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! 

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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!

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The Power of the Peer Review

Do you remember this crazy video of Hot Dog eating champion Kobayashi challenging a huge bear to an eating competition?  I love the contrast between the frantic looking Kobayashi trying to pound down hot dogs, while the bear gracefully munches on his meal.  I don't even know who wins in the end, but it just shows you that even the scariest of animals can be a gentleman at the table.  That bear must've been raised by a good mother.

Why am I telling you this?  Because by myself telling you how much of a gentelman that bear was, it makes you kind of want to meet the bear right?  Maybe feed the bear some of your yummy food?  That's the power of a peer review.  When people first hear about our site, they often ask about the safety of having people come over to their homes or eating out at other people's homes.  We tell them that there's a risk in everything you do in life, but you're able to rate every person you meet on our site.  People generally want to be liked and want to be invited back, so the peer review really helps people behave.  If you're a real annoying or unlikable person, it'll only take a couple meals before you stop getting accepted to future meals.  Also, before you accept anyone to your home, you can see their full profile to see if their interests are complimentary to yours.  By knowing exactly who's coming over, it's even safer than hosting a house party when a friend's friend's friend randomly comes over.  And hey, since we don't give out your address until you accept the user, you can always say no!

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The Problem With Restaurants

I love eating and I love eating out.  But there are a few huge problems with restaurants.  A couple of them are called tax and tip.  If you order an entree for $6.99, you know it's going to really cost you $10.  That $3.25 lemonade is going to set you back another $5.  It's sad, but tax and tip pain me so much that I try to find loopholes around it.  For example, in California, I've realized that if you order food that isn't hot (like a sandwich), and you tell them that it's to-go, you don't have to pay tax!  There have been many times that I've ordered a sandwich, only to say, "to-go", but just plop right down on a seat to eat.  That little move just saved me 9.5%! 

With tip, I'll order carry-out at my favorite restaurants, so that I can just go in there, pay the exact amount, and eat my food at home.  Obviously I still feel bad that I'm not giving a tip for their take-out services, but it just saved me 15-20%!  (Okay, sometimes I'll tip $1.00 if they're nice...)  The tip on fancy restaurants is even worse.  15-20% on a $100 meal hurts a lot more than 15% on a $7 meal, even if they gave relatively the same service.  Why pay more just because the food costs more?  And why do all expensive restaurants have to be all stuffy and pretentious?  Isn't food about enjoying a meal with your friends and socializing with them?  It seems like the more expensive the restaurant, the less you can be yourself and the less you can enjoy your experience with the snooty patrons sitting right next to you.  

You might think of me as an extreme cheapskate, but we're running a startup!  Every dollar saved is another Del Taco meal, which gives us a greater runway of capital to use while we're building this site.  It's also encouragement for you to use our site, since you never have to pay tip, there's no annoying waiters trying to upsell you appetizers, and you get to meet and eat with great new friends!

 

Posted via email from GrubWithUs blog

It's the execution that matters

I'm currently watching Mint.com's CEO Aaron Patzer speaking about 'Accounting for Startups'.  If you don't read TechCrunch six times a day like I do, check out the video here.  And if you don't know about Mint.com's success story, they started the company about two and a half years ago and just sold their company to Inuit for $170 million cash.  Not too shabby.

While the video is supposed to be about the dry topic of accounting, Aaron's presentation is more about how to start a successful startup.  Quite simply, "It's the execution that matters".  While there are tons of people with good ideas, you need bright people to actually execute and see the vision through.  Aaron goes on to say that a technical cofounder adds $500K in valuation to a company, while a business cofounder subtracts $250K in valuation.  You have to be able to build the product before you can do anything else.

At GrubWIthUs, we've always believed that you have to build the alpha version in house.  It doesn't really work when you have to outsource all your development in the beginning stages.  You're not only losing valuable capital, but your contractors definitely don't care about your vision or drive, and will only do exactly what you tell them to do.  You're basically spending all your time managing people and you can't tweak your code at a moment's notice.

We have two cofounders here, Daishin and myself.  I majored in Computer Science, so I naturally do most of the coding, but Daishin being the political economics major, didn't want to be labeled a negative valuation business cofounder and decided to get dirty as well.  He designs the site, codes all the stylesheets, and photoshops all the images.  It's definitely a huge help for me that he handles most of the front-end stuff so that I can focus more on the logic.  I honestly don't know if our company would even be here if I had to do all the programming myself. 

Anyway, speaking of execution, I'm going to stop this blog post right now so that I can finish integrating our site with Facebook!

