ZipList

» see ziplist.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The first archived copy of ziplist.com is from 11 December 2008 and the product is already finished. "ZipList, The Grocery List that's Always with You!" runs across the top, with a tour, a signup, and a feature list promising you could add to the same list from a computer, an iPhone, a BlackBerry, email, SMS, or instant messenger. The company had been formed in Reston, Virginia earlier that month. Geoff Allen was the CEO.

What it solved was a household coordination problem rather than a cooking one. Two people, one list, both of them adding to it from wherever they happened to remember the milk. Everything after that was built on top of the list: recipe saving, so that clicking a dish would push its ingredients onto the list, and aisle sorting, so that the list came out of your pocket in the order you walked the store.

Then it stopped selling itself to shoppers. By early 2012 Allen was telling reporters the strategy had moved away from being a standalone site, and ZipList was embedding its recipe box inside other people's food sites under their branding. Martha Stewart ran it. So did a long tail of food blogs and magazine websites. The company hit a million users in March 2012 with four million recipes saved among them, and most of those users had arrived through a partner rather than through ziplist.com, which by then was closer to a developer's homepage than a destination.

~ the case file ~

~ the pivot nobody saw ~

White-labeling was the whole business by the end. A publisher dropped in a save-recipe button, readers built boxes without leaving the publisher's site, and ZipList reported an average 15 percent lift in pageviews to the people who installed it. Revenue came from splitting ads with the partner and from what the saved recipes said about the reader. Six and a half thousand partner sites eventually carried it.

A grocery list sorted by supermarket aisle is a product with a country attached. It assumes a weekly big shop and a store whose layout holds still from one month to the next. Shopping in Turkey around 2010 meant the corner market a few times a week plus a Migros run when something ran out, and nobody needed routing software for that. The recipe half travels anywhere. The aisle-sorted list was built for somebody else's Saturday morning.

~ the exit ~

Condé Nast announced the acquisition on 11 April 2012. The reported price was around $14 million including earnouts, and the logic was that the publisher already owned Epicurious and Bon Appétit, both of which were ZipList customers or could be. Buying the vendor was cheaper than licensing it forever.

Thirty-two months later Condé Nast shut the vendor down. The notice went up in late 2014 and opened "It is with heavy hearts that we announce that ZipList will be no longer be supporting the recipe box and shopping list platform," typo included. On 10 December 2014 the website, the iOS and Android apps, the recipe clipper, and every partner's embedded box went dark at once. Users were told to create an Epicurious account with the same email address and their recipes would merge across.

The shopping lists did not make the trip. The FAQ is blunt about it: "Unfortunately, there is no way to sync our shopping list with another service." Anyone who wanted theirs had to visit ziplist.com/savemyziplist before the tenth and download a zip file of CSVs. Archive Team ran a grab between 2 and 4 December 2014 and got the public recipe pages out, which is more than the users got.

~ the funny part ~

ziplist.com resolves today and serves a WordPress site titled "Free printable templates, cooking recipes and apps." It has a Genesis theme, a reader-interactions block, and no connection whatsoever to the company that spent six years building a recipe box on that address. A squatter picked up a lapsed domain with food-related search history and built the cheapest possible thing to monetize it, landing on roughly the same three nouns by accident.

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