how to disrupt the broiler whitespace
a vision, a name list, and an open invitation to dm me your cap table
Nobody uses their broiler. This is a fact I am prepared to defend in any room. It sits there, at the top of your oven dial, fully functional, completely ignored, like a treadmill that came pre-installed in your apartment. You know it exists. You have made peace with never really using it. You once turned it on to melt cheese and it went fine and then you never spoke of it again.
Meanwhile, someone became a billionaire selling you a small convection oven and calling it an air fryer. You put it on your counter. You make chicken thighs in it. You tell people about it at dinner parties. This is the world we live in.
the pitch
Here is what I am proposing, and I am proposing it to anyone with a manufacturing contact and a tolerance for moderate risk: a countertop broiler. Not a toaster oven. Not another beige rectangle. Not a salamander, which is the professional kitchen version of this idea and is the size of a small car and costs four thousand dollars and would absolutely solve your problem if you were willing to knock out a wall to install it. Something thin, something that folds down from under your cabinet like it has somewhere to be, with a single heating element pointed directly at your food and a timer that shuts itself off before you destroy anything. A window so you can watch. A name that does not sound like a home improvement project.
Think the thing that lives above the stove in every serious restaurant kitchen, miniaturized, made beautiful, built from medical-grade materials it does not need, given a name that sounds like a verb, and sold at a price point that makes you feel like you are investing in yourself rather than your kitchen. A Breville designed by Apple. One button. Brushed aluminum. A founder note on the website about how they went looking for the perfect broiler and couldn’t find one so they had to build it themselves. It does one thing and it does it faster and better than anything else in your kitchen and it fits in a drawer when you are done.
the market
The broiler is already in your kitchen and you are afraid of it. That fear is the entire market. The air fryer became a cultural phenomenon by competing with a deep fryer that nobody owned. This product gets to compete with something you already have and already avoid, which is a much more honest value proposition and frankly a lower bar.
the names
I am giving this idea away. I want nothing except to see it exist and to be proven right about the broiler.
The following names are also free:
Skorch
Searify
The Flame Tamer
The Scorcher
Broilboy
The margins are real. The counter space conversation is already happening in every kitchen in America. The only thing standing between you and a hundred million units is the word broil, which we have agreed to retire, and a form factor that does not look like something from a 1987 Sears catalog.
I’m willing and able to try first products, dm for my address when you announce the pre-launch.