Scran

Scran Founders (Jonny and Grant)
Scran Founders (Jonny and Grant) with Community of Testers (Scranners)
Scran Founders (Grant and Jonny) in their kitchen
App Logo 1024x1024
Hero App Store Image
User Journey Screens
Simplified Recipe - Our Hero Feature
Recipe Home Screen
Shopping List Feature
Scran Flyers at the Edinburgh Fringe
Scran Launch Event at the Edinburgh Fringe

Inspiration

Scran is an inclusive cooking app co-designed with neurodivergent people to take the mental load out of cooking.

We’re Jonny and Grant, the two-person team behind Scran. We began building Scran last year to combine our experience across product, design and engineering with something we both love: cooking. Jonny had previously worked on AI education technology supporting neurodivergent students, and we wanted to apply that experience to an everyday activity with the potential for meaningful impact.

Our research highlighted the heavy mental load surrounding cooking. It requires people to plan, remember information, switch between tasks and follow instructions in sequence. Dense paragraphs, hidden preparation, separated ingredient amounts and repeated scrolling also add unnecessary cognitive demands.

We saw an opportunity to combine accessible design and tailored AI to make any recipe easier to follow, helping more neurodivergent people feel confident, supported and independent.

What it does

Scran fits into how people already discover recipes. Users can share a recipe directly from a website or social app, or import one from a screenshot, cookbook or handwritten note.

Scran then uses tailored AI to simplify it into a consistent, accessible format. Preparation is brought forward, ingredient quantities appear within the relevant steps and instructions are broken down into smaller tasks that can be ticked off.

Cook Mode presents one step at a time, helping people stay focused and maintain their place. Users can also choose dyslexia-friendly fonts, increase the text size, use dark mode and switch between metric and imperial measurements.

Saved recipes form a visual, personal recipe bank and can be organised into collections. Ingredients can also be added to automatically aisle-sorted shopping lists, reducing the mental load across more of the cooking journey.

How we built it

Scran was built by a team of two. Jonny led product, research and growth, while Grant owned both product design and engineering. We worked with an indie-hacker mentality, keeping the design, build and testing process as lean as possible while creating foundations that could scale into a sustainable business.

Notion became our shared source of truth. It brought together user research, product requirements, delivery tracking and, crucially, the reason behind each feature. This helped us stay focused on solving evidenced user problems rather than adding functionality for its own sake.

We built Scran with a modern cross-platform stack. Expo and React Native allowed us to develop for iOS and Android from a shared codebase, while RevenueCat manages subscriptions and PostHog helps us understand how people use the product.

Our approach is to release, measure and learn. We use analytics, user feedback and A/B testing to evaluate changes, then feed those insights back into our requirements and designs.

A coordinated fleet of Claude Code agents has helped our small team work across the development lifecycle, from synthesising user research and refining designs to writing code and automating tests. This creates a continuous loop between Claude Code and Notion, turning user insight into requirements, implementation and testing, then capturing what we learn to inform the next iteration.

Challenges we ran into

Our first challenge was building Scran without external funding. We invested our savings, worked around existing commitments and had to make careful decisions about where a two-person team could create the most value. We are now reinvesting Scran’s revenue into its continued development.

Reaching the right users was another challenge. Building in public helped us grow a waitlist of around 500 people and recruit the community that shaped the product.

AI quality also required significant attention because recipes vary enormously in structure and source quality. We introduced evaluations, quality controls and user feedback mechanisms to help us improve the reliability of recipe imports and simplification over time.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

Our proudest result is the evidence that Scran is changing how cooking feels.

In a voluntary beta survey, 32 of 36 respondents said Scran had made cooking from recipes easier. Nineteen said much easier and thirteen said somewhat easier. The remaining four had not used it enough to say.

We continue measuring this outcome in the live app by asking users for a thumbs up or down on whether Scran made cooking easier. Of the 102 responses so far, 100 were positive.

Scran launched on 6 August 2026. Since launch, it achieved:

Around 2,500 downloads
172 paying subscribers
$5,136 in gross revenue
A 52% trial-to-paid conversion rate
More than 50 five-star ratings
Coverage across seven press outlets
A place in the UK’s Top 100 Food & Drink apps for 2 days

These results were achieved with just £650 in marketing spend.

We also took Scran onto the streets of our home city during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. With help from ten friends, including two dressed as giant Scran logos, we promoted the “Fringe’s only downloadable show”, handed out 750 flyers and generated 50 downloads. It gave our self-funded launch a joyful and memorable moment.

What we learned

Our biggest learning was that accessibility comes from many considered decisions across the whole experience, not one standalone feature.

Beta testers showed us that the mental load extends beyond following instructions into finding, organising and preparing to cook recipes. Their feedback helped Scran develop from a recipe simplifier into more complete cooking system.

We also learned that people do not necessarily need different recipes. They often need the recipes they find presented in a more accessible way. Combining user-led accessible design with tailored AI allows Scran to provide that experience across different sources, diets, cultures and households.

Finally, our launch showed us the importance of trust. Coverage from respected publications, recommendations from existing users and support from neurodivergent communities were our most effective sources of growth.

What’s next for Scran

Our priority is to deepen the value Scran already provides. We will continue improving import reliability, accessibility and personalisation using product data, in-app feedback and ongoing research with neurodivergent cooks.

We also want to reach more people through trusted communities and explore how Scran could support people with learning disabilities to learn to cook.

We will continue growing sustainably, reinvesting revenue while protecting the accessible experience at the heart of Scran.