* I can't cook every night but it's convenient to have it there so I don't have to plan from the morning to cook if I end up staying at home. I think most people would do the same.
* 5x / 7x less shipping fees for everyone.
* If you have stuff for 7 nights worth of food already set, I can pick my favourite 3. This is very powerful because I get a lot of choice and thus, satisfaction. The main problem people have with CSA farm shares for example, is that they can't control what they get. Also, this way you don't have to come up with recipes and mass-source ingredients every single day (which is very hard). Instead, you get to do that over the course of a week.
I think you can learn a lot from the methodologies of http://www.bostonorganics.com/.
Also, if you really are considerate of the vegans and vegetarians, you will get rave reviews and the support of a vocal and big customer base who love to cook and blog.
Nice photos go a long way, especially in food. It's hard, but it makes the difference between whether I will cook a recipe or not (i.e. a good photo will make me do a $20 purchase and commit 1 hour)
Finally, I think you should encourage customers to "hack" your recipes with their own ingredients, and maybe even offer a few variations with every recipe.
Hope this helps, and good luck! :)
We're working on our new page already. This page will have much more details, pricing plan, sign up, etc... We definitely have to liven up the page and add more pictures
And I love the idea of hacking recipes
I like the special diets idea.
Even better with hacking is that you can have a community-voted hack of the week (where you can't vote for yourself) and people upload their photos. Even better, you can offer those winners one of next week's recipes for free, in exchange for rights to their photos. So that you can uploads those photos in time for next week, and also get some valuable feedback.
Argh, even thinking about this is getting me excited.
You'll want to provide some sort of "difficulty" level with the recipes. Not everyone is good or confident at cooking. Following on to what makmanalp said, that could be another factor in addition to vegetarian, number of diners etc. Being able to pick 3 meals for the week would help greatly.
I'd recommend you publish your recipes even to those without accounts etc so others can try them, even though they'd have to get the ingredients themselves.
You'll find that not everyone has the best cookware and tools. You may find a good source of ancillary revenue and/or "frequent flyer" benefits to be supplying nice tools (eg knives, spatulas, scissors) and pots/pans.
The difficulty level is also a great idea. I think giving them a choice of meals/difficulties is good, we also want to add the option like "surprise me" for people to discover new things. What do you think about that?
You can certainly gamify things, and also take inspiration from the humour of Woot. For example bingo cards where you try to have meals covering the whole alphabet, or colours. Or "World Tours" where there are sequences of recipes that trace a path geographically around the world. Or voting certain ingredients off the "island". Or pick a film/TV show and make what the characters eat (or inspired by what they eat, or their locations). The Once Upon A Time In Mexico DVD has a 10 minute short on it showing how to make puerco pebil that I've done several times.
Here for example are the Indiana Jones locations: http://indianajones.wikia.com/wiki/Travel_with_Indy:_Locatio...
Out of that you'd get South America, France, Egypt, UK, India, Spain, Venice, Jordan and the US Southwest. My mouth is already watering :-)
