yhangry

It's been a year since we launched our old website (RIP) in September 2020 - curious about what Siddhi Mittal and I have been up to? 📈 500% growth since the beginning of the year 👩👩👦👦 Hired amazing people to go from 3 to now 18 team members! 🧑🍳 Onboarded 200 chefs and cooked for 12,000 diners in London 🥘 Developed hundreds of mouthwatering new recipes and photos - we truly eat with our eyes first 💻 Build a beautiful new brand and new website with faster checkout and viral features such as inviting your guests! 70% of our customers had never booked a private chef before. If that's you, book a yhangry chef and see for yourself why we are changing the world. And to celebrate with us, get a bottle of our favourite champagne using the code: NOCHAMPAGNENOGAIN Yhangry is making entertaining at home easy. We believe great things happen when great food and great people come together. Cheers to memorable gatherings that aren't on a clock - like our recent #teambonding in Siddhi's new home, where we filmed this update. Jordan Brierley Usman Mahomed Elizabeth Watson Shannon Juneja Shwetha Vasan Saeed E. Moody Boles Elina Comninou Radhika Sharma Aruneeta Srivastava and the rest of the team not on here <3 And a special thanks to Michael Cavanagh for guiding us through this rebrand!

Jinjing Liang and I met in Ycombinator building marketplaces... 2yrs later I’m a paid customer for her new AI Startup 😱 TLDR: I love supporting founders. And sometimes it's a real WIN WIN! ❤️ In Y Combinator W22, Jinjing and I were peers, and shared dreams of building a unicorn consumer marketplace 🦄 We kept in touch (London vs San Francisco), and chatted about product 💻 We finally met at the YC alumni reunion weekend in SF in 2022 👯 In 2023, our fate intertwined: - Jinjing pivoted to build a AI QA testing software - we went through QA issues that cost £££ She was looking for a customer, and I was looking for a savior! Jinjing told me about Stably AI and I jumped at the chance to test it We started using Stably and it had teething issues (ofcourse) 😬 reliability % of tests setup (we needed 90%+) 😬 higher coverage of test suits needed (to keep up with our deployments) 😬 setting up all tests (AI didn't recognise quite a few of them) These guys worked with us for 2-2.5weeks in an IMPRESSIVE fashion: sorted all issues for us + committed to continuous improvements I finally asked my team: "What is the value of this for us?” We all came up with a range of £100-600 per month. I gave JinJing this entire feedback and at what point we were comfortable paying £600, or even higher We were offered a good deal and jumped at it! 🤯 Here is to founders supporting founders 👊🏼 #ycombinator #community #founders #startuplife #entreprenuership #testing #product #qaengineer #hiring #networking #genai #aiapplications

$$$ I’ve wasted on hiring? Half a MILLION. Save your $$$$$ My hard earned lessons: 1. || Running a fluff interview || by asking leading questions. You are at risk of hiring for charisma versus who will get the job done. Make the interview quantifiable by making a list of skillsets you want (eg: data analytical, critical thinker etc). Test and hire based on these in a hard assignment format across candidates 2. || Not abiding by “HELL YES”|| every candidate should pass this test, every time. If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a hell no. The easiest way to not fall into this trap is by NOT having a very wide funnel of applicants to start 3. || Firing too slowly || within 1-2 weeks you should know if they are a hell yes. If not, let them go. Be kind with them, but be brutal with preserving the calibre. Your team will rise or fall to the level of new candidates you hire. A players love working with A players 4. || Spending little time recruiting || recruiter fees are usually 10% of salary, £3-6k fixed fees etc for one candidate. That’s roughly 1-2months worth of salary. If you are spending a couple hours a week, how do you expect to get a wide starting funnel + high quality calibre? Either spend a solid 20-40hrs a week on this, or consider outsourcing the lead gen process to multiple recruiters 5. || Skipping reference checks || either you do none, or you fall prey to confirmation bias and endowment effect. If you aren’t asking the tough questions (eg; “what’s the one thing they can improve in?” “did you try to retain them?”), you are setting yourself up for future shock and failure 6. || Not spending time onboarding them || letting a new hire ‘figure it out’ is a recipe for failure. 50-80% of your time for the first two weeks is a good ballpark. Invest in your talent but giving them the most valuable resource which is your time 7. || Letting capable hires be a catch all || when a new keen person starts, they will say “yes I can do it” a lot. It’s an attractive quality. But if you let them be the catch all, they will destroy their output. Help them prioritise ruthlessly. Ask them every week what they have planned, and chop their list down to 30%. If they get that done, that’s a huge win. Rinse and repeat. 8. || Hiring the “wrong shape” || often in startups, skill sets needed change really fast. For example- for yhangry 👨🏻🍳, we thought we needed two product generalists. 15 days later I realised I could use one generalist and one lean UX designer. 10 days after that I realised I could actually create 3 different pods, and have a designer work across all 3 of those. Shape of the hire is a moving target (as you discover more info) so actively update your hiring strategy + assignment based on the new shape PS: I struggle with #4 a lot. What about you? Anything else you’d like to add? Help save your friends & peers $$$ #hiring #tech #founders #vc #startups #investors #entrepreneurship