Community identity

Our identity is closely tied to where we are from, where we live and where we expect to go. Our nature is to stitch our social circles into comparisons of ‘Us vs. Them.' …

I was torn between two ideas:

Building a game..

Skill building in early education..

Both ideas are CRAP. Both are too large. Both are too open-ended. What I needed was to talk to a few people about my life, interests, goals, career paths, options, blah blah blah. So what did…

I built my schedule around the Creative Founder class: and why? Because I wanted to learn. My roommate was in the class the year before and I heard all of the drama, I saw the struggles, but I also saw the results. …

As we have been trying to concrete our business, we found that our value proposition is still on the rocks. There is a difficulty in finding the right words to say and the right people to say it to. I mean, what do people really need to hear anyways? And when are they looking for those words so that they can sign up?

We came up with a list of the six most important things to improve and/or finish:

Locking down the trial user test

Our Value Proposition(most important)

Defining our Revenue Model

Locking down our Costs

What do we pay Insurance and Lawyers

Thoroughly define our SAM, SOM, TAM

Luckily our net burn rate is really low compared to our revenue. Unfortunately our zero cash date is today, or yesterday, or 11 weeks ago.

To figure out our personal burn rate is hard enough, but a company burn rate, and what we will cost the company is a bunch of numbers that I don’t want to run. Obviously, the revenue model was much more interesting, but there was some excitement in figuring out what all we could possibly be spending money on.

This week we planned out our Revenue Model. yay... Actually, it was rather fun; so here’s what we learned.

The chef needs to set their own hourly rate. This way we don’t push specific salaries for anybody, and if they believe that they can start charging more, then they can do that, or if they think they need to charge less then they can do that.

Our service is a luxury good. So, we are raising the price and focusing on the experience. We are taking a 40% service fee which is added to the chef’s hourly rate and the ingredient cost is included after the chef buys groceries.

We will hold the money until we need to pay the chef and until then it will be placed in low risk investments.

Wow, ok.. Let’s do this!

The Lean Startup is really convicting.. I guess that perhaps maybe we should throw ourselves out there a little bit. (hesitation implied) Commitment is some scary juju. We have some assumptions to get through: will people be ok with chefs coming over to their homes? will chefs value our company enough to actually join us, and will we have enough customers to keep the chefs busy, and enough chefs to keep our students interested? Getting enough people to use this is going to be difficult. Maybe our greatest assumption is that there’s actually a problem here that we should be solving.

Our business looks solid, but looks are always deceiving. I really don’t know how to proceed, but we’ll find out soon enough, yay… I’m not sure we have really embodied our specific officer roles yet, but we’ll get there.