Three Social Experiments for Growing a Marketplace

Housefed meals are now live in San Francisco. The first meal is at my house - a BBQ which is already half full with Googlers & Yelpers (book your spot now to meet some cool people!).

As I look to grow the community, I am trying three different approaches at spreading the site to other cities. With the inbound interest on these features, I thought I’d explain my reasoning, and seek outside feedback. 

Unlock a City with 500 Users

An initial base of users needs to be in a city to support meal booking or transactions. There are two ways of building this base:

  1. Post meals and fight to get enough signups.
  2. Start with a sizeable community before unlocking the feature.

As I’m only a one-man startup, I do not have the time to sell people on a single meal. (If I have to claw and scratch to get people to fill a reservation, this idea is a 0.) Therefore I’ve gone with the latter - an idea I grabbed from SkillShare. For a city to open up the meal booking features, it will need 500 users signed up.

From a user’s perspective, I have gotten a lot of flack for putting this up. 500!?! Users are a bit peeved because one super user in a city (most likely) doesnt’ have 500 friends to signup - but could get 100- 200. Another possibility - a superuser wants to use Housefed to facilitate a meal with a few of their friends. Both arguments I have gotten from users. 

Is 500 too much? Too little? I am not sure, but the goal is to figure out the number of Housefed users in a local area to support Meal booking. People are busy, and every user won’t be able to attend every meal so we will see.

Vote on the 1st Host

While a city is locked, a user is able to say if they would like to become a host. Rather than me filter each host, I’ve built in a voting mechanism for the community to vote on the hosts. Two reasons for this -

  1. This incentivizes potential hosts to spread Housefed to their friends to get votes.
  2. The host with the most support should be able to fill a meal quicker. 

As I have only opened Housefed Meals in the Bay Area, it will be interesting to see the results from this as I open other cities.

You must attend a meal to host a meal

In new cities, the first host, most likely, won’t have attended a meal so this pertains to each meal after the first. Coupled with voting for the 1st host, it gives a city’s first host a bit of clout with the local Housefed community. Every meal in that city, will have come from the 1st meal. Once you’ve attended a meal, you unlock the ability to host a meal. This also converts each guest into a potential future host. If a person is slightly interested in hosting a meal, they have an incentive to attend the first few meals.

Results - Time will tell

All three of these tricks are untested- I only emailed the community yesterday announcing the features. Will they work? Who knows. Are they interesting social experiments, definitely.

What’s wrong with being wrong?

Last week, I wrote a post Delete your homepage. The premise was, ‘Instead of worrying about homepage optimization, put up a signup form, and just focus on your product. If you are doing a good job, your users will tell their friends to sign up.’ All of the feedback was, ‘This is wrong.’ My response- ‘What’s wrong with being wrong?’

The mentality in Silicon Valley right now is, ‘To succeed you need rockstar engineers, an incredible design, and a clear value proposition.’ Disagree? Just look at Craigslist job descriptions in San Francisco. I think, ‘This is wrong.’

Look at Facebook and Twitter. They didn’t succeed by following traditional thinking. How many people would characterize Facebook as beautiful, or understood Twitter the first time they used it?

For the people Googling, ‘What is Housefed?’ Housefed will let you eat dinner with your neighbors. An Opentable for your kitchen, or Airbnb for food. This week I will be pushing the core-functionality, meal booking, which should answer most of your questions.

Like Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Williams, I’m a self-taught engineer who couldn’t type a line of Python a year ago. Housefed is my first community with thousands of users, and for it to succeed, I can’t compete against rockstar engineers or RISD designers on a traditional playing field. I can compete by coming up with creative, effective solutions that can’t be implemented by my established competitors.

There wasn’t one comment in total agreement on ‘Delete your homepage’ - yet everyone that left a comment was wrong. This past week, signups increased 3x, and the bounce rate was down 10%. The thing to remember is the people we aspire to be didn’t get there by following the herd. Zuck & Ev got there by going against the grain, by being wrong to ultimately be right.

