Cook@Home is a social platform that enables everyone to become a guest cook and share his or her culinary culture by going to another person’s home and teaching how it’s cooked, to enjoy the authentic taste of food from every corner of the world!
Cook@Home is a brand new service that will open your eyes to a new way of buying, preparing, and eating your food. Our social platform will bring the culinary delights of world food to your very own home. Have you heard of companies like Uber, AirBnB and BlaBlaCar? Why not doing the same with cooking?
From all American grandma’s special apple pie recipe to Italian macaroni to a Spanish paella, the world is full of delicious and particular dishes. The problem is that most are so far away and rare, which means some of us will never get the chance to try them. This will no longer be a problem with Cook@Home.
With Cook@Home, anyone can be your guest cook: a foreign exchange student, your neighbor, a housewife. Perhaps they come from another country, but they live in your city and can prepare a special dish for you: one that comes from their culinary tradition –maybe grandma’s secret recipe.
Also, you can actually learn how to cook recipes from every corner of the world right from your kitchen. Your guest cook can show you how to prepare that dish step by step, so you can make it yourself later on.
Benefits
• Learn how to prepare and enjoy that special dish from home, with your guests;
• Have someone that makes grocery trips for you and be able to monitor the quality and freshness of the ingredients that are used;
• Sit back and relax while your guest cooks and washthe dishes afterwards;
• Save money and grab the chance to eat something that is normally only a “family recipe”, like grandma’s special apple pie;
• Learn about and taste particular cuisines (Colonial, Medieval, Vegan, Maya, Ancient Roman, and many others).
HERE you will find a preview on how the social platform will be, once developed.
How does it work
There are two main ways to use Cook@Home: having a guest cook coming at your place or going yourself at his (this second model is known as “Home Restaurant”).
In both cases the guest-cook will teach you, upon demand, how it is prepared and cook that specific dish.
HERE you will find a preview on how the social platform will be, once developed.
Where Funds Will Go
We need to raise at least $60,000 to complete the website development and to take Cook@Home into the US and EU Markets. Around 50-55% of the total amount reached by the campaign will go for Indiegogo fees, payment processor, taxes, and rewards fulfillment.
That said, what actually remains in our pockets to develop the project and make it grow is roughly a bit less than half of the total.
If executed properly, we can reach a large number of people in need of an easier way to cook unique meals. Our features will make us incredibly qualified to succeed in the sharing economy industry. Our mission is to take care of every backer, supporter and customer with the utmost respect and care. We feel this will be the key to our growth.
In the event we don’t reach the whole goal, we will still be able to deliver you the perk you have chosen; they will just be delayed but not canceled.
Stretch Goals:
$90.000 – C@H WebTV: A WebTV that will show our best guest cooks, based on reviews and feedbacks, in action while presented by a designated presenter who will travel different cities and give any guest-cook an opportunity to shine on WebTV;
More stretch goals to be announced.
WHO – Meet the Team
Alessio Massagrande – Founder
Alessio always had a passion for cooking. With a strong experience in IT, his creative talents and design skills, he originated this idea.Now, he leads C@H’s vision and development. He started from scratch by reading lots of books about everything that could help him to carry out his vision.He will always be grateful to Marcin Kleczynski (CEO@Malwarebytes) and Fernando Francisco (VP@Malwarebytes).
Alexander Wong – Co-Founder
Alexander is a highly experienced IT and Information Security leader.Over the last ten years, he has helped hundreds of software companies and Start-Ups by overseeing their technical needs, while keeping the bad guys out of the door.He grew-up in the multicultural environment of Hong-Kong and has since traveled all over the world with one goal: to provide innovative projects like Cook@Home with the most secure and efficient technology.
Marco Pravettoni – Co-Founder
Marco works as managing director in a recycling plant and he helped and contributed to C@H since the very beginning. He joined us because he believed in Alessio’s vision of this new social platform that provides everyone the opportunity to be cook and patron at the same time, in every corner of the world.
