Is anyone else bemused by what happened on Dragons’ Den on Wednesday night? Carole Savage went on looking for £100k for her “online community for people who love food and cooking and want to share recipes with their friends and family”.

Deborah Meaden ended up giving her the dosh for a 15% stake in the business, MyDish.co.uk. The whole thing had me shaking my head. The first two questions I had were – 1) how did Carole Savage convince a load of friends and business people to pump £600k into the business already and 2) what in under God, has she spent the money on? I know on her blog she says she was actually questioned for two hours so maybe that was covered but we didn’t see it in the 10 minute segment in the show.

I’d rather invest in a free dose of leprosy. Having only £150k of the money left, she has already spent half a million pounds. What on? I hope to hell it’s not the website for two reasons, the first being that they knew Dragons’ Den was on last night and they’d feature on it. One plus one equals…how many? Yeah, that’s two. Of course there’d be a huge influx of people wanting to look at the site to see what it was all about. And what happened when I tried to log on to MyDish this morning? I couldn’t get in. After five attempts I kept getting “504 Gateway Time-out”, which in a nutshell basically means they haven’t thought of making sure they had enough bandwidth to cope with the demand after the show went out. Poor.

The second reason I hope she hasn’t spent the money on the website is that throughout the show, and specifically when questioned by Theo, when he asked if their site could be replicated, she said that they had created their own software which took a while to develop. That would ring alarm bells with me immediately. No one needs create their own software these days. It’s like a new corner shop opening up and the owners deciding to build their own till in a shed with what’s available from some garden waste, alongside Mr T, Face, Murdoch and Hannibal Smith.

I’m surprised the more technically minded in the Den didn’t give her a harder time. Her claims that she could charge £80k a year in advertising to companies for a website that currently has 100,000 visitors a month is ludicrous. I hate to get on my Internet hobby horse on a food site, but there’s too much waffling when it comes to online advertising.

Here’s the simple facts – when talking about Internet advertising, anyone talking in anything other than unique users and page impressions is bullshitting. James Khan at one point called her answer “wooly” and he’s right. 100,000 visitors equates to roughly 60,000 unique users. And if she seriously thinks she can charge each advertiser nearly £7k a month for those figures, she’s living in cloud cuckoo land.

I’m still astonished that Deborah Meaden put up the money. But then I’m no entrepreneur. I was able to get on the site from my phone whilst Dragons’ Den was on TV, and I didn’t see anything special. I’m not saying it’s an awful site, it’s not, it’s reasonable enough. Will anyone really use it because they can click on a recipe and immediately get the ingredients ordered via online shopping? No. It’s too complicated. Most recipes involve bits of ingredients that you already have – flour or butter or whatever. So then it becomes fiddly. And who’s going to bother when that happens? Then there’s the fact that most online food ordering systems charge a few quid for delivery. So are you really going to order just those items when the delivery could cost the same?

The site is easy to replicate, and whilst it wouldn’t be an overnight job to be as technically advanced as MyDish, I’m not sure it would be altogether that much of a huge deal. Neither am I sure that it’ll be able to grow at the rate that she thinks. Fair play to her if it does, but for me I’m out (not that I’ve any money to put in anyway).