Dorm Made, Inc.

Dorm Made is building a mrktplace for college students 2 profit & socialize by hosting group-meal experiences. Students already cook homemade daily so we created a sharing economy that empowers them 2 socialize in a vulnerable, humane way: by sharing & tasting culture, students can finally profit from an already existing habit
Teens no longer know how 2 build deep human connections, they are content w superficial relationships; our social marketplace flips the script, we use food/culture as a tool 2 spark human intimacy & foster not only a connection 2 others but a long-lost connection 2 Self

We ran an MVP in London for three months that generated revenue and allowed us to identify super users and focus on their feedback then I moved to SF Bay Area to build our team for a year, while also finishing college then I moved to Boston for my final semester of college and there I found the 3rd developer we needed to start building the 2nd MVP, which we are building right now and looking to soft launch in Miami as now I am based here. The company was incorporated in Delaware over two years ago.

Its in the pitch deck, slide 9. Customer archetype can be found in the extra slides at the bottom, we have more I just didnt include all of them in the intro deck.

Dorm Made exists to solve two problems, the Freshman 15 phenomenon & over-connectivity phenomenon. Both these problem’s root cause is the path of least resistance currently ingrained into the college lifestyle & culture. Our secret insight was identifying a paradigm in the collective subconscious of an entire generation - we’ve identified how teens/college students prioritize their short term comfort over long term health and it all starts with one’s food/eating habits. Because we are what we eat. If teens go through their entire college experience never mastering the art of meal prepping and cooking homemade, what kind of adults/parents will they become? The bigger problem here is how teens are forgetting how to sit down in the present moment to enjoy a meal as if it weren't a variable reward.

So one one side, the F15 exists because during this customer's life cycle, they are triggered daily to make mini self-sabotage decisions that prioritize their short term pleasures at the expense of long term self actualization. On the other side, another core problem of our target persona is the fact that because they were raised with social technologies going mainstream; the traditional “rat-race” UX/UI D2C brands use to engage & hook their consumers has had a negative side effect in society that has been long overlooked; it has completely changed the way teenagers and kids perceive and create value because the lines between offline/online reality and social currency have become so blurred.

I am happy to share the wireframes of the react native MVP.2 we are building with investors one by one but will not put the link here for it to be available to a general public.

Slide 7 of the pitch deck

We are category designers, we will leverage strategies like embedding, brand & network effects. We understand the user better than they understand themselves, we know their subconscious consumption triggers and will exploit biases like groupthink and anchoring effect to create a comprehensive experience that makes other solutions irrelevant; it won't be easy but it can be done especially because our advisors and mentors are best-in-class in their respective fields, for example, Nir Eyal, Gina Gotthilf, Dave Meltzer & Martin Spier, to name a few.

Iteration of the second product & team, finding product market channel fit & community building; iteration of partner acquisition channels; legal strategy & positioning. We are building an owned acquisition channel as a marketing flywheel. There is still a lot of things to validate, we need a budget to test counterintuitive things because our competition surely wont be; paid growth is completely out of scope at this stage.

We are looking for investors with experience building marketplace models, social platforms, D2C brands and FMCG industry. Fintech & blockchain experience is a bonus. At such an early stage, we want people who will be strategic value adds, people who can open doors for us in our sector and help with relationship building in the college ecosystem.

Biggest risk is not being able to navigate the legal scenario - we want to strategically place the marketplace as a Money Transmitter and legally say that students are not necessarily selling food but selling their time as hosts or selling a cooking lesson and the food is just a byproduct of the experience.

Hult Prize Accelerator, Toronto Summit. Kauffman Fellow Venture Deals graduate, Y-Combinator Startup School graduate, Founder Institute in Sao Paulo & San Francisco, Hubspot's Elevate program, Hult Founders Lab