- Exhibit
- 02 · iChefs
- Status
- Stopped
- What we believed
- Chefs and the people who want to hire one would find each other more easily through one trusted middleman, like Uber for cooking.
- Where we got stuck
- A two-sided market that needed a big investment up front, a team of friends without the discipline to run it daily, and a launch in Brazil, where we had few connections.
- The question it left us
- If people love it, who on the team will run it every day, and do they want to?
iChefs connected chefs with people who wanted to hire one, with iChefs in the middle. Think Uber, but for cooking. The team had the expertise, and the people we showed it to loved the idea.
That’s usually the moment founders relax. Validation feels like the hard part. It wasn’t.
A marketplace is two businesses
A two-sided marketplace has to win chefs and customers on the same day, in the same city. Neither side shows up without the other. That needs a large investment up front, before the first booking, and someone matching, chasing and fixing things every single day after it.
Love doesn’t run a product
We were a group of friends with good intentions and day jobs. Nobody had the time or the discipline to operate it daily, and nobody had agreed to be the one who would. People loving a product doesn’t tell you who will run it.
The wrong place to start
We launched in Brazil, a market we weren’t close to and where we had few connections. Marketplaces launch through relationships, city by city. Without them, there was no way to bring either side in.
What we’d try now
- Validate the operation, not only the idea. Run the service by hand for a week before building it.
- Name the operator before the launch date. If no one wants that job, the model is wrong for the team.
- Start where you have relationships. A marketplace’s first hundred users come from people you know.