The interviews I conducted introduced the idea of consumers wanting to branch out and try new cuisines, but they wanted something they could trust, something that felt homemade rather than a restaurant establishment. When considering their food ordering and consumption habits, many cited trust in certain “go-tos” but only because of limited availability and affordability in the area. They would love to branch out and explore less known and niche offerings but feel like there isn’t much visibility around this. While they are open to the idea of cottage food offerings, they did also cite concerns around safety and transparency.
For our project, we would like to create a product/app that allows people to transform their homes into a “mom and pop” restaurant, or simply a restaurant owned by a family. Our vision is to create opportunities to try cuisines from unfamiliar cultures in a comfortable, welcoming environment.
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 and device access 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, 85% of the US adult population, 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. 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. Stanford is the university that uses Doordash the most, so we believe that this SOM is the perfect starting point for our company. 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.