Andrea Grandi – Founding Collaborator
Andrea is an engineer and graphic designer. He joined the team after he learned about this project by his childhood friend Alessio, and gladly embarked with him in this adventure! He loves cooking (mostly eating it!) and American football, which he played for nine years.
Merike Heidelberg – Founding Collaborator
Merike is currently finishing her Bachelor’s degree in Computer science and is responsible for making Cook@Home’s ideas visible. She has a strong passion for music and cooking as well as graphic design.
We all have worked tirelessly over the past year to plan and bring this project to life.
Join Us
A social platform is nothing without users, and that’s why we would love to have you among us. Your contribution will give you the opportunity to be one of the first Cook@Home users. Funds will go towards the development and testing.
Cook@Home has endless possibilities: we plan to incorporate enterprise solutions of the, to further customize the first version and create additional products and services.
“Cook@Home” needs pledges, but above all, it needs your attention and interest! If you love this product as much as we do, then please take a moment to click on our support page and share your support for us with only 3 clicks! Help us spread the word and get things started!
How to Donate
This campaign accepts contribution with credit and debit cards and Apple Pay only, for safety reasons we do not accept contributions from PayPal.
Indiegogo accepts card payments including Visa, MasterCard, Discovery and American Express credit or debit cards, but not prepaid cards. (more in FAQ)
Make your pledge and join us in making Cook@Home a reality.
If you decide to join our project and donate, please remember to share your passion for us on your Facebook and Twitter account!
You can easily do that with 3 clicks on our support page
Risks & Challenges
We are committed to bringing you a great service, and won’t settle for anything less. Thus, during our final development stage, we will actively work with our developers and QA’s to make sure that everything is exactly up to our standards of quality. We recognize that this might result in a delay in our effective Launch Day if complications arise, but rest assured that we will notify everyone of what’s going on so there will be no nasty surprises. Even if we will not get fully funded we will make it, its a promise!
FAN-MADE MADE VIDEO CONTEST
We have created this contest to promote our project while rewarding the best ones of you who will be able to create the best fan-made video out there!
You heard it, yes! You will be in all our social media profiles and in our webpage; furthermore, you have the chance to win a prize for that!
How does this contest work:
All you need to do is to create a testimonial video and submit it to us (info@cookathome.net). You need to submit a Youtube or Vimeo link where you uploaded your video (don’t attach the video file) along with your name and contacts. After screening them against certain criteria, we will create a an answer pool with our fan-made video contest on Facebook containing your video and have it rated by all our followers.
Each follower will be able to rate each video from 1 to 5 and so each video will have sum up to a certain rating amount.
On the end of the contest each video will put in comparison and the one who received the highest rating will be the winner; the same system will be used to identify the 2nd one, 3rd one and so on.
So submit a video, and then ask all your friends to support you!
What a Fan-Made Video might contain:
As a general rule, the video should be about your enthusiasm or passion about our idea and project. It can be an animation, an explainer, a funny video……the more you are creative the better!
We however will not accept video containing:
pornography, violence, racism, hate, discrimination, copyrighted contents or material that will violates another person’s rights if distributed.
Other than that, please by guided by your own good sense.
The winning prizes:
1st place:Access for two person to the Gala Event plus a Total Lifetime discount
2nd place:Win an Airship tour or an Helicopter tour from two persons plus a Lifetime discount
3rd place:Win a Dinner in the Sky from two persons plus a Lifetime discount
4th-5th-6th places:Win a Coffee Mug and an Apron, shipping costs included.
6th-10th places:Win one Coffee Mug or an Apron, of your choice, shipping costs included.
Thank You For Joining Us
We feel so grateful to everyone who has contributed and helped us spread the word. We have spent the last few months working hard to bring our vision to life in this campaign and it was worth every minute, so thank you to all our generous supporters. Please know your efforts, even the smallest, don’t go unnoticed. We will keep you posted on what your contribution helped us to achieve. You are part of our Cook@Home family.
