Maker Match Making
Matching makers, creators, founders with complementary skillsets to help each other on their projects.
UPDATE: we have not renewed the domain anymore, and it now appears to point to a shady adult website. DO NOT OPEN IT.
This year Techcrunch Disrupt has moved to Brooklyn. As usual we went without much of a plan and started the 24h hackathon with a brainstorming session after we assessed the sponsorship landscape.
We came up with the concept of a meal sharing marketplace. When you make a meal, make twice the amount, and list the other half on homecookers.club
Since this was not our first Hackathon we knew it was important to build a relationship with the sponsors. If they know you and your project, your likelihood of winning increases by a lot. We checked in with the representative from .club domains multiple times throughout the night to ensure we were top of mind. At one point, it must have been just about midnight, we got a six-pack delivered (NYC Never Sleeps, right?). And invited our good friend from .club domains to our table for a cold one while we showed him our progress. Fun times.
We spent the majority of the night finishing the backend and made sure the service would work. Neither Vincent who was my hacking companion, nor myself have had much of a design experience so the frontend was rather "simple". But it is a hackathon after all, and the proof of concept is what matters.
We had a lot of fun developing this project, and intend to keep developing it further. Though there seems to be a major obstacle with food laws. There is something called Cottage food laws however. Which may be an avenue to explore.
We were competing with a bunch of other projects going for the .club domain price. But at the end we were lucky enough to come in first. We like to believe that our networking all night long has paid off.
Over the last few years we always managed to score tickets for the Disrupt Conference one way or another. The first two times we won them right out. From then on we managed to get unused ones from our sponsors as an added bonus. Same this year.
We love this conference every year. So much inspiration from hundreds of startups, speakers and fellow entrepreneurs. One fun side attraction was the caricaturist which was on site and worked for tips. Obviously we could not walk past this one.