Chicago, Get Your Pots and Pans Ready!

Hey Chicago, we're almost ready to start eating and hosting some home cooked meals!  We want to make sure enough people know about GrubWithUs before we start our beta launch, go to http://grubwith.us and petition to open up the Chicago area for service.  The quicker we get to our target number, the quicker everyone gets to eat.  We definitely need people that want to cook and want to make some money off their cooking too!  If you're still unsure about the site, you should look at this post now.

We're going to be cooking it up at the GrubWithUs apartment in Lincoln Park near DePaul, so definitely come eat and give us some feedback on the site.  We want to make sure this service is super fun and safe, so that everyone can eat, meet new people and have a great time.  For those of you interested in hosting meals but are worried about random people coming over, check out a previous post about consumer psychology and the peer review.  As a host, you choose to accept or reject any person wanting to come eat.  And remember, your address is never given out until your accept a person to your meal! 

Posted via email from GrubWithUs blog

Productivity Porn

I'm an efficiency freak and love it when things get done quickly and my time isn't wasted.  I honestly think one of the main reasons why I hated working in corporate jobs was because things weren't efficient.  I'd get my job done, but would still have to sit around for 'face time' and be bored out of my mind.  Now that we've broken away from the corporate lifestyle, I'm constantly finding ways to be even more productive.  Reading Hacker News a few times a day definitely doesn't help my productivity, but I always find great articles like "The Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity".

I won't recite it here, but if you want to become more productive, definitely read his blog post.  The one tip I like the best is how to use your procrastination to become more productive.  Procrastination usually happens when you don't really like doing a certain task (for me, it's writing test scripts).  Instead of putting off the task and searching online for some sort of distraction, keep a list of other tasks that need to be done that day as well.  When you feel like procrastinating, do those other tasks instead.  You'll end up feeling very productive, even though you procrastinated!

There's also another tip on the guide that I really should be doing.  It's eating breakfast.  Daishin and I try to usually meet up between 7-8, and we usually starve ourselves until lunchtime.  Like, literally starve.  We must complain that we're hungry about 10 times each in the morning.  Putting fuel in our bodies in the morning might actually make us more productive as well! 

Posted via email from GrubWithUs blog

GrubWithUs...Chicago!

We've had a great time grubbing with everyone in Los Angeles and we really appreciate all the feedback!  We've learned so much about what our users want and a lot about our capabilities as well.  LA is our home, and it's been awesome, but one of the co-founders has to move to Chicago for half a year.  It's a long story that you'll definitely hear about one of these days, but this is a location dependent website and we don't want to half-ass anything.  This means, we've decided to move our operations to Chicago and expand there first!

Don't worry, we're not abandoning you, LA.  We'll be back here real soon and will be growing the Los Angeles region in a few months, but we just felt that we have to be all together in the initial growing stages.  We're really excited about GrubWithUs, so we're willing to take off the shorts and put on the parkas for the site!  Chicago is an awesome city and we also think the people living there are very open minded and would embrace the idea.  We'll keep you guys posted and Los Angeles will be definitely be our next stop!

Posted via email from GrubWithUs blog

Never Eat Alone

You know that popular business networking/motivational book "Never Eat Alone"? Well I've never read it, but I'm pretty sure I don't have to pay $14.95 to get the point. Other books the author should write are "Never Watch a Movie Alone", "Never Play Board Games Alone", and "Never Get Stranded on an Iceberg While Being Chased By Six Polar Bears Alone". Anyway, the point is that many things suck if you're doing it alone, but eating alone really sucks.

In grade school, my favorite classes were lunch and recess. In college, my favorite classes were lunch and sleep. When I started my career in Consulting, my favorite time was definitely lunch, when 12 of your favorite coworkers would spend 1-2 hours not doing work. When I decided to work at an Investment Bank, lunch consisted of going across the street to pick up food, then running back to your desk to eat alone and stare at the screen for another 12 hours. It was the first time that lunch wasn't fun.

Food is such an important component of our lives that we should definitely enjoy it whenever we can. I've had my fair share of dinners alone in my apartment and it's never pleasant. Since I'm only cooking for myself, I'm too lazy to cook up fresh food and end up getting take-out or heating up some Lean Cuisine. That's why we're creating this site.

We're creating a place where anyone can basically create a restaurant at their home, center it around an activity (such as watching the NBA Finals - Go Lakers!!), and have your paying guests and new friends come over to eat a great home cooked meal. Never Eat Alone!

We do not want to live online

First post from our new startup! Can't show it to you yet (since we haven't finished building it..), but we'll be unfolding it here over the next few weeks. For now, we're going to tell you how it all happened.

It's hard to quantify how many ideas we've had and how many times we've started a project and written a bunch of code, only to realize that we had a better idea and should work on that idea instead. I think we've had around 11 serious concepts, but GrubWithUs was the lone survivor. Why?

We do not want to live online.

Sure, you can have a good time on Facebook by stalking your thousands of 'friends' everyday or peruse Twitter to find out when your favorite celebrities are having more fun than you are, but we'd rather have some physical interaction. Heck, I'm so off the online life bandwagon that I just created a Facebook account last week and that was because I wanted to reserve my vanity url. Of course, every url I really wanted was taken because everyone was sitting alone on a Friday night reserving their url!!

I may sound like an old timer and not 'with the times', but is it too much to ask to physically meet new people these days? Can we get away from the Super Poke for a few hours and enjoy a great meal at a real friend's house? Maybe many people out there enjoy human - computer - human interaction, but GrubWithUs is here to take out the middle man!

We're building this site to fill a need of ours and who knows if it'll catch on, but here's to hope that we're not just a society of zombies and vampiers and mobsters and that we actually like talking to real people!