Gojee’s Beautiful Recipe Website Comes To iPhone, iPad And Android

Gojee, a design-driven recipe sharing website which has grown its user base to over half a million, is today debuting mobile apps for iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The company, which raised $2.8 million in funding this July, has often been described as “a full-screen Pinterest,” Gojee co-founder Michael LaValle tells us this morning. And now that the company is starting to see traction within the “foodie” space, the plan is to go after other verticals next, including perhaps home decor, art and fashion.

The company originally launched in July 2011, with the idea to create a mobile/tablet-like experience for browsing recipes, but decided to put it on the web first, says LaValle. From there, they watched how users interacted with the service, and what sort of things they wanted to do with Gojee, prior to releasing these mobile apps today. The iPad version of Gojee feels a lot like using the website, except that it’s swipe-enabled, you’ll notice. Meanwhile, the smartphone apps have a more vertical experience, but are still quite similar to the overall feel of the website.

Gojee, whose design aesthetic earned it a nomination for “Best Design” at the 2012 Crunchies awards, currently sources its content from a network of over 300 independent food blogs. And these sites are carefully chosen. “We care a lot about the design of the blog, and we care about the part of the world they’re from,” says LaValle. “We like [the recipe] to have a story behind it,” he adds.

Users on the website, or now in the mobile apps, can browse through the recipes, and get inspired by the big, beautiful photos – similar to how people are inspired to order food at a restaurant in real life: by seeing a picture on a menu or tabletop ad, or seeing a dish on another person’s plate, and thinking to themselves, “yum, that looks good!”

The company is now thinking about when and how to integrate a few other features users are asking for, including organization of favorites into categories and support for uploading users’ own images. No ETA on when those options will become available. You can download the new mobile apps from the company’s website here shortly, or directly from Google Play or iTunes, or by searching for “gojee.”