10/23/2020 ryan@indigap.com
Post MVP case study by Indigap INC. (facebook page: here). Note: Don’t Panic! Just Cook. is no longer running.
Don’t Panic! Just Cook. (referred to as DPJC in this case study)
DPJC was an online virtual cooking platform. The initial goal of the platform was to be a marketplace for virtual cooking classes, hosted by professional chefs, presented to users in their home’s during the COVID-19 lockdowns via ZOOM. Think AirBNB for chefs “turn your kitchen into money, virtually”.
Vision – Short-term: help offset the economic and social impact of Covid-19. Long-term: to host vegetarian and vegan virtual cooking classes with the goal of producing flavorful dishes that would contribute to a healthy lifestyle and to help offset of greenhouse gas emissions produced by reducing the amount of live stock consumed/needed by humans. (EPA reported that 9.9 percent of 2018 greenhouse gas emissions were from agriculture.). The initial classes of DPJC were not required to be vegan and vegetarian.
Note: after the ideation and implementation of DPJC, it was soon realized that video streaming live classes would be successful even before or after Covid-19. However, Covid-19 was a forcing function for live video streaming platforms and the fast acceptance live online classes.
Ideation
The unique opportunity Covid-19 presented was: 1) To prevent the spread of Covid-19, an overwhelmingly large (if not nearly all) portion of the World’s population were confined to their homes and essentially isolated from all in-person socializing (including the workplace). This created a mass need for people to start cooking all meals for themselves at home and find alternative ways to socialize. 2) Because of restaurant closures, effective immediately, approx. all chefs/cooks/etc. were laid-off/suspended/unemployed. 3) The immediate world wide adoption of live video streaming platforms, such as ZOOM, allowed for video streaming (by a chef and users) to easily be implemented for work/socializing/etc.
The three points from above, realized an opportunity to help chefs/cooks/etc. to work from home and get paid by teaching people to cook, virtually, from their own kitchen’s (both chef’s and users) via ZOOM during Covid-19 lockdowns. As well, this helped people to be socially engaged with friends/family/strangers during the COVID-19 lock down.
Note: some restaurants stayed open, at minimum staffing, to keep serving food during the lockdowns. However, there was still minimum staff and low order output.
Problems being solved
1. Chefs/cooks/etc. jobs were immediately paused/ended during lockdown do to restaurant closures. Leaving a large portion of the service industry unemployed.
2. Due to lockdown and restaurant closures there was a large influx of people cooking for themselves at home.
3. Due to lockdowns, people’s needs for in person socializing were paused/ended.
Business Plan-ish:
1. Create Online Marketplace for Chefs/cooks/etc. to post virtual cooking classes.
2. Attract Chefs to Marketplace and post classes, attract users, and get paid.
3. Attract Users to Marketplace to participate in classes form classes offered.
4. Take a transaction cut in the purchasing of tickets.
Creating an Online Marketplace
The DPJC MVP website was built via WIX. WIX provides a low cost web design + easy to use website template platform, as well as customizable page layout, event ticketing (WIX does take a % of ticketing cost), and add-ons. WIX Premium Plan $28/month. Time invested to build WIX site approx. 15-20hrs (time includes learning WIX platform).
Attract Chefs to Marketplace
Attracting chefs to the marketplace was quite easy.
Personal network, most friends/family (who knew how to cook) were willing to host classes for free, donation based, or for a fixed cost. *Friends and family classes drew in the largest groups. Mainly for support and socializing.
Unique chefs were either recommended to the platform by users from personal network or drawn to the site via Meetachef.com ($10/month). Meetachef.com brought in +20 chefs to the site (highly recommended).
Attract Users to the Marketplace
Attracting users to the marketplace was easy. However, getting them to purchase a ticket was very difficult.
Users were attracted to the platform via personal network, Facebook ads, and word of mouth. Having a Facebook page and Instagram page was also helpful in attracting people to the platform because classes could be promoted directly to followers.
Facebook ads was the best way to go in attracting unique users. However, Facebook is not great at getting people to purchase tickets. An average add would run for 5 days and cost approx. $10. Facebook insights reveal of 15 classes, of 48 million targeted, 8K people were reached, 195 event responses, 17 ticket clicks, and 0 ticket sales. It was found that Facebook users would show interest in the event and then not take any action almost 100% (see conclusion).
