Initial User Interview Summary
For our project, we would like to create a platform/application that connects people who would like to transform their homes into a “mom and pop” restaurant and share their homemade signature dishes with their community. Our vision is to create opportunities for people to try cuisines from unfamiliar cultures. From our initial interviews, we found that people tend to be more willing/open-minded to new cuisines when there is some sense of familiarity attached to the food (even better, feeling of home).
More specifically, I conducted interviews with two master’s student at Stanford. Both of them expressed willingness to branch into cuisine of another culture, even though one of them appeared to be more selective/conservative when it comes to choice of cuisine/specific dishes.
- Student A describes herself as quite picky about food in general, even for dished from her own culture. Thus, when navigating unfamiliar territory of food, she usually follows recommendations of her friends/family who have fair understanding of her dietary preferences and restrictions. She also tends to choose dishes that appears similar to dishes she has already known. Benefited from that, she has mostly had positive past experiences when branching into cuisine of another culture.
- Student B, in contrast, is much more willing to try things he has never tried before. As a foodie, he usually would like to get the most authentic food in other cultures and he is really willing to push his boundaries. He would also seek advice, but not limited to friends/family. Instead, he would like to listen to advice from local people to really get that authenticity. He also reveals that sometimes things can get a bit too far, but as he tries more cuisines, he starts to understand his own preferences more.
TAM/SAM/SOM and market size
TAM – Our total available market can be estimated as all United State citizens with a smartphone or laptop. Since this will likely be an app and website, the user would need internet access and some device in order to use the application. Although we would like to target college students in our app via branding, we understand that this product would likely be accessible to everyone with access to the required technology. The number of US citizens with internet access is about 307 million, comprising 90% of the US population. Should we choose to only create a mobile app, our TAM would then reduce to the number of US adults with smartphones. This is approximately 85% of the US adult population, With 210 million US adults (18+), we would then have about 178.5 million users in our TAM.
SAM – Our serviceable available market would be approximately all college affiliates within the United States who have a cell phone/laptop. We are going to estimate that the vast majority of college students in the US do have access to this technology for simplicity. There are approximately 19 million college students in the United States. 63% of students have food delivered from off campus, leaving us with about 12 million students.
To get a stronger understanding of potential revenues, we see that the food delivery industry has been consistently increasing its revenues, with platform-to-consumer delivery earning 28.12 million in America. We know that the average American spends about $1,850 annually on food delivery. This would equate to $22.2 billion dollars in revenue annually.
SOM – Our Serviceable Obtainable Market can be estimated by the Stanford student population. We envision this to be a very valuable piece of our market because undergraduate students tend to have restricted food options based on the dining halls. Being in an area with some of the most expensive restaurants in the United States, the market for more financially accessible food options is fairly less competitive. Currently there are approximately 17,000 students at Stanford. If we wanted to be more specific about our market, we could isolate the 7645 undergraduate students, as these are the ones that are typically without access to a kitchen and are forced to be on meal plans, making it impossible to create home cooked meals themselves. Stanford is the university that uses Doordash the most, so we believe that this SOM is the perfect starting point for our company. The relative isolation and limited number of nearby affordable options expand our market. If we continue with the understanding that the average American spends $1850 annually on delivery, then we would predict that we would earn about $14 million annually.
