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Core concepts

Before diving into specific features, it helps to understand the core objects you will work with in dough and how they fit together.

Recipes

A recipe is the central object in dough. It represents a single dish with a title, description, ingredients, instructions, timing, photos, and classification metadata (dietary tags, cuisine, meal type, season).

Recipes can be created manually or imported from URLs, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, screenshots, or a WordPress recipe plugin. Every recipe goes through a simple lifecycle:

  • Draft — the recipe is in your library but not ready for email use.
  • Active — the recipe is ready to be inserted into emails and included in products.
  • Archived — the recipe is hidden from your library but still works in any products that already reference it.

Dietary tags

Every recipe can have dietary tags like Gluten-Free, Vegan, Keto, Dairy-Free, and others. When you import or create a recipe, dough analyzes the ingredients and suggests tags automatically.

Tags start as unconfirmed — meaning dough thinks they apply, but you have not reviewed them yet. Once you confirm a tag, it becomes active and can be used to segment your subscribers.

Only confirmed tags are synced to Kit. This protects you from accidentally mislabeling a recipe.

Collections

A collection is an ordered group of recipes. Collections help you organize your library (for example, “Weeknight Dinners” or “Holiday Baking”) and serve as the building blocks for digital products.

A recipe can belong to multiple collections. The order of recipes in a collection determines the order they appear in products like ebooks and recipe card packs.

Products

A product is a digital file generated from your recipes. dough supports four product types:

Ebook

A PDF or EPUB cookbook built from a collection of recipes, organized into chapters with AI-assisted intro copy. Available in letter size (8.5 x 11) or trade size (6 x 9).

Meal plan

A day-by-day meal assignment grid with a consolidated shopping list generated from all assigned recipes. Exported as PDF.

Recipe card pack

A set of individually formatted recipe cards (4 x 6 or 5 x 7), one per page. Great for printable downloads.

Lead magnet

A free sample automatically generated from an existing ebook or recipe card pack. Includes 3 to 5 of your top-performing recipes and a call to action for the full product. Comes with an auto-generated Kit opt-in form and delivery sequence.

Products go through their own lifecycle: Draft (building), Published (live on a sales platform), and Archived (removed from sale).

Segments

A segment is a group of your Kit subscribers who share a dietary preference. dough builds segments from two sources:

  1. Explicit preferences — when a subscriber fills out a preference capture form and selects dietary preferences like “Gluten-Free” or “Vegan.”
  2. Behavioral signals — when a subscriber clicks “Save This Recipe” on a recipe with confirmed dietary tags, dough tags them in Kit accordingly.

Over time, dough builds a profile of your audience’s dietary interests. You can see segment sizes, engagement rates, and growth trends on your analytics dashboard.

Engagement scores

Every recipe has an engagement score on a 0-to-10 scale. The score is computed daily based on four signals:

  • Save clicks — how many subscribers clicked “Save This Recipe” in the last 30 days.
  • Sequence triggers — how many subscribers entered a sequence because of this recipe.
  • Card views — how many times this recipe card was included in a sent broadcast.
  • Purchase attributions — how many product purchases can be traced back to this recipe.

Scores are relative to your own performance — your highest-performing recipe anchors the scale. Recipes with no engagement data have no score.

Automations

dough creates Kit sequences and broadcast drafts on your behalf, but it never sends anything without your approval.

Key automations include:

  • Save This Recipe sequences — when a subscriber saves a recipe, dough can enroll them in a follow-up sequence that delivers related recipes and a soft product pitch.
  • New recipe broadcast drafts — when you mark a recipe as “email ready,” dough creates a Kit broadcast draft with the recipe card pre-inserted.
  • Lead magnet delivery sequences — when you create a lead magnet, dough sets up a Kit sequence that delivers the free PDF and nurtures the subscriber toward the full product.
  • Seasonal recipe drops — you configure a season, date range, and collection, and dough creates broadcast drafts featuring your top recipes on schedule.

Brand kit

Your brand kit stores your visual identity: primary color, secondary color, accent color, heading font, body font, and logo. dough uses these settings to style recipe cards in emails and format your digital products.

On the Studio tier, you can create multiple brand kits for different product lines or partnerships.

How it all connects

Here is the typical flow:

  1. You import recipes into your library and confirm their dietary tags.
  2. You send recipe cards in Kit emails. Subscribers click “Save This Recipe.”
  3. dough tags subscribers with dietary preferences and records engagement events.
  4. Segments form around dietary preferences. You can see which preferences your audience cares about most.
  5. dough recommends products based on segment data — for example, “You have 200 gluten-free subscribers and 12 gluten-free recipes. This could be your next ebook.”
  6. You build a product from a collection of recipes. dough helps with chapter organization and copy.
  7. You publish the product to Stan Store, Gumroad, or LTK.
  8. dough generates a lead magnet from the product and sets up a Kit form and delivery sequence.
  9. New subscribers opt in, receive the lead magnet, and enter your nurture sequence — driving them toward the full product.

Every step feeds data back into dough’s analytics, helping you make better decisions about what to create next.