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! 

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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!

 

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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!

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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!

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