Rachel Abady (Class of 2008), Josh Abady (Class of 2012) and Guy Greenstein (Class of 2012)

10/13/2020

co-founded and recently launched Manna, a new recipe app and cooking platform. You can download the app here: https://bit.ly/mannacooking.

Q: Tell us how you came up with the concept for Manna and how it took off.

Guy Greenstein: After I finished college about two years ago, I started thinking about what I could do on my own time while I was looking for a job. My mom cooks at home and is also a private chef; she keeps kosher and is lactose intolerant, so she’s virtually vegan. She is constantly crossing things out, writing things into the margins, and printing out recipes. I knew there had to be a better way to do it! I started looking online for recipe apps and it just seemed like everything was too complicated or didn’t fit her needs and I wondered if I could do a better job.

Rachel Abady: I spent my career in video, journalism and media working at the nexus of what’s now called audience development (how you reach people when you’re trying to tell a story). I worked really hard to get my dream jobs but I felt like the corporate world was not for me. I went from the Huffington Post to the New York Times to Vox and I was ready to quit my job, but I was afraid because of the uncertainty of it all and I was looking for the right idea essentially. When this happened and [Guy and Josh] told me what they were thinking, I said why don’t we call it Manna?

It was cheeky in a lot of ways. We all met at Jewish day school. What is manna in the Bible? The nourishment in the sky that gives you everything you need. What is the point of the app? To give you everything you need in the kitchen to cook and find recipes. I quit my job two weeks later with no plan but pursuing this. We approached Guy’s dad (David), a serial entrepreneur and CEO, who has really built his own self-made empire in the lifestyle/consumer business with physical products. He built an incubator for himself where he takes small businesses and helps them grow.

Guy has built every single inch of this app completely by himself. Josh and I tag team everything else when it comes to the brand, the voice, the partnerships, the strategy and David is our guide and we work with the agency Graj + Gustavsen to hone the visual parts of it. We have freelancers who work with us to do design. We’ve built out this insane business in 18 months and now we’re at this critical point where we are trying to fundraise so we can take it to the next level and make it huge. It goes without saying, but this was relevant before Coronavirus and now that people are cooking inside all the time, it’s not only clever and useful—it’s vital. We weren’t going to launch until 2021 and then when this happened, we thought it would be a huge mistake not to share it with the world.

Q: What has the last year been like for you?

Josh Abady: Guy called me at the end of March 2019. Rachel quit her job April 1. Our business incorporated on April 3. We moved instantly. Everyone was in a position, especially Rachel and me, to either quit a promising career and do this or not.

RA: This business is really becoming a business in a way that is so unbelievably quick and crazy. The thrilling part of it is people want it and there’s interest and we’re building the plane as we fly it. That’s what we do every day and that’s what you do if you’re an entrepreneur in your 20s or 30s. When I quit my job for this, I got into the final round of one of the biggest jobs of my life and I said no. I don’t regret it and I would say no again even though some days it’s so crazy. It’s our big chance to do something incredible.

Q: How did you develop your business model?

JA: The obvious answer [in order to become profitable] is advertisements but there’s a problem in that online recipes already have tons of ads, and we’re actually trying to eliminate those. We will have some ads in the social environment of our app, but when it comes to the utility of managing recipes, prepping, we want to take away those distractions.

Rachel came up with printing out cookbooks for holiday presents so people can have their own cookbook to share that they custom create. We have lots of content partnerships: unique products we will sell in the Manna store which is launching pretty soon. But we needed a big revenue driver. Grocery delivery services have been massively exploding in the past couple of years and they’re up 70 percent since coronavirus. But it’s actually quite a tedious process just like shopping at the regular store. Our app is uniquely designed to automatically do grocery shopping for people. Our solution is you drag and drop recipes from your cookbook directly into a meal planner. You make your meal plan for the week and you click a button and our meal planner will automatically measure and calculate everything in all of those recipes and make you a grocery list of everything you need. You click one more button and it redirects you to Instacart or another service and you have a filled out grocery list and it shops for you.

Q: What has working together been like?

