Traqly is Live. Here's What We Built and Why.

About a year ago, my brother Adam and I started having conversations with personal chefs, private chefs, meal prep chefs, and caterers. We weren't selling or building anything. We were just following the dots from a different idea, trying to understand how these businesses actually run day to day.

We talked to over 100 chefs. And we continued to hear the same thing from almost every single one of them over and over gain.

The cooking is the easy part. Running the business and staying organized is the challenge. Not surprising, but still a challenge.

The problem nobody was solving

Every chef we talked to was stitching their business together with some combination of Google Docs, spreadsheets, text threads, Venmo, and whatever invoicing app they'd tried most recently. Recipes in one place. Client info in another. Grocery lists on paper or in a Notes app. Proposals in a Word doc. Payments through three different channels.

Not because they liked it that way. Because nothing really existed that was built for how they actually work.

The tools that do exist in this space were either built for massive catering companies with enterprise budgets or built for generic freelancers with no understanding of food operations. There was very little in between. Nothing that understood a chef's full workflow and made them more efficient.

What Traqly does

Traqly is an operating system for private and personal chefs. It connects everything a chef does into one platform:

Recipes and ingredients. Upload your recipes or type them in. Every recipe has ingredients with measurements and dietary tags. When you scale a recipe from 4 servings to 12, the ingredients scale automatically.

Smart grocery lists. This is the feature chefs tell us changes everything. Select your menus for the week across multiple clients, and Traqly generates one consolidated grocery list. Ingredients from different recipes get combined and organized.

Menus. Build menus from your recipe library. Assign them to clients and events. Reuse them, adjust them, swap dishes in and out.

Client management. Every client has a profile with their preferences, allergies, dietary restrictions, event history, and communication notes. All in one place. No more scrolling through text threads to remember what a client can't eat.

Proposals and invoicing. Build a proposal, send it, get it signed. Send an invoice, collect payment. Stripe is built in, so clients can pay by card directly through Traqly.

Payments. Accept deposits, process payments, track who's paid and who hasn't. Connected to your events and invoices so the numbers actually match.

Reporting. See your revenue by client, by event type, by time period. Know which clients are profitable and which ones aren't worth the drive.

Ask Traqly: an AI copilot that knows your business

A lot of chefs already use ChatGPT. And it's useful. That's until you realize you're copy-pasting the same context into it every single time. Your client's preferences. Your pricing. Your recipes. It doesn't know any of it.

Ask Traqly is different. It sits on top of your actual business data. It knows your clients, your recipes, your menus, your event history, your numbers. So when you ask it to draft a proposal, it pulls from your real pricing and your client's real preferences. When you ask it to build a menu, it checks what you've already cooked for that client recently.

"Put together a proposal for the Johnson family. 12 guests, $85 a head. Mediterranean theme. Include a grocery list." And it does it. Using your recipes, your pricing, your client's dietary restrictions. Not generic suggestions from the internet.

That's the difference between a general AI tool and one that's built into the system where your business actually lives.

Why we built this

Every creative industry has its platform. Photographers have their tools. Designers have theirs. Fitness trainers, consultants, therapists. They all have software built specifically for how they work.

Private and personal chefs didn't. And it's not a small market. There are roughly 100,000 personal chef, private chef, and catering businesses in the US. Many of them are doing $100K-$300K in annual revenue. These are real businesses, run by serious operators, held together by duct tape and good memory.

We built Traqly because these chefs deserve a real tool. One that doesn't ask them to adapt to software that was designed for someone else. One that starts with how they actually think about their work: recipes first, then everything else flows from there.

We're live

Traqly is available now. If you're a private chef, personal chef, meal prep chef, or caterer running your own business, we built this for you.

Start your free trial at gotraqly.com.

And if you know a chef who's still running their business across five different apps and a group text, send this their way.

Traqly is the operating system for private and personal chefs. Recipes, clients, menus, grocery lists, proposals, invoicing, payments, and an AI copilot that knows your business. Get started at gotraqly.com.