The Merrymaker Sisters successfully launched their recipe app in November 2016 and it rose to number one in the Australian app store within 24 hours.
The sisters are health and happiness bloggers, Emma and Carla Papas who want to create an affordable app with their quick and easy, healthy recipes.
“We love creating recipes for our blog, this is why we see hundreds of thousands of views to our website each month,” says Carla.
“The hard thing for our readers is refinding their favourite recipes; they can waste hours researching for it. We wanted to create something that made finding and more importantly making, healthy recipes easy.”
Get Merry App review
The mobile phone app is simple to use, with recipes divided by type (breakfast, sweet treats, smoothies and drinks, savoury snacks and dinner). There’s a place to bookmark your favourites and a one click to save your shopping list. Each recipe has a super pretty illustrated photo of the dish, a clear list of ingredients and step by step instructions. There is also a handy time to make and serving size.
We cooked the Moroccan lamb and pumpkin salad and enjoyed our dinner. I’m looking forward to trying slow cooked beef cheeks with a slow cooker, paleo cheese burger and fried cauli rice.
If you subscribe to the Merrymaker Sisters email newsletter you’ll know they excel in the sweets area. You’ll be tempted by recipes for chocolate raspberry tart, raw banoffee cake, vegan wagon wheels, health Ferrero Rocher and gaytime cake.
About the Merrymaker Sisters
The sisters founded themerrymakersisters.com in 2013 when they started living a paleo lifestyle and sharing images to their personal Instagram accounts. Since then they’ve moved to a ‘real’ or unprocessed lifestyle.
“Paleo will always be part of our story but for us, it’s more important to take a less stress is best approach in all parts of life… especially food! We both used to have a really negative mindset when it came to our body image. We’d binge, feel guilty, beat ourselves up for a day, feel like crap, eat ‘healthy’ for a couple days then do it all over again.”
The sisters’ homepage sums up their philosophy as ‘stuff the diets and guilt trips (they suck!). Get Merry instead.’
“Getting Merry is all about enjoying real food that is fun and yum. It’s about adding more good to your plate, rather than focusing on the stuff you ‘can’t’ eat. Eating food that makes you feel amazing and surrounding yourself with others doing the same.”
The sisters now reach over 1.5 million people every year with their messages, have self-published 2 cookbooks, created Merrymaker Club: an online meal plan membership as well as the #MerryBiz podcast where they interview experts and share their candid, personal stories.
Creating the app
The sisters wanted to create a simple and easy to use app, but they found original quotes discouraging.
“We asked around a few business groups about building an app, were told numerous reasons not to do it… it would cost over $100K to build, apps are dead, no one needs it…but when we spoke with Jarrod from The App Match he said different,” says Carla.
“He explained that the convenience factor of having all our recipes at the touch of the button would solve our reader’s problem and to start right away!” Plus he said it would cost us under $1000 in development… which with Jarrod’s help and coaching, it did!”
The sisters worked on the app for over seven months to bring it to life.
“We set the goal for 500 downloads in week 1 of launch… [it’s] safe to say we need to think a little bigger next time! We’re so happy that our readers love the app as much as we do! It just proves that anything is possible when you want to make it happen.”
Download the Get Merry App
The Get Merry App is available for only $2.99 (AUD) with Android and iPhone versions.
For more information, on Emma and Carla head to the Merrymaker Sisters website.
To find about more about mobilizing your business with an affordable solution head to The App Match website.