Take a transaction cut in the purchasing of tickets
DPJC took 20% of the ticket price set by the chef. Chefs decided how much they were going to charge for each class. Most chefs opted to charge between $15-35. Others did donations or free. The donation based classes had the best turn out and higher payouts to chefs. The paid classes seemed to deter users from buying a ticket (higher price lower turnout).
Strategies to get people to use the platform
1. Facebook ads. Based on the collected data from the Facebook Ads (see above), there was an overwhelming response from people in the age range of 24 – 45 and over 75% were from women. Facebook insights reveal of 15 classes, 8K people were reached, 195 event responses, 17 ticket clicks, and 0 ticket sales.
2. Find and connect with chefs who are hosting virtual cooking classes, of their own, and offer to post their classes for free on DPJC. This was very effective in getting attention drawn to the DPJC platform and to have consistent and new weekly posts on the platform. This strategy is one of the best ways to get unique users and raise awareness.
3. Contact business HR departments to raise awareness for companies to host virtual retreats and team building exercises for their employees during work from home. This was done in the later stages of the platform and was concluded that small HR departments, preferably ones with one HR person (i.e. startups), are the best to target because they have the most power. In larger corporations HR departments have a hierarchy and have to get spending approved creating a hurdle for our goal.
4. We eventually micro-focused the vegan and vegetarian community. This was to achieve our long-term vision goals and have a focused target audience. Vegans and vegetarians have a hard time transitioning and finding tasteful recipes that are easy to make. Many vegans and vegetarians are willing to try new products, such as plant based protein, and are interested in new recipes to keep variety of flavor in their dishes.
5. The idea of having “donation-based” only classes was floated. This strategy could ease the worry of users who are skeptical of taking the class. In theory, this would also get the chefs to perform at their best to increase donations received.
Class Results
1. Friends and family classes, by far, had the largest turnouts. From what was observed, this is because the chefs used their network to promote themselves and the users felt comfortable engaging with each other from the start of class.
2. People felt most comfortable attending classes with people they knew, both virtually or in the same kitchen.
Unknown unknowns I found that many chefs need a way to make income while in between jobs. Many of the chefs interviewed for DPJC said that they would highly consider using a platform, like DPJC, so that they can support themselves between jobs. It was found that the restaurant industry can be quite harsh for it’s workers and jumping to a new restaurant, or starting your own for that matter, is really hard. So there was much interest in chefs wanting to host virtual/in-person cooking classes while in between jobs.
Conclusion
The observation behind low unique user turnout was due to the amount of hurdles a user had to climb to take a course. Example: 1) User must find a class they want to take by date and/or by dish. 2) Because the classes were scheduled for a specific date and time a user must schedule this class into their calendar and not at their convenience. Due to the way classes were scheduled this further reduced the probability of a user not finding a class that works for them (consider time zones). 3) If a user found a class within their schedule, they would then need to buy a ticket and the ingredients for the class (costs could get >$100/class). And 4) the user had to feel confident enough that the class was worth it. In the age of “one click buy” many users would show interest in taking a class but fail to attend due to so many hurdles.
A fix to this would have been to rebuild the website so that the chefs would be able “open” their calendar to accept classes, just like AirBNB. This would allow users to pick which day and time would work best for them. Then once the user requested/paid for a class they could talk with the chef, which would build confidence in the user to take the class. It would have been nice to include partnerships with local farms and grocery stores to pre package/supply the food to the uses and chefs.
I believe all of this can be accomplished and done successfully. However, after much work and consideration on the MVP, it was decided that DPJC does not fall into the long-term goals of Indigap and the project has since been ended for the following reasons: 1) There is no new/interesting/immediate tech to be developed in the short-term. And any long-term tech goals of DPJC have not been realized. 2) There was no realization of 10x-ing this service/product to beat the competition or significantly changing the industry. Due to the ease of repeatability there are now many competing platforms, including AirBNB. 3) Time to profit could not be determined and PMF could not be determined.
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