Emily asked me to write a piece reflecting on the last year. For those of you who have seen my LinkedIn feed, I haven’t been one for many online reflections this year. We’ve had a lot on our plate! However, writing this has been hugely satisfying and shows how hard the team has worked.
Nomad is two years old today! 🎉🎈
Emily asked me to write a piece reflecting on the last year. For those of you who have seen my LinkedIn feed, I haven’t been one for many online reflections this year. We’ve had a lot on our plate! However, writing this has been hugely satisfying and shows how hard the team has worked.
August 2021 was my one-year anniversary working full-time on Nomad. It’s safe to say that it hadn’t been an easy year. Global pandemics don’t lend well to starting an events business.
The good news was that by August 2021, it had been one month since the social contact restrictions had been lifted. Even better news was that people were booking chefs with us at a faster rate than we could believe. We were starting to feel that beautiful pull when plans start working…
We’ve made a lot of mistakes and failed more than I’d like to admit. But, there are a few absolute gems that I’d like to self-indulgently share here:
Investment - In December, we raised a pre-seed investment. Amazing investors joined us who hail from Opentable, Abel&Cole, Meta (Facebook) and more. This has given us the wonderful opportunity to build and grow the company at 10x speed . Sorry Mum but this was way better than your Christmas present.
Team - The next step was to now hire a team to push us forward. We don’t shout about them enough but Liz, Dami, Daisy and Emily are amazing and have been fundamental to our growth this year.
Product - Building out a scaleable two-sided marketplace connecting chefs to customers has been a challenge. Solving the many variations of this exchange has been so much more complicated than problems I faced during my Biology degree. Who would have known that pricing canapés is so tricky! Chefs are used to working with tools like whiteboard calendars, Word documents and WhatsApp. This has meant that we’ve had to pool together all the Nomad team’s brainpower to design a first class experience where one can browse for available chefs, book, agree a bespoke menu and pay - all online.
Our chefs - 55 chefs, 36 different cuisines, prices ranging from £30-£200/head. Daisy has done an excellent job curating and vetting the best chefs in London and onboarding them to our platform. Freelancing is notoriously lonely. As well as generating work for our chefs, we’ve set up a social community with pub meet-ups and online spaces.
Gender and pay equality - We all love restaurants, but many chefs don’t. The most recent ONS statistics show that only 17% of U.K. chefs are women. On our platform, 70% of chefs are women. Additionally, a chef cooking two Nomad jobs in a week earns on average £55k pa - nearly double the average UK head chef’s salary.
One Feeds Two - We’ve grown our partnership with this amazing charity and in year 2, we’ve donated nearly 5000 school meals to children in need.
We’ve worked out the fundamentals; when booking a chef with us we’re confident the booking experience will be easy and the chef will be brilliant. Now, we are ready to share this with as many people as possible.
A quick favour to ask: if you ever think you’d prefer to relax (on holiday or at home) and let someone else take the reins in the kitchen, please think of us!
Thank you to all of you that have supported us along the way, we can’t wait to see what the next year holds for Nomad!
Jojo