*** If anyone works at Paypal and can help get Housefed approved, please email me - emile(at)housefed.com. ***

Launch your site too soon

Housefed has been live for a little more than 2 months without the core functionality. On March 28th - with only a few days of testing, I posted ‘Review my startup: Housefed.com - Airbnb for Food’  to get feedback on the idea, and my execution so far. Because I launched it before I was ready, I got real feedback, which forced to me to address the bugs which real visitors & users were hitting. 

My design was awful

10 minutes before I made the HN post, I push a total site overhaul which was based upon a few days of private testing. Let’s just say people thought it was bad. The top comment on HN, 

“Went to front page. Saw a bunch of photos of food. Didn’t see where I could buy food. Left.”

It was ugly, and ultimately I borrowed some design elements from other sites (Twitter & Dribbble to name a few). Like I learned in painting classes, learn from the masters.

My process for uploading images was broken.

Letting users upload photos of their cooking is a major piece of the site. Initially, I had a JS cropper with a 2 step process- upload, then crop. In private testing, this was not a problem. However in reality, live users uploaded images, then forget to crop them (even though this was the next page). This created more headaches than just ugly photos. It became very evident that I needed a better process.

I hadn’t thought about spam.

I learned very quickly that a flagging system was necessary. I hadn’t built one when I launched, but that was the first major feature I built after the swarm had moved on. One piece of advice - do not let every user flag images. Some users will abuse this system too.  

My messaging was off. 

Being the ’Airbnb of food’ was right and wrong. Yes, you will be able to book home-cooked meals at a person’s home. No, it will not be like the Airbnb UX. Because I was setting up the wrong expectations, many users became confused after signing up.

Since I fixed these issues, the site has grown to over 800 users that have uploaded over 500 photos. 

Because I launched Housefed before it was ready, I addressed the problems I didn’t know about. Had I launched when meal booking was fully finished, I would have been adding bugs ontop of bugs. Many of your initial assumptions are wrong. You won’t know which ones until you get real users on your site. So my advice -  

Launch your before you core functionality is done. You’ll fix the bugs you don’t know you have.

Where are we going!?

I’ve gotten some emails from you guys wondering about the direction of the site, Meals, and whats going on at HQ. So I wanted to just give you all a sense for our goals, and the reasoning behind some of the features.

Our goal for Housefed is to build a community marketplace of people you can book a meal with. Traveling in Istanbul? Find a host, book a meal, and meet up at the host’s home for a wonderful experience. Meet a new friend, and learn about the city, food, and culture. 

The next questions are usually, ‘Why are you worrying about food photos? Likes? Following!?”

The answer is community. To have someone over to your home is an intimate experience with a lot of trust involved. We want to make sure guests feel comfortable with a host, and hosts feel the same about guests. Housefed is first and foremost about building a community, building a reputation on your actions, and not on the thoughts of others. 

So as we get ready to open Meals, we are releasing Levels. Now there are Levels to your activity on the site. This will help guide new users through the community while building a reputation of their own. 

 We hope this better explains where we are going. We are growing at an incredible pace so we want to make sure everyone is on the same page as we take this journey together!

Happy cooking,

Emile

Housefed is live!

After a few weeks of coding and a couple iterations, we launched Housefed yesterday. There is a lot of work to do, but this is going to be one fun ride.

Our goal is to connect foodies around the world. We are working on this problem piece by piece. The first part of the site is allowing users to share photos of their home-cooked dishes. There are some amazing dishes already up - check them out!

Our next step is getting our hosts piece finished - allowing users to become hosts and throw meals at their home. If you would like to become a host, upload 5 pics to the site. That will reveal the host application. We want our hosts to be the best out there so we’d love to see your food!

Thanks again to our users who made yesterday super special. We are working on a product we truly believe in. So get ready, we are changing the food world.