Group Members: Annie, Damanpreet, Krishnan, Swastika
Welcome to the progress update of HomeFood! We are very excited to share the journey of our project thus far and outline some of our next steps.
1. What is your project concept?
For our project, our goal was to help people try new foods and explore cuisines. Although we had a general domain where we wished to work, we had no idea what problems existed in this domain. Through our needfinding interviews, we found that people love to explore new cuisines, but can feel uncomfortable or misguided. However, this experience seems to be minimized when people eat at “mom and pop” shops, or “small hole-in-the-wall restaurants led by cute couples who usually live above the restaurant” (as stated by one of our interviewers). Because of the care taken to establish a relationship between the customers and owners, these businesses are able to create a sense of safety, comfort, authenticity and home for people unfamiliar to their cuisine. As a result our idea was to turn home cooks into “mom and pop shops.”
4. What is the goal of the project; how are users’ lives changed by your product?
We have two goals in mind as we pursue this project. First we want to use food to make college students feel like they’re at “home”. Our interviews show people feeling nostalgia for homecooked food, or just the simplicity of a homecooked meal. However, they are typically limited to the options given through DoorDash or Dining Halls due to the lack of a car and time. This feeling of isolation and distance from home can be a significant stressor for students. However, with food we want to emulate this feeling of warmth, safety and community that many associate with home.
On the other hand, we also want to help home cooks create a new source of revenue based off their hobby/talent. Food is a language of love. It can show people you know intimately, and those who are strangers, that you simply care about them. We want to enable home cooks to share their passion for cooking with a community who could benefit from this extra love and support.
3. Why is your value proposition statement correct?
Updated value proposition: Our food delivery service helps busy, homesick college students, along with aspiring homecooks with a desire to make an additional revenue by providing a platform that that connects these groups to exchange authentic, homemade food, building a unique sense of community/family and home that centers around food, unlike large food delivery like Doordash. We believe our value proposition statement is correct based on the needfinding results discussed above, along with our comparative research results.
Here is our value proposition canvas.
We did an in-depth competitor analysis with 8 companies. From the perspective of our competitor axes, we envision Home Food to embody high levels of convenience and sense of home and community for our consumers. While maintaining the features of quick delivery that our market expects, we will introduce a sense of homeliness that will transform food delivery into an interactive and fulfilling experience rather than an isolated transaction that ends when the food has been delivered.
Here is a more in-depth look at some of our top competitors!
3. What motivated your choices for the MVP?
Below is our business model canvas.
Based on this and our VPC, we started thinking about our participatory roadmaps. We split up a list of features and services that our app would provide into three groups: thing we should develop soon, later and much later. Here is the road map for our customers!
And here is the roadmap for our chefs
From these participatory road maps, we found that some chefs were skeptical about sending videos to their customers, especially introverted chefs. We also found that they prioritized providing chef profiles and short bios for their customers. Some were also concerned about how they would advertise themselves, meaning they prioritized spotlights.
From the customer side, we found that some did want to receive videos from their chefs but didn’t find it a large priority in a food delivery service. We found that many were treating the app like DoorDash. As a result, we must focus on building a brand and establishing norms that go beyond the convenience of standard food delivery services. Our must be geared towards creating an experience where, with some additional effort, both chefs and customers leave a sense of community and home.
For our MVP, we are most concerned about distinguishing ourselves from our competitors on a branding basis. We could simply market ourselves as a food delivery service that sells homemade food. However, the ease, convenience and simplicity of Doordash makes it difficult to pull customers away. As a result, the features that we want to implement are a mixture of technical components that can provide the experience of ordering food, but also the experience of creating a community/connection between chefs and consumers. As a result, we will have chef profiles, customer profiles and menus/dishes that people can order. To create our sense of community, we will create a communication interface between customers and chefs that will allow them to share video, text, or audio messages.
5. What assumptions have we tested and which are we still worried about?
When brainstorming our assumptions, we came to the following map:
Our most important assumptions are:
- Home cooked food provide an extra value that supersedes readily available options (such as restaurants and dining halls)
- Students will trust food cooked by home chefs
- Cooks have a desire to learn more about their customers
- Customers have a desire to build a personal connection with their chefs that goes beyond the food.
Our team is most concerned about the assumption of both college students and home chefs desiring a connection between each other. This expands to other concerns we’ve expressed in the right hand corner of our assumption map as our product relies on the sense of community to drive users to develop connections and experience feelings of home. We are hoping to further test these assumptions with more experienced prototypes.
We have currently developed and tested one experience prototype to see whether our users perceive additional value from home cooked food as opposed to a restaurant equivalent. With home-cooked meals being one of our distinguishing features, we wanted to see early on if this would be viable and appealing to students. We brought in homemade Chicken Curry (a homegrown solution by one of our teammate’s parents) and an equivalent restaurant version and offered both to 4 college students to see which they preferred. All four tried both and indicated preference for the home-cooked curry, citing how “while it’s not what I have at home, it just reminds me of being back at the dining table with family.” We are looking to continue our experience prototyping by looking at communication between our “test” home chef and our “test” users this Thursday!
To test whether customers want to build a connection with chefs that goes beyond the food, we will be offering people homemade food and the contact info of the person who made the food (which will likely just be one of our numbers). We will see how many people reach out to the number and assess the conversation that they try to create. We are also trying out variations of this experiment, testing to see if receiving a message from the chef first will encourage users to create a personal connection/conversation and how different mediums (video, text, audio) will influence their willingness to communicate with their chefs.
Here are some of our future experience prototypes!
6. How viable is our product as of right now?
As of now, our product is reasonably viable. Looking at our results from the experience prototypes, we could build a platform that sells the novelty and nostalgia of homemade food to college students. However, we still lack information about how people want to engage in a community surrounding homemade food. We must know if there are differences between what is desired and what is acted upon when it comes to communities. This will allow us to better design our system to encourage a solution that still upholds our values of community, home and authenticity.
Our plans for the future include doing more extensive experience prototyping, which focuses on testing the key assumption of whether chefs and consumers want to build a relationship with each other. We also want to begin our “look and feel” prototype on Figma and establish our “role prototype” by connecting a real chef and consumer and documenting their transaction interaction.
7. What advice do we want from our reviewers?
How can we promote convenience while also helping customers build personal relationships with their chefs?
How can we encourage users to try our platform when the options may be more limited than DoorDash?
