Ideas

Food and entrepreneurship

Platter began with a love for food and entrepreneurship. Our original concept was devised after our founder, Ronak, learned about the Cottage Act.

This act enabled anyone to be a chef, and this greatly inspired our team, who had known their own parents to be great cooks and knew that this law could provide huge opportunities to aspiring chefs.

The concept as it was initially proposed was a food marketplace for homemade cooks. Initially, we thought we’d connect local homemade sellers to students on the university campus. However, this proved to be a problem for a couple of reasons.

1. Local homemade sellers didn’t live near the university campus, as UCSD was located in the affluent La Jolla section of San Diego, which was predominantly filled with the richest people in town (no homemade sellers to be found)
2. Students were leaving campus in droves due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, with no early return in sight

Around this time, we also started conducting alot more user research. We had done some before, but on further examination, we realized that we weren’t interviewing properly, but rather trying to confirm our ideas (and not getting actual feedback). With a better perspective in mind, we learned some important things from our prospective sellers and markets:

1. Most homemade sellers didn’t actually want more customers — they instead wanted to maintain their existing clientele, and to keep cooking as a part time thing. For them, cooking was a hobby that assisted with the bills, not a livelihood
2. For a few homemade sellers, making food was more of an inbetween thing as they geared up to start a restaurant. These sellers wanted to save enough money to get their own restaurants/ cafes
3. Students were interested in trying homemade food, but also wanted to eat on a budget. Many homemade sellers used premium ingredients, making their prices out of reach.

Around this time, we made more mistakes in that we proceeded to continue design our app, but this was done before fully understanding our product / market fit.

Talking to Restaurant Owners

On a hunch after talking to a homemade seller about their goals to become a restaurant owner, I decided to interview a restaurant owner. From talking to him, I realized a much larger problem with food marketplaces.

Many large food marketplaces charged a percentage model — taking 15 and sometimes 30% of every purchase made.

Restaurants still listed items on these marketplaces because they relied on them for discovery; services like Yelp and Google Maps Reviews didn’t go far enough

Most owners increased the prices of their food items to accommodate the price increase.

Following these insights, our cofounders Ronak and Daniel together made the difficult decision to pivot Platter.

We’d keep our mission to connect people through food, but now focus our efforts on the local mom and pop market vs the homemade sellers market.

Our new idea proposed a food marketplace that exclusively featured mom and pop stores (highly curated by our team) and charged restaurant owners a flat monthly fee instead of taking a cut. This way, by treating our service like a utility, we’d provide an expected cost for our platform. The only fees involved would be the processing fee (via Stripe), which we would pass onto the customer (as most customers are used to paying a small fee already when purchasing items online).

Most importantly, this would align our business goals with that of our customers; providing a stable service that enabled customers to grow would benefit both us and our customer — while also ensuring there wasn’t an incentive to squeeze our customers at our benefit.

That’s how we ended up with our final idea for Platter.