http://liveworks.appAn app that would let hospitality workers pick up any shift from any venue at any time. The problem with that is, since its a platform I needed a lot of supply (restaurants) to encourage the demand (workers) side. We even decided to pivot to a 3 staged launch (stage 1, we'd let restaurants come on board for free, stage 2, we'd let them pay their own workers through the app, stage 3 we open the flood gates and let the workers pick up shifts from places other then their own restaurant)
What did I learn?
- Don't work on problems that you are not 100% passionate about. I met the other co-founder through a work/equity deal where my agency would take some $ plus percentage equity to finish the app.
- Before trying to solve a problem, ask if the problem is worth solving or not (product design), being a technical person, its easy to jump straight into the bells & whistles of a product without thinking about _who_ is going to use it, and if there is even a need for it? We can pick the shiniest tools and the best tech, but if no one is going to use the product, none of that matters.
- We ignored competition, thinking was since we are not _just_ a scheduling app, we can ignore the biggest competitor in the space and still make a scheduling app. Turns out the competition just rolled out a new feature that lets venues handle the HR side of their business as well.
http://shareablekitchen.com
A platform that would let kitchen owners rent out their un-used kitchen space for some $$ on the side. Kind of like Airbnb, but for kitchens (I know that should have run alarm bells). I joined the project after it was already started by the 2 previous co-founders (both non-technical). Idea was to let new business owners that were just starting out, easily rent kitchens from other people for a couple of hours, days, weeks at a time.
What did I learn?
- Market research is important, don't skimp over it. I realized a couple months into the work that most restaurant owners don't want to deal with renting their kitchens anyways. There are specific ghost kitchens in almost every city now so it's cheaper/easier for people looking to start their culinary experience to go through them instead of renting a given person's kitchen.
- After doing some back of the napkin calculations, ghost kitchens on their own was a small industry to be in (don't remember the exact numbers, but it was peaking out around 1 million / year)
- You can not steamroll health/safety restrictions, and every state, city, county has their own permits for renting kitchens to handling food. This often times requires the person seeking to rent a kitchen to have their own business permits, to keep track of all those things and enforce them was too much to handle.
- Competition already exists out there, and its mainly catered towards community kitchens.
- Don't become partners with people that are not going to have skin in the game. Although I will digress going into details here, but if they don't have skin in the game (even as non-technical co-founders), they will treat it as a side project.
Main takeaway:
- Trust your gut, vet ideas, vet people
- An mvp glued together is better than a highly scalable/distributed/serverless/${new_shiny_tech}