Plenry is a platform that brings together those who want to enjoy home-cooked meals, and those who want to share these meals.
My Story
In 2014, I was a graduate student. After trying Airbnb for the first time, I wanted to create another sharing economy business: Airbnb for food. I shared this idea with some of my friends, and one of them, Lisha He, became my co-founder.
In 2014, we signed a contract with an incubator company, Ufrate, who gave us $100,000 for seed funding and free sharing office space in Sunnyvale, CA.
In 2015, after seventy-two different investment pitches, we received $520,000 funding from Kyline Fortune Investment in Hong Kong as well as additional funding from the following individual investors: Zion Shen, Yong Chen, Jie Liu, Jiejun Chen, and Xuefeng.
Between 2015 and 2017, our team had seven full-time employees and ten interns. It was an amazing experience in my career life.
Role
Team
Duration
Co-Founder | Product Designer
Growth Marketing Team
Engineer Team
2.5 Years (2015-2017)
Design tools I use
Sketch | InVision| Zeplin | Final Cut Pro | Adobe After Effects| , Adobe Premiere | Adobe Photoshop |Adobe Illustrate | Adobe Animate | HTML | CSS
Problem Statement
Pain Point
Restaurants, Take-out food & Food Delivery
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Long waiting time
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High cost (tax & gratuity)
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Less opportunity to know new people
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Disconnected from the community
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Food arrives cold for take-out and delivery service
Solution
A platform where users can enjoy home-made food at local homes
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Save Money and time when booking
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Enjoy home-made food when dining
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Share culture at the table
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Make money when hosting
Enjoy home-made food
Save money and time
Share culture
Make money
Why
Big needs for college students and young professionals to meet face-to-face for networking purposes.
On one hand, plenty of people want to have home-made meals, which are more delicious and healthy compared to restaurant foods. On the other hand, many housewives with good cooking skills are looking for more social opportunities and additional incomes.
Today many people choose to eat out at restaurants when they want to eat good food without the hassle of cooking, however going to restaurants is often a pain, and is boring.
Target users (guest)
1: Yong professional who just moved to a new city who are looking for friends
2: People who want to eat a meal from a different culture
3: People who travel the world to eat local homemade meals
1: Home chefs who want to earn side income
2: Senior people who feel lonely at home
3: Religious groups who want to connect which their community
5: People who want to share their own culture
6: People who live in a special location such as a treehouse, boat
Target users (host)
Challenges Throughout My Work
The largest challenges I faced during my work came in the form of creating an informative proposition behind my designs and the development of ideas in an abstract context. Methods I used to help to overcome these hurdles were organizing team brainstorm sessions, critiques, and sprints.
Android
Learning Outcomes
Reflecting on this work, it has single-handedly made the greatest impact on my personal growth as a designer. In defining the three most important takeaways from my job, they would be:
1: Defining Value and Intentionality
Learning how to define and pitch the value behind my designs effectively and supporting this value through illustrating my intentionality behind designs and product decisions. This led to me creating a positive impact on problems that affected users and the company alike.
2: Developing Interaction Systems
Creating designs with a high degree of flexibility for usage in multiple design teams, designing with anticipation of negotiation, and balancing the values of product teams with the overarching goals of product standardization.
3: Prototyping & Motion Design
Learning how to exclude my internal bias to design for different audiences, creating production-ready prototypes for engineers, and learning how to create communicative and engaging motion designs.
Features
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Users and host or join events based on location.
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Users who are going to the same event (participants) will be able to connect with each other.
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Patent Feature:Plenry creates a chat room via its web-based platform and App.
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Before joining an event, users can only see a general location of the event. The exact location will be shown only after the attendance has been confirmed.
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Participants can stay connected to everyone they meet. The system reminds users where they met each other.
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Allows users to leave “reviews” for the host after the event.
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Strong anti-harassment features.
-Only the users who are going to the same event can connect with each other.
-One-to-one chat room will only be allowed after event ends.
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Allows user to send invitation to others they have met.
