Ask HN: Critique my biz idea – local.menu the next Airbnb | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Critique my biz idea – local.menu the next Airbnb

2 pointsandrewfromx22 comments

Remember the days before Airbnb when their biz idea would have been laughed at? There are LAWS against renting out your apartment. In 2016 I think the world is ready for local.menu, the app that lets you rent out your kitchen to a restaurant for a night, your restaurant. i.e. you are allowed to cook for people in your neighborhood with no health permit / zoning laws issues.

It's very simple. A mom is cooking dinner for 4. She posts to local.menu what she is making and sets a 5 min time limit. She gets 3 hits in 5 mins of people close by that want an extra serving of what she is making. They come by her house/apt and get their food to go. The mom simply made 3 extra servings of what she was making for her family anyways. And the markup is crazy. She can sell her special curry for $30 a plate to hipsters that want good curry, local, and fast.

Go ahead. Tell me this will never work because it breaks some laws.

Being a single person who does not cook often, this would be a fantastic idea to see come to fruition.

On the other hand, as a person who skews toward the overly-cautious, I would be concerned about the lack of sanitation inspections, servsafe certifications and other safeguards that commercial kitchens adhere to. Also, how could you be assured that Mom is not in a dire financial situation, re-heating her special curry to sell at a marked-up price - a special curry that went bad several days ago.

Law-, permit- and zoning-wise, I am not sure of what would need to be done. It is an interesting idea for sure, albeit one that would take some serious planning.

i think giving out 5 star ratings just like uber would help u find the good places. People are people. We live in a big village. Let's all eat together :)

There are a bunch of these already, exactly as you described it.

His idea is very different from gobble.com or others. This is a family/home-made kitchen idea, which is very very common in Asiaa countries like.

links please.

gobble.com, mytable.com, josephine.com...

gobble seems to have pivoted to delivering ingredients, which differs from their initial plan from 2011: http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/gobble-helps-you-order-...

oh! you are totally right! haha, thanks. I'm gonna use one of these vs. build this :)

You seriously think health standards for restaurants is something that needs to be disrupted?

1. A lot of people make homemade food, so what's up with the health and hygiene standard there?

2. If you think health and hygiene standard in restaurants are good, I don't know what else to say but many restaurants receive C or lower grade in NY. Some due to discrimination, some due to misjudgement, but many do reflect serious lack of proper maintenance and cleaning.

Home made food is explicitly that - for your own home. You are already responsible for the people you're feeding.

Once it becomes about making money without regulation, I guaran-fucking-tee you there will be people using it to run a "business" with zero fucks given about food safety.

Sure there are restaurants with a low rating. There are also the ones that have been shut down. That's the sort of place you need to be worried about

but that's 0.001% of the people cooking. The rest are making nice food I wanna eat!

> but that's 0.001% of the people cooking

What are you basing that number on?

Once someone starts using the system to make money, a number of important dynamics change.

- they need to start buying more products, with the intent of making a profit, so there is even more incentive for them to buy "discount" items that are marked down due to being close to their use-by date. Risk goes up.

- they need to store a lot more products. How many home kitchens do you know of that have different fridges to completely separate raw meat from cooked meat, dairy, etc?

- they need to have a way to keep the prepared food ready to 'serve' once it's been prepared/cooked. How many home kitchens do you know that can keep prepared food easy/quick to serve and hygienic at the same time?

Your idea is no more about "sharing economy" than Uber is. They're both just saying "who needs accreditation, licences or insurance - any schmoe can do this".

i seriously think people want curry and once this app takes off, laws will be re-defined because people don't want to lose this new thing they love. i.e. uber/airbnb/zenefits

Can you elaborate how people wanting curry equates to disregarding food safety laws?

airbnb: people wanting cheap hotel rooms equates to disregarding hotel zoning laws

uber: people wanting on-demand taxi service equates to disregarding taxi medalian laws

local.menu: people wanting curry next door equates to disregarding "selling" food laws.

i.e. once people start using the new things that break laws and love them, they collectively go, f those laws they were dumb.

> once people start using the new things that break laws and love them, they collectively go, f those laws they were dumb.

People collectively say a lot of things, that doesn't make them true or accurate.

Americans in particular seem to have an obsession with "fuck regulations, free market ftw" - plenty of other countries regulate things that make sense, without making things overly burdensome.

Go ask anyone who had a mortgage and/or pension fund in 2008 how that free market thing turned out for them.

> people wanting curry next door

I don't know what your obsession with curry is specifically, but if it's next door, they're your neighbour. Just ask them if you can have some fucking curry.

you have a point about not all regulations are bad. But this one seems like airbnb bad, not mortgage2008 bad.

s/curry/anyfood

Asking your neighbour is not the same thing as letting cooks broadcast what they are cooking and if they are willing to sell plates.

> But this one seems like airbnb bad, not mortgage2008 bad.

This one is Airbnb bad if you assume that 1 out of every 5 Airbnb rentals is being used to (take your pick) shoot porn; murder and cut up the bodies of people (to later be fed to pigs); arrange a reboot of the Bumfights video series; run a 24-hour needle swapping joint; etc

> Asking your neighbour is not the same thing as letting cooks broadcast what they are cooking and if they are willing to sell plates.

Exactly. The first one is a social interaction. The second is a business, and that's my whole point.

also think about a big apartment building. What if 1 person was the "cook" for that village? Isn't that better, more social. human like, than each human alone in their own apt eating a tv dinner?

Why is the choice between everyone eating from a sole cook or everyone eating TV dinners?

I don't think I'll ever understand American culture.

big american apartment building can be very lonely and isolating. No one talks to anyone. You goto work, u go home, u interact only with your tv. Bringing back the concept of a village where people gather around and eat together is a good thing.

> big american apartment building can be very lonely and isolating. No one talks to anyone. You goto work, u go home, u interact only with your tv.

Do you see the irony of the situation - you're complaining about a lack of social interaction and community - and your solution is an app and the transfer of money.

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