RA: We all have very complementary skills which is the reason the three of us made sense. Guy is a literal tech architect. He knows how to build and code and has learned how to be a designer. Josh has a really good sense of how money and finances work since he had been a self-employed poker player for many years. I’ve worked in big companies and in media and know a ton about marketing and branding and partnerships. We’re all responsible for joint pieces but we do it together still.

Q: What are some challenges you have encountered along the way?

JA: Right before the pandemic really hit, and I literally mean days before, we had our funding secured. It was March 15. We were not going to be crowdfunding and we were going straight through our professional network. We were going to move into their office building. Then the pandemic hit and since we’re in the food space, everyone who wanted to invest in our app—all these people who are restaurant owners and entrepreneurs—lost tons of money and pulled out of the deal and it was heartbreaking. There was a point where we were pretty sure the business would die. We figured we tried, we got unlucky, and there is a global pandemic so what can you do? And then we decided to fight for a few weeks and see what happened.

Suddenly we got blown up with messages: the pandemic, everyone is cooking at home now, and your app is so relevant. We did a total 180. Rather than laying down and calling it a failure, let’s accept the reality and take the small silver lining that comes with something as horrible as this and gives people an app that can help people cook at home.

Q: What sets Manna apart from other food apps that are available?

RA: This app is supposed to feel approachable and non-judgmental to all skill levels. In pitch meetings, we say Bobby from Iowa and Bobby Flay are put on an equal playing field in a way that doesn’t exist. And what is food? Food is connection; food is family; food is human. It feels like this thing that is so primal should feel easier with the technology that we have . . . especially if we’re rooting it in community and that’s the ethos behind it.

GG: The number one thing that sets us apart from other apps in terms of the technology is the fact it was built this year. Almost all of the other apps in this space were built five to 10 years ago, where the app space in general was in its infantile stages and the technology wasn’t really there yet. A lot of recipe apps that were built with the newest technology of 2013 cannot adapt to the newest times because it would require a complete redesign in their architecture so they can’t really catch up to us in that sense.

JA: The food app space is split into two segments. You have publishers on one side (Bon Appetit, Food Network, All Recipes, etc.) that have apps that plug in their content in exchange for watching ads. They are designed to increase the consumption of their recipe content. On the flipside, there are repository apps (like Yummly and Big Oven) which don’t address many pain points in the kitchen. If you find recipes on the internet but you want them in your app to organize them, there’s no way to do that unless you have two separate apps and you’re managing each. There is not really a social component either, so you can’t interact with other people even though there are millions of users online. You cannot share what you made or ask for tips or advice on what you should make, and there’s nothing like swipe mode where if you don't know what you want to make but you know you want to make something, we have a way for you to find it.

Q: What advice would you give alumni looking to start something from scratch like you have?

GG: When I started, I didn’t know anything. I just knew the basics of coding. I taught myself how to do it in high school and throughout college, but I had never coded an app. I buckled down and learned how. Now it’s something that I feel could be my career going forward very easily. Even if it doesn’t work out, I’ve gotten incredible experience out of it and that’s what I would tell any developer. You don’t get more experience than figuring things out by yourself.

JA: I remember in the initial days where I would give up my desk to our intern so that he would feel more comfortable in the environment and watching Guy code. A lot of it was figuring out what to do. Forget doing it! We weren’t sure what we were doing and we were constantly coming up with new features, new ideas. Our most popular feature now is our swipe mode and that’s something we came up with because I made a joke that I was going to leave this company and start food Tinder. Why do you swipe on Tinder? The data shows it’s not actually because you think you’re going to match with people and mostly because you like looking at people. Food is the same. Some recipes you actually want and think of adding to your cookbook. And you might see a seven layer cake and think I’m never making this in a million years but it looks incredible.

Q: How has being part of the Leffell School/Schechter Westchester community impacted your start-up?

RA: This wouldn’t have happened if we wouldn’t have met at Schechter Westchester, case in point which is kind of insane. Schechter was quite literally the breeding ground for this idea. Josh and Guy have been best friends for years. We always talked about kehilah and community. This is living proof of that. This was born from the community and we keep reaching back out to the community to keep iterating and finding new ways of improving.

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