Last week I had a conversation with a friend about Come Dine with Me - a British TV show where 5 contestants get together and in the span of a week, host a small dinner at their house, which they have to prepare and cook for everyone else. After each dinner, they rate the food and at the end, the person with the most points, wins a prize.
I like the format of the show, so I played a bit with the idea of organising a similar experience with my friends. As soon as I started thinking about the logistical parts - asking for availability, managing organisational details, finding recipes - I quickly gave up on that idea.
But what if all of the above was given to me in a packaged format and all I had to do was enjoy the experience with friends?
Okay let’s dive in.
How it works
The essence of the idea is based on re-creating the popular format of Come Dine with Me while removing all logistical obstacles that come with it. Here is how it can roughly work:
- Sign-up and create a private group
- Invite your friends and decide on a day and time for each person to host a dinner
- Get recommended recipe cards for each dinner
- Award the host points after each dinner is completed (scores would be hidden until the end)
- Scores are revealed after the last dinner and the winner wins a small digital prize
There are a couple of different problems you are helping solve.
Firstly, it’s the organisational overhead. Without the tools to support you, organising this would quickly turn into a mess. Creating chat groups, asking for availability, spinning up spreadsheets, sending calendar invites etc. There needs to be an easier way to manage all that.
Secondly, not everyone is a chef. While some people might enjoy cooking for 3-4 other people, for most that might be a roadblock. You also have to make sure that everyone is working with the same budget to make it fair. That’s where recipe cards come in. You don’t have to think about coming up with your own recipes, you just pick from the suggestions and go have fun.
Lastly, the event has to be fun from start to finish and leave you with a sense of satisfaction. From picking a “deck of recipe cards” to awarding points and receiving prizes, it’s all about making the experience as engaging as possible.
Can this work?
I see an opportunity to start this idea in a city like London, where socialising is not always easy. Giving people the structure to meet up with their friends on a regular basis, while adding the element of competition, seems great to me.
But you can take this idea a step further. What if you could host public groups? You open a public group and now anyone can join. Wouldn’t that be a great way of meeting people for the first time, especially if you are new to the city? You could even put a name on the group (e.g. “Dine with architects”), so you attract people of similar interests. It might sound slightly weird, inviting strangers over to your home for the first time, but didn’t Airbnb start the same way?
The marketing side also looks pretty straightforward. You can take advantage of big online communities such as /r/London, do an influencer campaign or even try to partner up with the Come Dine with Me. They seem to be looking for ways to expand beyond the TV show, so you might give them that opportunity, though in the long-term it would be better not to be associated with the show too much as that would restrict growth and the flexibility of changing parts of the format.
But…
The biggest concern for me is the fact that you are not really solving an existing pain point, but instead trying to introduce a new type of behaviour. While this is not always a bad thing, it’s usually a much harder sell pushing people to do something that they have never done before.
There is also the monetisation issue. Would this be a subscription service? I am not very certain this is a repeating behaviour that would just justify the monthly cost.
All in all, this is a fun idea to play with, but it has some questions that need to be answered before I can confidently say it's a good idea.