Mark Smith
Khal is a dedicated cooking profile for professional chefs and cooking enthusiasts to show their cooking skills. Users make profiles, add recipes, make other peoples recipes.
In the process of making their profile good they add a lot of user generated content, which makes the platform interesting. Also the social factor lets you see the cooking activities of the people you follow
Tell us about yourself?
I’m a software developer who loves to cook. I was raised in Mumbai and moved to the US 13 years ago. Prior to Khal my brother and I started a company and took it to $16 million in sales. Currently I’m working on Khal and plan on making it a a multi-billion dollar company
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Sit back and enjoy the ride. It’s going to be a fun 2 years going forward
What problem does your business solve?
There is no place to have a dedicated cooking profile. Khal is a dedicated cooking profile for professional chefs and cooking enthusiasts to showcase their cooking skills
What is the inspiration behind your business?
I really to cook cook and share my recipes with family and friends. Before Khal there wasn’t a dedicated social media platform where cooking enthusiasts can showcase their skills. I want to bring the culinary community together – everyone from foodies to cooking professionals
What is your magic sauce?
Our magic sauce is our persistence. We are creating a community of cooking lovers as opposed to showing recipes from our staff chefs
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
In the next 5 years we want to have more than 100 million cooking enthusiasts on our platform. Our vision is to have every cooking lover to have a profile on Khal
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
The biggest challenge I’ve faced so far is raising money for our startup. We have bootstrap our way to over 270,000 users. I had to learn to code within 6 months to get the platform started
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We want everyone in the culinary community to create a dedicated cooking profile on Khal and share their recipes with the world
