Homemade

Buy unique Homemade food from local cooks

3 followers

Buy unique Homemade food from local cooks

3 followers

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Launch tags:iOS•iPad•Health & Fitness

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I'm generally very positive about marketplaces and tech that encourage or enable people to create and ideally, make a living off of something they love to do; however, I'm skeptical that many people will be willing to buy and pickup food from a local stranger. Maybe people are more trusting than I expect (Airbnb has shown that millions of people are excited to stay in a stranger's home) but I cringed a little bit when the cook placed the delicious-looking meal in the box with his bare hands in this video:

Thoughts, @ichaboddee and @ndevane?

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11yr ago

Homemade

Maker

@rrhoover Thanks for the feedback! My apologies, I responded below.

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11yr ago

Homemade

Maker

@rrhoover Totally, its something we've spent a lot of time thinking about and working to improve, and Homemade may have a long road to establish meaningful trust. We've found many people selling food off Instagram, hacked yelp/seamless accounts, and running pop-up dinners from their homes and uncertified spaces. Businesses like Eatwith, Dinnerlab, and Feastly have created fantastic solutions and businesses around similar behavior. Our rating and review system allows us to freeze any cook who's food receives negative feedback. Additionally, we have a long list of expectations for cooks and how they prepare food from a sanitation perspective. We provide this information to every cook and make it readily available on mobile, while a fast-casual restaurant in many instances only needs one person on premises to have a food handlers license. Coming from a restaurant background and knowing the way that the current system works, I am somewhat of the party that we collectively place a lot of trust in entities that are infrequently checked or certified. In New York for instance, you can fail a sanitation test and have horrible violations (like rats in your kitchen), but are allowed a full month to display a 'Grade Pending' rating before you get another shot to improve, if you still have not remedied the situation you can appeal and operate for a full additional month, all the while serving people regularly. Lastly, Homemade takes cooks and pulls their networks into our CRM which helps them market to their people, so the typical use case is really buying/picking up food from friends and friends of friends in their local community. We have not built a big business around strangers selling to other strangers at this point.

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11yr ago

@rrhoover I had this exact same reaction at first glance. I wonder if there is something about food that requires a higher threshold of comfort for use in this capacity. With transportation and living spaces, we interact with the service at a level of abstraction that can't exist when it comes to food. I can get out of the car or leave the apartment if I am not comfortable but I have to make a decision from the outset to trust the service because once I take my first bite, there's no bailing. The rating system is vital for increasing the level of comfort but that immediacy of buy-in to the service will be tough for me to swallow. (excuse the pun)

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11yr ago

Homemade

Maker

@kylenoble @rrhoover Lets get to the meat of the issue ; ) Food is tricky because of how poorly prepared food can cause harm and illness. It's an incredibly intimate thing and to your point, if you wake up in the middle of the night with your airbnb host overtop of you, you can in theory run away or call for help. Our view of growth and establishing trust starts with riffing off of existing networks, if friends and mutual friends are the start of a cook sharing food on Homemade, their reviews and ratings may create the necessary jump for less adventurous eaters. At some point, if dozens of people have said "You absolutely have to try Joe Dinoto's Chicken Parm", you may just be tempted by their reviews, friends talking about it, and seeing amazing pictures of the food (and cook). The best part of Homemade is actually when you do get to meet someone you don't know. We call it 'community through food' and it is a powerful way to connect with your neighbors.

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11yr ago

@ndevane @rrhoover I think that makes a ton of sense. Intimate was the word that came to my mind as well which works when my network is leveraged to recommend great places. Your other point about the safety of food in regular restaurants also rings true for me, logically, but there is something about the rating of a regulatory entity that has really strong effects on perception. @jacqvon mentioned certified kitchens which would be a great signifier for health and safety in a way that's similar to a restaurant's rating. I think that special designations for top reviewers like an Amazon Top 500 reviewer or Yelp Elite reviewer would be huge for growing the network outside of what my friends and family can provide. Overall, homemade food always tastes better for some reason so I hope that you guys hit a home run. IMO, the way you leverage reviews will be the most important factor in that outcome.

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11yr ago

Sup app - Friends Nearby

I appreciate the concerns expressed, but I wouldn't be worried by them. Taxis used to to sell the value prop that they have superior knowledge of the city, qualifications etc. But now we see past that apparent value and use Uber. We realised that the 'trust' factor wasn't worth it. Exactly the same with Airbnb. I think this is stunning and am really excited by it. I don't know how this would look (could be a myfitnesspal integration), but if the cook could input nutritional data, that would be sweet. The fitness community would eat that up (see what I did there). Good luck. You're going to have SO many doubters, but I think it'll be so worth it.

