Mumbai: Launched in April 2020, HT Media’s innovation hub for digital-first products – HT Labs has built a diverse portfolio of products spanning edtech (HT School), fintech (MintGenie), OTT (OTTplay), food (Slurrp), and digital publishing (Upublish) in the B2B and B2C domains in just 18 months.
While OTTplay is a content discovery and recommendation platform that aggregates information from over 50 OTT platforms in Indian and Asia, HT Schools, with its focus on holistic learning and development, has nearly 40-45 courses in collaboration with well-known names such as Shaan and Sabrina Merchant among others.
Digital Publishing platform Upublish, though catering to independent writers and journalists as well, is largely a B2B product targeting small and medium publishers. MintGenie is a fintech app intended as a ‘learn, earn, and grow ecosystem’ for those with little or no knowledge of investing.
HT Labs is led by publishing industry veteran Avinash Mudaliar who is the company’s co-founder and CEO. He likes to describe it as “a start-up hub where all product, tech, and thought leadership happens.” His team comprises over 150 professionals across technology, product, design, content, and editorial. Earlier this month HT Labs launched its fifth brand Slurrp in the food space under Mudaliar’s leadership.
How Slurrp was founded
Slurrp, with its over three lakh recipes, was born out of the problem that there are a lot of recipes out there but it becomes very difficult to narrow down on that which fits one’s choice of cuisine, health consideration, regional choices, ingredient preferences, and allergy considerations, all at the same time.
“During last year’s lockdowns the number of searches on things as elementary as “how to cook rice in a microwave or how to store vegetables” skyrocketed as people staying home became wary of ordering food online. The struggle to figure out these basics was compounded by the fact that there was no one place to find all related information. That’s when HT Labs decided to solve this problem using AI and launched India’s first recommendation engine for recipes – Slurrp,” shares Mudaliar.
Slurrp’s TG includes all those who ‘live to eat’ and ‘eat to live,’ and therefore, it effectively serves the needs of all interested users across levels of proficiency in cooking. The app is currently being monetised through affiliate shopping models, sponsorships and ads.
The recipe – just the right mix of content and technology
Mudaliar tells us that Slurrp was launched with an equal focus on content and tech wherein apart from collating new and age-old recipes at one place the intent was to build conversations and stories around food. The app takes users on culinary trails charting the history of the most familiar as well as the most exotic of their favourite food and beverages.
There are plans to launch a community feature in the next couple of weeks to provide a platform for chefs, influencers, and enthusiasts to exchange ideas. “Because not all information is documented, and a lot of hacks and interesting trivia – the grandmothers’ secrets – come out only during conversations, this information can later be integrated into the mother app and recipes or conversations with the end-users with the help of AI,” he says.
More features in the offing include an AI-based personal assistant to take people through their cooking journey, enhanced filters, language personalisation, and voice recipes. At present, the app has only textual and video recipes in English.
Some of the uniquely interesting filters that Mudaliar’s team is exploring include those around food combinations and mood-based recipes. “Food and music consumption are very similar in the sense that mood plays a very important role in how a person eats. We are exploring ways to offer personalised recommendations to satisfy these not-easily-definable features,” he states.
Mudaliar’s most important consideration while designing the app was to solve for the barrier of entry by keeping the interface simple. “We didn’t want to change user behaviour or break any paradigms, so we incorporated features such as ‘swipe left, swipe right’ that most people are used to, and further simplified on that. The idea is to make users comfortable, enhance their cooking experience and get them to spend more time on the app by offering easy access to content,” he remarks.