Posted via email from GrubWithUs blog

Home Cooked Mac n' Cheese

I want to eat this.  Some good, home cooked mac n' cheese.  I'm not talking about the blue box from Kraft.  I'm talking about the stuff baked in an oven, so that the top layer of cheese has browned and is slightly crispy.  Where the cheese doesn't come from a powder but rather has names like Gruyere and Havarti.  I've eaten at some fancy restaurants that have fancy macaroni and cheese, but I really don't appreciate the fancy $12 price tag plus tax and tip. 

This is where you guys come in!  My first food request is home cooked mac n' cheese.  Instead of paying an overpriced restaurant a boatload of money for mac n' cheese, I want to pay you to eat your version of fancy mac n' cheese.  My mission is to try the mac 'n cheese from every GrubWithUs restaurant, so start cooking and I'll show up. 

P.S. We're opening our site to a public alpha launch really, really soon, so if you know how to cook a great meal, or you want to eat some great meals, make sure you sign up on the GrubWithUs website (http://grubwith.us) with the invite code: creampuff.  See you guys at our restaurants!

Posted via email from GrubWithUs blog

Meet More People And Have More Fun

We humans love to eat. Actually, we need to eat. We also tend to eat three times a day (or if you listen to Taco Bell, you should add Forth Meal). We always think about food. You're probably getting hungry just reading this!

Food is necessary for survival, but we've turned it into something so much more enjoyable..usually.  We'll go out to celebrate a friend's birthday with food, or take a date to a fancy dinner, but what about all those times in between?  How many times have you eaten an uninspired, mediocre meal by yourself at home?  I've done way too many times myself..

Instead, why not eat with a neighbor who's cooking authentic Dal Makhani?  You can actually get to know your neighbor for once as well!  Or why can't we find out about the people down the street who are watching American Idol together and eating homemade mac n cheese?  If I'm going to watch it anyway and I need to eat anyway, I might as well enjoy it with people!

That's why were creating this site. We want to meet more people and have more fun. Eating is something we have to do every day of our lives, so why not make it memorable?

Posted via email from GrubWithUs blog

Changing The World..Of Eating

If you're in Tech, you probably read Techcrunch.  They just had their annual TechCrunch 50 conference, where 50 promising startups reveal their products for the first time.  One major criticism from the conference judges this year was that too few companies were trying to 'change the world'.  Basically, most companies were focused on some specific niche or improving an existing product instead of becoming the next Google or Facebook.  Well, here I am, proud to say that GrubWithUs is indeed aiming to change the world..of eating!

While good restaurants will always exist, we're here to replace the uninspired, mediocre, overpriced, unfriendly restaurants that permeate our cities.  If you only have a $6 budget for food tonight and you don't want to cook, instead of going to one of these depressing sinkholes, why not find a home cooked meal on GrubWithUs, bond over an activity, and make new friends? 

We're also trying to change the world by getting people offline and having real-life connections! We think too much time is spent making online connections, instead of having real-life experiences that you might actually remember 20 years from now.  So help us alpha test at http://grubwith.us and join us on our quest for a dining revolution!

Posted via email from GrubWithUs blog

Being Scrappy

I'm sitting here at the Virgin America terminal at 2:01 AM writing this blog.  Virgin's only $29 flight is at 6AM and no one loves me enough to drive me 50 miles to the airport at 4:30AM.  I am definitely not spending $16/day to park my car, so a buddy of mine drove me to the airport at night.  Here I am, sitting on the same bench as a homeless looking guy and listening to another dude vacuum the whole establishment.  Now they're buffing the floors.  I'm mentioning this because I thought I was being scrappy, but it's probably just mostly pathetic..

Anyway, much has been said about entrepreneurs and being scrappy.  One of my favorites is Paul Graham's essays about being relentlessly resourceful http://paulgraham.com/relres.html.  I totally agree that scrappy entrepreneurs are usually more successful than their counterparts, since they know how to get a lot out of very little.  What I don't understand is why most people aren't scrappy.  It just seems so intuitive to fight and twist and claw to think of every possible way to survive when you're backed into a corner.  Do 'non-scrappy' entrepreneurs just bend over and take it?

Daishin didn't know photoshop, but he learned it.  He didn't know CSS either, but he learned it.  I didn't know one thing about jQuery, but I knew I had to figure it out.  I've always hated sysadmin work, but if there's no one else to configure apache, guess who has to do it?  I can't stand founders who outsource ALL their technical work to someone else and just work on the 'business'.  There are definitely some exceptions, but why spend thousands per month on outsourced development to deplete your capital and shorten your runway?  If you're in a technical startup, then act like a technician and read some tutorials and start coding.  Your 'business' vision will probably change anyway.

