Dexterity Talks with Ivy Nguyen

My special guest this week is Ivy Nguyen, Co-Founder & Head of Growth at Recime (https://www.recime.app/).  Recime is the world’s most popular recipe organiser, with over 2 million downloads. 

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?

I’m one of three co-founders of Recime, alongside Christine and Will.  We started the company in 2020 during COVID.  It was originally a side hustle because we all loved cooking and just wanted an easier way to share recipes with each other, especially our family favourites. We decided to go all in and work on it full time in July 2022.  It’s been an amazing journey so far especially as things have grown since moving to NYC earlier this year.

How did you get here?

During uni, I worked at a small dress rental startup, supporting social media marketing and operations. My first role after uni was working at a big-4 bank in risk and compliance.  It was a good experience in so far as I got to play a number of different roles and manage different work forces. 

Now my role as head of growth at Recime is focussed on paid and organic marketing, which has been a big shift.  I’ve been learning on the go and speaking to so many different people along the way.

Our app has evolved a lot along the way.  In the beginning we were a free to access social network app, now we are a recipe organizer and we have a freemium model.      

I’m now in the fortunate position to work with people who can support our marketing goals, but at the very start we had to do it all ourselves from learning how to edit video, write scripts, publish and manage ad performance.

How did you as co-founders pick you roles?

Before we went full-time, we did everything together.  Through that process each of our natural strengths emerged.  Christine has a background in consulting. Will worked in investments and had experience on monetisation and fund raising. For me, I really enjoyed the creative aspects of marketing and growth.

What has been your biggest challenge in business and how did you overcome it?

As a company it has been figuring out our product market fit.  We started off as an app that allowed users to socialise and share recipes.  That worked during COVID and in its aftermath as everyone wanted to cook whilst finding a way to stay social online. 

As time moved on post COVID, the social aspect of the app actually became less important to users.  That led us to pivot into a collation and organisation tool. 

Personally the biggest challenge for me was to get up to speed on marketing, it is ever evolving! I spoke to so many people.  Listened to a bunch of podcasts.  Read all the marketing articles.  Marketing is an experiment and it was great to have a close knit founding team I could bounce ideas off.

Do you have to deal with accountants, lawyers or other advisors as part of your role?  And what do you think is important for them to know when working with start-ups?

I think it really helps if advisors demonstrate that they understand the business and where you stand practically.  Then they can provide much more helpful advice as to legal implications.  For us moving to NYC threw up a lot of new legal questions and it was great having advisors who understood our business.

What is next for Recime?

We have been improving our social media importing, websites and cookbooks in order to improve the accuracy of our app.  We also want to make it more accessible on iPad and android. 

Finally, how is NYC working out?

It’s been amazing.  There is so much to do and it’s a really inspiring city to work in.  I feel an energy to work and everyone we meet is very inspired about what they’re doing.

We have a few friends living here before we moved and that made it a lot easier to hit the ground running.  There are a lot of social events so there are many opportunities to meet new people.  I’ve gone along to a cookbook club I saw on Instagram and have joined a running group.

Ivy Nguyen – thanks for talking with us!

Dexterity Talks is a web series of interviews with founders, investors and advisors in the Australian start-up scene.  This interview was conduct by Pippin Barry (BA, JD), an Australian lawyer and the principal of Dexterity Law.