a built-in revenue model. It will not be competing with other food videos on the Internet — instead, it will be decidedly offline, in a way that you can touch, taste, and see. And it will excite your creativity in a way that goes way beyond basic technique cooking lessons.

Ideas have more than one life; there’s no shame in letting them freely come and go. The story of Scratch House is far fromover. This is just another chapter in an ongoing effort to fulfill my goal of motivating people to cook, while building a sustainable life for myself.

Tina Ye is the founder of Scratch House and a die-hard champion of cooking food with your own bare hands. When she’s not whipping up a massive braise, or talking her way into working in restaurants, she can be found hanging out with her husband and corgi somewhere in Brooklyn (of course).