Editor’s note: This is part of VentureBeat’s series “Startup Spotlight.” Every week, we’ll sift through the scores of companies applying to be promoted and profile the best one. Companies can sign up here at the Entrepreneur Corner, which is currently sponsored by Microsoft. (Of course, you’ll still find lots of startup news and innovation in our day-to-day coverage.) Today, we continue the series with Rouxbe, below.
Instructional video sites like Howcast and 5min are becoming more and more popular these days, offering short visual guides for a variety of tasks ranging from fixing a bicycle to breaking up with your boyfriend. Not surprisingly, many of them also contain cooking categories, teaching users how to make specific dishes. Rouxbe (pronounced like ruby) takes this idea a few steps further, providing a video curriculum that actually teaches you to become a competent cook, complete with recipe drills, quizzes and progress tracking.
Rouxbe is the ideal destination for anyone who recently left the movie "Julie and Julia" determined to learn how to cook once and for all. The site offers step-by-step videos for even the rawest of beginners and is designed to build their skill sets gradually to more advanced levels. The company says the techniques taught are the same that any chef would learn in professional cooking school.
When you first visit the site, you find a featured video (today it's "How to Brine"), as well as a list of other skills to choose from like "how to cook steak" and "knife sharpening." Drop-down menus also provide a selection of recipes and tips. But these are just to give you a sample of course content. After providing login information, you are granted access to even more videos for free, as well as forums where you can discuss recipes and lessons with other site members.
This free, basic level of membership allows you to take quizzes, bookmark recipes and videos and track your progress. The only restrictions are that you can only view one lesson a day from a smaller pool of lessons, and there's no support or advice from professional chefs. The site runs targeted advertising to monetize these memberships.
In order to learn how to cook more methodically, users are encouraged to upgrade to premium accounts. This is how Rouxbe brings in revenue. Subscriptions to the cooking school cost $15 a month, $99 a year, or $199 for lifetime membership. Premium membership lets you watch as many instructional videos as you want a day and allows you to ask chefs for help via the site. It is also free of advertising.
The prices might sound steep to internet users not accustomed to paying for this type of video content. But each lesson is expertly produced -- not user generated like on many sites -- giving clear and helpful directions. The breadth of the curriculum is impressive. It doesn't just teach you how to make isolated recipes (which it does well too) -- it shows you how to prepare your kitchen (sharpening knives, buying the right ingredients, even how to properly heat a pan).
It also breaks things down by food groups, showing you everything you need to know about cooking with vegetables, fish, legumes, sauces and even chocolate -- one at a time. Other cooking videos, featuring fancy recipes and celebrity chefs, lack this comprehensiveness. Becoming an accomplished cook means knowing the intermediate steps -- like how to make sauces, stocks or dressings -- backwards and forwards. This is the toolkit Rouxbe seeks to give its users, not to mention a catalog of delicious recipes.
So far, the site has attracted tens of thousands of users in 180 countries. Almost 950 videos have been posted, with 26,530 quizzes already completed. This is pretty good for a site completely focused on cooking, and serious cooking at that. Rouxbe also has a humanitarian bent, contributing 10 percent of all the membership fees it collects to the United Nations World Food Program to help feed hungry school children.
Based in Vancouver, Canada, Rouxbe has raised $3.4 million in venture funding to date from Beacon Law Advisors, former Flickr COO Jason Classon, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield and Imagekind and Inkd co-founder Kelly Smith.
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