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Miscellaneous See other Miscellaneous Articles Title: Woyoufan: New platform brings strangers together for dinner WCT... Since the establishment earlier this year of Woyoufan, an online platform that serves home-cooked meals, it has hosted 1,000 dinners for more than 8,000 customers, with a repurchase rate as high as 40%. "When people sit down to share gourmet food, there are no strangers," says the platform's founder Feng Zheng, 2 The hosts of the dinners do not cook for their families or friends but for strangers who have already paid for the food. When the diners — previously unknown to each other — arrive at the host's venue, the meal starts with a brief self-introduction from each diner before the party sits down to eat. The platform was inspired by Feng's experience living abroad. He graduated from Yale University and returned to China in 2014, having taken note of the emerging "sharing economy" fostered by online companies such as Airbnb and Uber. Feng told Guangzhou's 21st Century Business Herald that when the platform was set up it faced the problem of finding both hosts and diners. "The first batch of private cooks was sought out by our staff in Beijing. They themselves already ran such dinner-sharing businesses and we simply got them on board and changed the model from word-of-mouth promotion or phone pre-ordering to online orders," Feng said. With the platform becoming popular, more and more hosts want to spread information via his platform, he said. Feng said his screening team pays a visit to the host's venues and inspects the environment, cooking process and the personality of the hosts. If the team finds that the environment or the host's personal qualities do not meet the website's standards, they will not be accepted. Up to 70% of prospective hosts fall at this hurdle, Feng said. The threshold of establishing the platform is not too high, but the important thing is handling the details and formulating rules, he said. "We have photographers to film the host preparing the dishes. We have an editorial theme, personnel that set the routes and take on-site records, as well as others to arrange for follow-up communication work," he added. The 21st Century Business Herald said the platform limits each meal to between four and eight diners to ensure dining proceeds smoothly and to provide the optimal conditions for diners to chat with each other. It does not interfere with the prices charged by the host and does not take a commission from them. "We only offer reference prices," feng said. Feng said that he has no intention of getting money from the hosts but hopes to monetize the service through cooperation with enterprises or value-added services after accumulating a certain amount of users. Want China Times Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Tatarewicz (#0)
Neat concept! I like its discriminatory process :-)
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