Why We Designed Garde, a DIY & Recipe App
If you're anything like my wife, you recreate food recipes you see on TikTok or Instagram. & If you're a DIY enthusiast, you likely save videos like this outdoor chair by Handyman or even this mirror frame decor.
You're the reason why I developed Garde.
Garde is an app that turns any how-to videos into text. This way, whenever you want to recreate that activity or food you saw & loved from TikTok, IG or YouTube, you can open the Garde app, paste the link, & see the step-by-step instructions from there.
The solution we solve is simple: Garde helps you avoid scrolling through your saved pages on TikTok, especially when you're at the grocery store & are trying to buy the ingredients for the Mediterranean gazpacho soup Ramsey Gordon made.
How Garde, the DIY & Recipe Keeper App, Works
You find a recipe or activity you want to recreate, simply copy the link, open the recipe app, & paste your link.
In about 1-2 minutes, Garde will process the video & extract everything you need: a complete list of ingredients with exact measurements & step-by-step instructions you can actually follow. It'll look like this:
Continues below:
& ends here:
You can compare Garde’s accuracy with the actual video from Gordon Ramsey:
If you’re wondering how Garde compares to one of the most popular alternatives, see image below:
Garde’s recipe app is on the left, & we obviously pay more attention to detail than one of the leading recipe apps in the category.
What this means:
The same video that would have you pausing & rewinding in the kitchen is now a clean Google-Keep-looking text you can glance at while cooking.
The beauty of Garde is that you've already watched the video.
You know what the dish or activity should look like, a mental picture of how it comes together. You just need the text as a reference - to confirm measurements, check the next step, & make sure you didn't miss anything.
& That's why about a thousand people already use Garde via the web app to save their instructional videos & read from it when they're ready to “cook.”
A Few Features of Garde that Makes your $4.99 Worth It
Garde is $4.99/m & 49.99/year for now, & here are a few features that makes it worth it:
1. The Shopping List Feature
The recipe app helps you automatically pull out ingredients from each recipe card. This means you can automatically create a shopping list from each recipe you saved.
Where it becomes genuinely useful for my wife is that you can generate a shopping list that combines multiple recipes at once.
For context, say you saved three recipes on Sunday. You head to your meal planner & slot a Mediterranean chicken recipe for Tuesday, beef tacos for Thursday, & stuffed peppers for Saturday.
You can combine the ingredients from these three recipe cards so you can use it as your ultimate grocery list for the week.
You can then check the items you have in your house off, & only check the rest of the unavailable items as you shop.
This way, you're not watching that recipe video all over again when you get to the mall like my wife really did, especially when she forgot her cooking notebook. You'd be using Garde’s recipe app as your ultimate shopping list.
2. The Meal Planner
As a three months old couple, & like every other couple, we often run out of food ideas for breakfast or dinner. You probably get tired of worrying about what to eat too.
As I write this blog on my couch, my wife has asked me what to eat for dinner twice.
& Like every other time since I added the AI Recipe Maker feature to Garde, I've pointed her to the feature. “Tell it what we have & it'll generate three food ideas for us.” But this is another feature entirely (see point 5).
The Meal Planner, in essence, helps you plan your week (or day) through a food calendar.
With it, you can slot each recipe into the days of the week you want Garde to assist you in the kitchen. For example, if you intend to make that burger recipe on a Sunday afternoon, you can add it to the Sunday lunch slot.
& if you found a snack idea for Saturday, you can add it to the snack box for Saturday. I currently have two snack ideas for Wednesday & Saturday as at the time of writing.
This way, the Meal Planner is your partner in the kitchen, & this makes sense for families of all sizes.
3. Reminder feature:
You may want to take action on some of your ingredients before you actually cook.
For example, you may need to prep one of your ingredients before you cook. With Garde recipe app, you can hit the reminder button & write “marinate the chicken two hours before cooking.”
Some recipes even require you to marinate some ingredients overnight. The reminder feature comes in handy so you know when to get up & prep your meal for the next day.