Josephine is closing its doors • Hacker News Board

Re: Josephine is closing its doors

#41

Post by gambiting » Fri, Feb 02, 2018, 1:40 PM UTC

brazzy wrote: post #38

gambiting wrote: post #12

What was Josephine? I've looked at their homepage but I still have no idea what they did. Was it a restaurant? That served home made food?

Did you look at josephine.com, rather than blog.josephine.com? IMO the former does well at explaining itself. The latter seems to be rather stupid in being a pure social media thing.

Ah, I actually didn't there was another "main" website - I just clicked on "home" in the corner, and that only shows stories about food, not what Josephine does. But now with this and other replies I can see it's a food sharing-like service, thanks :-)

Re: Josephine is closing its doors

#42

Post by marcus_holmes » Fri, Feb 02, 2018, 4:11 PM UTC

I coached two startup founders looking at this exact model (there were about five founders plus one Startup Weekend team that attempted this all around the same time). Josephine became my go-to "this appears to be working, let's try and work out why..." model. I never could work it out.

Shame they couldn't get it to work. As far as I can see, the whole niche/model is fubar'd. Good try, though, and great community attitude :)

Re: Josephine is closing its doors

#43

Post by Spivak » Fri, Feb 02, 2018, 6:34 PM UTC

nmeofthestate wrote: post #39

gregschlom wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they allowed people to cook and sell meals in their neighborhood.

...with an huge amount of touchy-feely "empowerment" messaging larded on top of the whole thing.

Well yeah, I don't expect every business to be 'Very Good Building & Development Co.'. Why would you even start the business if you didn't buy into all the touchy-feely stuff? It's not like there aren't better paying super serious dev jobs out there.

Re: Josephine is closing its doors

#44

Post by dmode » Fri, Feb 02, 2018, 9:57 PM UTC

My wife visited Israel and told me about the concept of Kibbutz. Since then I have been thinking about it and it is such a great concept. May be someone can borrow some aspects of the kibbutz and invent a business model. A big communal kitchen for the neighborhood where professional chefs make food for the community, but costs are kept low by households volunteering in prep work and clean-up. Everyone subscribes to the communal kitchen like an HOA. Would be great for the neighborhood community to better know each other and also access healthy "home cooked" meals.

Re: Josephine is closing its doors

#45

Post by mooreds » Fri, Feb 02, 2018, 10:07 PM UTC

Here's a take from the CEO of a competitor of Josephine: https://medium.com/@ashleycolpaart/saying-farewell-to-joseph...

(full disclosure, I'm her co-founder.)

Re: Josephine is closing its doors

#46

Post by mooreds » Fri, Feb 02, 2018, 10:08 PM UTC

dmode wrote: post #44

My wife visited Israel and told me about the concept of Kibbutz. Since then I have been thinking about it and it is such a great concept. May be someone can borrow some aspects of the kibbutz and invent a business model. A big communal kitchen for the neighborhood where professional chefs make food for the community, but costs are kept low by households volunteering in prep work and clean-up. Everyone subscribes to t…

Here in the USA I believe it's called co-housing. I have some friends who live in such neighborhoods and they love it.

More here: http://www.cohousing.org/