And what's up with people needing $9 million in revenues to be profitable?? We just hosted our first few meals as a private alpha test of our website, and we were joking that we were already profitable because everyone that came over paid $2!  When you're being scrappy and the two of you are the only developers, business people, accountants, lawyers, and marketers, being profitable can mean earning as little as $16 dollars!!

So there you have it.  GrubWithUs is cash flow positive!

Posted via email from GrubWithUs blog

Calling all Los Angeles foodies!

If you like cooking and are in the Los Angeles area, we need your help!

We are in the infant stages of our web start-up company and are looking to test our product.

If you are interested in cooking and hosting people at your house, this is perfect! You can make money doing it also.
For more info, check out www.grubwith.us/about

Please email info@grubwith.us to hear more.

In your email, please include the following:
Age/Gender/Occupation

We will contact you if you are a good fit!

Posted via email from GrubWithUs blog

Get a Mentor!

We're humming along at GrubWithUs, getting feedback from our initial testers, but our two guy programming team has always known one key problem with our site: Marketing. Sure, we can do the code, but we didn't have much experience with getting our site distributed.

We decided to go to Twiistup, a tech conference in Los Angeles, with no expectations except to meet people that would be willing to test out our site. What we got in return was a bunch of testers, but also a high-profile tech personality that was uber interested in our site. He's an experienced entrepreneur and also a great marketer, which is a perfect complement to the skills we lacked.

Since Twiistup, we've already exchanged numerous emails, had a face-to-face meeting, and set up another meeting with another potential mentor. Having an experienced and interested mentor watch over us has really made us focus on our direction and cut out a lot of fat from the site. Our initial site design was cluttered with all these features that we wanted, but with our mentor, we've learned to just clean up the site and focus on the core functionality. (If you want to check out the site design and help us alpha test, you should email me at eddy@grubwith.us. We'd love to have you!)

Anyway, many of us can hack, but having that experienced, passionate outsider critique your product is invaluable.

Two Guys One Cup

Obviously when you devote 15 hours a day to a self-funded venture, you're going to have to skimp a little. Over the course of three years, I think we've gotten very, very good at the whole bootstrapping thing. I'm writing this post because of our latest hilarious episode of being extremely 'cost effective'.

We work on our startup at Starbucks everyday. Our strict weekday regiment consists of:

-Meeting at Starbucks at 7AM
-Leaving to eat lunch at 1PM
-Going to another Starbucks at 2PM
-Exercise at 7PM
-Eat at 8PM
-Finish up at another Starbucks at 8:30PM

I know what you people are saying. "Three visits to Starbucks??!?? That's a lot of drinks! Instead of paying Starbucks all that money, why don't you just rent out an apartment and code there?" No no, young grasshopper. Here we take advantage of a slight Starbucks loophole and spend about $2 per person per day.

Starbucks has a very generous refill policy on iced teas and iced coffees. It's only $0.50 per refill, so in the morning, ONE of us buys a $2.10 venti iced tea and we SHARE the drink. I drink from the cup, Daishin drinks from the straw. We take turns buying refills. When it's time to leave, we take the usually empty cup with us and save it for the next location.

Of course, you must have very little shame when doing this. We work at Starbucks so often that most of the employees know us, and sometimes they automatically give us two straws when we order. It's kind of hilarious and sad at the same time, but hey, extreme bootstrapping is a hard skill to master.

I'm writing this post today because of an incident that happened at Starbucks 10 minutes ago. My ears are finely tuned to hearing the word 'Free', so at the peak of Starbucks rush hour, I hear these magical words from Stephanie, one of the baristas, "Anyone want a free venti Frappaccino?". I immediately tell Daishin to run over to the bar and grab it. Like Barry Sanders in his prime, Daishin jukes and weaves past the slower, more sensible patrons and proudly asks the barista, "Did I hear something about a Frappaccino?" In another embarrassing moment, the barista laughs and says, "Yeah, I thought you would hear that. Go ahead and take it".

I think all the customers were still in shock at the speed and shamelessness of claiming the drink, but whatever. We were able to score the Starbucks gold standard, the $4.30 Venti Frappaccino, for free. And it will allow us to extend our bootstrapping by another day. Thanks Starbucks!

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!