If you cannot donate but you still want to help, please contact us so we can set you up with a referral program! You might even be able to earn perks, just by spreading the word!
You can contact us at: info@cookathome.net
FAQ
1. What about some country specific dish that cannot be prepared abroad without certain ingredients?
This is a question we receive often :)
We are aware that some particular dish needs ingredients that can be found only in a certain country, we also know that all cuisine types uses a base of ingredients that can be found everywhere in the world. Also, in hypermarkets or big grocery stores you might find ingredients that are considered to be exotic and hardly used in that country, among those often one might find what he looks for and ultimately, at least in big cities, specialized country stores can be found which would be able to provide almost anything coming from that country.
Thus said, surely some dish would still impossible to prepared and cook outside its country of origin for lack of special ingredients but we believe, considering what we said above, those to be a small minority of dish a country has to offer. If you want to taste those particular dish we suggest you to either contact a guest-cook coming from that country to check if he is able to provide those after a trip to his homeland or by having a travel yourself to that country and discover every taste and flavor that region of the world has to offer.
2. Why my credit card does not work?
Indiegogo accepts card payments including Visa, MasterCard, Discovery and American Express credit or debit cards, but not prepaid cards.
For further clarification, even though it’s called a debit card, a prepaid debit card is very different from a bank account debit card. A bank account debit card is linked to your checking account; a prepaid debit card is not. Instead, you pay in advance to load funds onto a prepaid card, and then use the money you have loaded onto the card.
3. About Dinner in the Sky, Airship/Helicopter tours perk rewards
We understand that not our supporter will be in the geographical zones of US or EU; in those cases we will try to arrange for rewarding those perks in that supporter specific geographical zone; helicopter tours are pretty common, unfortunately Airship tours are present only in Europe at the moment, you might still choose it but then you will have to travel to central Europe.
4. About Cook@Home website service fees
To sustain further the whole project and sustain a platform that would reach and support every country in the world, we will charge a small percentage fee every time a reservation will be made. This fee will be shared by both parties, mostly on the guest cook, and it will be calculated on the entire amount of the transaction. The fee itself will be between 14% and 8%, depending on the amount of the reservation, so patrons can save money when booking large reservations (ie. for many patrons or reserving many dish). This will cover the cost of running the platform while providing a high standard of quality.
5. About Cook@Home Expansion
Our pilot project will focus, initially, on metropolis and big cities: we will require a strong user base to keep this project working. Once that is consolidated our focus will switch on all medium and small sized cities everywhere we will be able to reach and support those users. During this process everyone, from everywhere, will be welcome to join and use our service, eventually there will be enough users for everyone to be able to enjoy a culinary exchange. For those cities outside our pilot project we will offer incentives such as promos and big discounts on the service fees.
6. Which cities will be included in the pilot project?
The following cities will be targeted by our pilot project:
New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Indianapolis, Columbus, Charlotte, Detroit, Memphis, Seattle, Denver, Washington D.C., Boston, London, Berlin, Madrid, Rome, Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Warsaw, Munich, Milan, Sofia, Prague, Brussels, Kiev, Tallinn, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Sydney, Melbourne, Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Johannesburg, Auckland.
7. So who exactly can become a guest cook?
Simply put, anyone who knows how to cook and has passion and patience to cook for others. We believe that people that cooks for passion in most cases knows recipes that aren’t found in any cookbook or restaurants, so basically each person can add a flavor to the cuisine cannot be found elsewhere. In any case, there are some folks who will better make use of this platform, for example exchange students and people living abroad in general, chefs (why not?) , unemployed, retired etc. Imagine a Japanese student living in your city that will teach you how sushi is prepared or a Greek, a Maltese or even a person that can teach you how to prepare and cook some exotic historical cuisine, like Medieval, Aztec, Ottoman! The possibilities are so many, there is an entire world of aromas and flavors out there, maybe closer to you than you think!