Starting a business with my wife O_O
My wife is a classically trained chef. She's opened 2 restaurants, cooked for celebrities, had some of her food on the Food Network, and is an all-around badass. I'm a career tech guy that's deep in product management, customer success, and no-code tech.
Since moving to the Washington DC area, she's taken up a different career (that pays actual money) but still throws multi-course dinner parties for our friends and co-workers. Every time we host one of these, at least one guess drops this line: "I wish I knew how to do something like this."
Well, we're going to test the hypothesis that people do indeed want to know how to cook multi-course meals that make sense. We've reached out to five people, all of whom agreed to test an "MVP" of a plan, built using Canva.
If we find out there's some traction with these folks, I'll end up creating a "product" here on IH and documenting our journey. I have a ton of ideas of tech that could exist to help, but I'm not building a dang thing until we have a crisply defined problem space and target audience.
PS. If any of you are interested in testing the plan and providing feedback, I'd love to connect!
All the best @andrew_bpco I personally think that coming up with quick UI mocks using tools like Figma (which is free for 1 user) can help build mind maps of concepts
Figma is a great tool! We're not at a point where UI mockups make sense yet, but I prefer to to skip mockups and test real implementations using Bubble. It's only a tiny bit slower, but the ability to deliver actual user value makes it worth going this route.
I've found users give different feedback to mockups than they do when they're actually using the software to do something. If I were working with a dev, I'd totally be using Figma to create the designs for implementation, but since I'm doing it all myself, I'd rather build the designs once!
fair point. mvp is the way with simulated experience
This is awesome, good luck!
Thanks! We had our accidental first sale come through today. Your luck has passed to us!
Sounds like you're well on your way to validation!
This is awesome, @andrew_bpco, looking forward to following your journey!
Thanks! I'll keep posting until we find a reason to abandon the pursuit.
Best of luck working with your wife. I certainly feel bad for my husband having had to work with me, lol. (kidding). We survived and are still together!
It's kinda funny...we've worked together multiple times for other people. I was on the team for one of the restaurant openings (part-time), and we've worked at the same tech company since 2015. We've never really DIRECTLY worked together, but I feel good about it. She may have other opinions :)
why a new platform and not build a content package on an existing platform?
BTW, you know https://www.eatwith.com/ ?..
Like for both phisical and virtual learnings of cooking or anything else there are plenty of platform people can buy content in today... Also plenty of content say on youtube, some use to promote other content they have, membership sites, books and others...
For sure! Eat With looks to be used for folks that want to eat a dinner party with locals. Our hypothesis is that regular non-chefs want to learn how to throw a multi-course meal of their own. The first cut at a plan is a step-by-step guide for an entire 3-course meal, not just 3 separate recipes.
There are plenty of other folks doing content around cooking, you're totally right. Success for us looks like this: Can we get 500 people to cook and host a 3-course dinner party for their friends? Can we get those 500 people to create a complete experience that folks remember and talk about for months?
The risks for us are pretty nonexistent. We love doing this type of thing, we're both gainfully employed at steady jobs, we have no intention of quitting to go full-time indie hacker, and we're hoping to learn a ton about marketing, social media, and content creation throughout the process.
Like do consider it's one of these that people would say yes way more than they would actually buy at the end of the day by a long shot and likely won't actually do as much as they buy...
To "get 500 people to cook and host a 3-course dinner party for their friends?"
How many do you think you need to train? 5k? 50k?...
Do you think this would spread by word of mouth?
Honestly staring at the niche for a couple of years from the side I'm getting the feeling it's mostly the gift/event/experience niche more than actual teaching/learning... (The majority of it as revenue)
You should probably validate if people see a difference between 3 recipes and a 3 course meal...
Like you could put content on skillshare or any other course platform...
Thanks for the thoughtful replies. There are a ton of things for us to validate, which is exactly where we're focusing at the moment. There's a chance this won't work out at all, but that's ok!
Sorry a bit off topic, but do you have tips on how to find a wife like that? :)
Here's how I did it: