Homecooked, Inc.

A world without strangers at the dining table - inclusive social dining experience.

An ironic characteristic of our new digitized society is that communication is easier and faster than ever before, and yet, we struggle to connect. We are more socially isolated than ever before. We interact with each other through screens at work, then go home and sit alone at our apartment dining tables.

The dining table used to be the central core of our social life. And it makes sense. Food is the fundamental building block of society. It is a testament to the extent of our isolation that now we eat 53% of all of our meals alone.

Homecooked is about connecting people and re-socializing food. We are a social dining platform that enables people to book seats at the tables of local home cooks. "Cook," here, is a broad definition. Anyone can cook, or host a Homecooked event. These events take place in the intimate setting of the chef's own home, through the medium of food. We organize events based on shared interests and passions between the chef and their guests. We believe that these are all the ingredients for forming meaningful relationships and connections to break through the isolation of our digitized world.

We're envisioning change on a global scale. Socio-political climates are more polarized than ever before. We want to build multicultural food spaces where people from a diverse array of backgrounds can break bread together. The result we dream of is more integrated, connected local communities and larger societies.

Our solution leverages already existing resources but utilizes them in an innovative way to create a new market category within the food industry. The food industry lacks any truly social dining experiences, almost an insult to the very roots of food.

We use existing infrastructure (home kitchens) as a connective space for home chefs and dinner guests.

Our mobile app is built on React Native and through AWS, allowing us to be flexible, scaleable, and 100% portable for both iOS and Android.

AWS's very recent Lambda function allows us to scale the application incredibly quickly. This is because it allows apps to be built on a serverless architecture, meaning that instead of paying for and maintaining our own servers, we pay AWS per computation.

This will allow us to quickly expand our social dining platform into global markets much more quickly.

We'll implement these features:

1) Organizing events by shared interests.

We display social profile cards of the chef and other guests. We organize the feed so that tables where others share many of your interests/passions appear at the top.

2) A level system. Chefs start at Lvl.1, where they can host events for maximum $15, host 1x2 weeks, and for 5 guests. They advance levels by gaining experience from positive ratings/reviews/tips, upon which they choose to increase price, hosting frequency, or # of guests.

Through the rest of the year, we plan to expand into Boston, Providence, New York, greater Ontario area.

The long-term vision is to develop our social dining solution for social isolation globally.

In February '19, we want to try Homecooked in Latin America, with Santiago, Chile as our launch point. We'll expand into Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil over the next 6 months.

In August '19, we want to start with Copenhagen as our home base for expanding in EU.

In March '20, we hope to participate in MIT-CHIEF, and are extremely excited about working in China and Southeast Asia. Between the three founders, we actually speak Canto/Mandarin, Korean, Vietnamese, and Hindi.

We grow organically by involving the guests in onboarding chefs. New chefs qualify after hosting test events reviewed by guests. New cities have an updating progress bar that tracks sign-ups and opens when enough users sign-up.

Our app is built on React Native for iOS/ Android. In September, we'll launch a web app at a hackathon in Ontario.

We reach our audiences through YouTube, where we imbue the journey of building Homecooked with transparency and personality. This includes a startup vlog and a comedy-sketch called "Recipes for Disaster.” Our first episode features our CTO trying to program on a typewriter.

We have 128 paying users - 12 chefs and 116 guests.

Our guest target market consists of the 22-35 and 48-65 age groups in urban environments. This age distribution represents the most socially isolated age groups.

Our chef target market consists of the same age groups, with a baseline level of cooking skills.

Once our app is live, we'll use Facebook login for a referral program to organically grow at a rapid pace.

Homecooked allows chefs to monetize and share their cooking in home dining spaces. It allows guests to connect through food and shared interests.

Guest testimonial

Chef Testimonial

We will serve 10,000 guests and 250 chefs by 2019, and 100,000 guests and 2,000 chefs by 2021.

Chefs will host about 10 events per year. In 2019, we will serve 250 chefs across 20 major cities in North&South America. This is about 2,500 events, which will be attended by 4.0 unique guests on average.

In 2021, we will serve 2,000 chefs in 70 major cities across the Americas, Asia, and Europe. About 20,000 events attended by 5.0 unique guests on average. The 1.0 rise in average guests accounts for higher level chefs hosting more guests per event.

Hojung (CEO) is able to clearly communicate his vision and direction. He has also gained accounting and marketing experience supporting himself as a South Korean pro squash player.

Kevin (COO) has the superpower of day-to-day execution, and an uncanny ability to empathize with people, a crucial reason we've been able to create many of the underlying parts of the Homecooked experience.

Eric (CTO) is a coder-philosopher who combines the machine-like efficiency of a programmer with extremely grounded thinking and humility.

15% commission fee on all bookings.

We hope to graduate away from this by relying more on affiliate advertising for food and cooking ware products to our chefs and guests, as well as relying on YouTube ad revenue from our startup channel.

Quite frankly, MIT's approach to building social impact is unrivaled by any other university (and we're saying this as UChicago and Yale students). We're excited to work with MIT faculty and SOLVE to build a truly connected and inclusive social dining experience.

To build a truly global solution requires a fluid mesh with a vast variety of global cultures. We hope that Solve can help us navigate the challenges of building a truly multicultural social dining experience by advising us on cultural empathy, and providing connections to changemakers in many of the local communities we are looking at for expansion.