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11yr ago

Homemade

Maker

@dannylowney Thank you so much for the support Danny. We feel the same way. We've been looking at some various options to get the nutritional data up on the application easily. Myfitnesspal is great idea/option, also a service like Ingredient1 or something that can make accurate assumptions from our ingredient list. My impression is quality ingredients are the biggest factor to creating healthy and delicious meals. I would love to have you try Homemade out when we reach your community/neighborhood. We're coming to the Southern California area over the next few weeks.

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11yr ago

Sup app - Friends Nearby

@ndevane I absolutely love that you think I'm in SoCal... but let me know when you're in London! Proper ingredients absolutely are important. But fitness folk are interested with Macronutrients above all. If you offered that info, would make it super easy to track. I'm justing thinking of the emergence of healthy food delivery services :) P.S. Insta game strong. Awesome foodie influencers are gonna be so 🔑

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11yr ago

@dannylowney I think people are quite trusting and community dynamics will be able to fix the poor people quickly. To me it's logistics - if you don't nail that experience it can be the most frustrating aspect. I've seen a couple of other products in this space and it's the logistics of getting food from point A to point B that kills them.

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11yr ago

Gorgias

I ate from Homemade for the past 3 months (almost every week). Here's my review. In short: It's both delicious, diverse and relatively cheap. For the past 5 years I've been living in France and let's just say that my culinary standards increased during this time. So when I came to work in NYC the dire situation of the food services here made me truly sad. Homemade was a touch of 'home' for me because I actually ate food from some french cooks here. I saw that most cooks on Homemade are carefully selected and they are usually people who enjoy cooking, they don't have a restaurant, so homemade is a good fit for them and for me :D

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11yr ago

Golden Kitty Awards 2016

@humanfromearth Your testimonial makes me want to give it a try!

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11yr ago

Homemade

Maker

@corleyh @humanfromearth use code: 5off

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11yr ago

Homemade food and community building through enabling technology - what's not to like? I think this team has the potential to do for food what Airbnb did for lodging and Uber did for on-demand transportation. It's understandable they face the same challenges with establishing trust, regulatory hurdles, etc but if you give the app a spin you'll see that they vet their chefs thoroughly and that great care goes into creating a truly differentiated, delicious, delicious product. Now @ndevane & @ichaboddee - where's my Android version? :)

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11yr ago

Homemade

Maker

@aexm Thank you so much for the support! Mobile web is coming very very soon, which will allow us to be platform agnostic on the consumption side and let cooks market individual nano-restaurants. We will make sure to notify you when its live.

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11yr ago

I love this idea. Some friends and I had thought about this for a school project (and possibly after), but after researching cottage food laws in Washington, DC, we scrapped it. Is Homemade focusing on jurisdictions with lax cottage food law, or are you pulling an Uber and offering it first, worrying about the law later?

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11yr ago

Homemade

Maker

@scottruona We are doing a bit of both, finding an acceptable working relationship with regulators to create the proper dialogue around this space (everyone we've spoken to is aware of the volume of both unregulated pop-up dinners and people selling food off independent social accounts/websites). While innovation needs to inform regulation in many instances, this is a known problem that needs an effective answer from the regulation standpoint.

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11yr ago

Two questions: 1. Will the customers come to chef's place to pick the food unlike in traditional delivery services? 2. When will be the android app will come so that I can try ordering some food?

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11yr ago

Homemade

Maker

@ram_rayavarapu Thanks for the questions! 1. The cook can choose pickup or delivery. If they choose delivery, the logistics are on them. We have found that the face-to-face interaction of pickup has been a really important part of the experience, in spite of the friction it adds. 1. No definite schedule for Android app, but we are working on Mobile web which should have you ordering in the coming months :-)

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11yr ago

I'm curious why you thought this should be launched as an app, rather than on the web? If you started on the web it would be more searchable, easier to access, quicker to iterate, etc.

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11yr ago

Homemade

Maker

@pdavies You're totally correct. @ichaboddee however is an iOS dev and initially learned to build for iphone because three years ago we thought this would be the best path to enter the market. We are about to deploy on the web for the reasons you mentioned, along with a few others.

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11yr ago

@ndevane 👌

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11yr ago

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