

Show HN: SoupNextDoor - GrubWithUs for personal chefs - dgunn
http://soupnextdoor.com

======
dgunn
Hello HN. For those who do not want to click, the premise is a GrubWithUs for
private chefs or an Airbnb for food. We have about 20 chefs in NYC who will
cook and host meals in various locations (houses, restaurants, bakeries,
apartments, friends' space, etc)

The business model currently is to make a booking fee (about 15%) on each seat
purchased on the site.

We're doing some testing with a few chefs preparing for our official launch in
January. We'd love some feedback.

I'll be here for questions. Ask me anything.

~~~
aspir
Are you familiar with the home concert movement with musicians? Its
essentially what you're proposing, but in a different industry. You may want
to do some research to see if they've run into any problems, just so you know
what to look out for.

I personally don't know too much about it, except that every party in the home
concert ecosystem absolutely _loves_ it. The hosts throw an awesome party for
their friends at a reasonable cost, and the musicians get paid while
entertaining a grateful audience with what they love to do. I don't see how
this would be any different -- good luck!

~~~
dgunn
I hadn't actually heard of that. Very cool concept though. Our software is
generic enough that something like this could easily spring up. As in, we
don't limit our event to food only, we're interested to see how our users bend
the site to their own will. Thanks for the good wishes and such an interesting
comment.

------
joshu
I love the idea. I wold swear I saw another one of these before, though. Not
sure how well they are doing, though.

~~~
dgunn
You're probably thinking of Housefed.com. He took the site down a while back I
guess. I actually contacted the owner and chatted a (small) bit. Housefed was
by far what I would consider to be the most popular of any of these types of
services, but I don't think he could get a biz model that worked for him.

I'm glad you like the idea. We're doing it a little differently than we've
seen so far. Seems to be working out thus far, of course, it's still very
early.

~~~
skadamat
I had a 90% similar idea to Housefed and talked to Emile as well.

The main issue with Housefed / this thread's idea is that your site basically
allows people to sell food without a permit. I would stay away from things
like house events, because if even a few incidents happen at a house food
event and people blog about it, you won't get in any legal trouble as long as
you be careful in your TOS, but it's VERY bad PR for y'all. (e.g. remember the
AirBNB fiasco?).

GrubWithUs makes sure their chefs are accountable for what they cook /
prescreen all cooks. Private cooking is a whole another legal monster, lots of
things to worry about. I think as long as you educate end users and watch how
you word things legally, you should hopefully be okay :).

If y'all are ever looking to expand to Austin, let me know I'd be glad to help
out / put you in touch with the startup community here!

~~~
dgunn
We've heard this a lot and couldn't agree more. Originally we tried to find a
market of home cooks that wanted to host events but (fortunately) we couldn't
find them which led us to the pros. They were easier to find and they have the
added benefit of being legal and much less likely to poison our consumers.

That said, it's going to happen at some point. Someone _will_ get sick, it's
inevitable. We're prepared to do anything we can to reduce the impact of a
media fire.

We're staying in NYC at first not just to make it feel more exclusive, but
because it makes it easier to know ALL of our chefs personally. Which we do.
So we feel comfortable putting diners in their seats.

~~~
skadamat
Awesome, glad y'all have that figured out :)

I'm loving the site design btw, good work on that! How many of y'all are
working on it by the by ?

~~~
dgunn
Thanks for the kudos. It's just two of us. We both do "it all" but if we have
a lot to do, we break up and I'll work mostly front end design, js, etc and
Matt, my cofounder, will do back-end (django) cause he's way better than I am.

~~~
skadamat
gluck

