Chef2nite
A two-sided marketplace for booking private chefs. The client's first two attempts never shipped — we built the third one and got it launched.
Visit chef2nite.com
Overview
A private chef, booked like a restaurant table.
Chef2nite matches hosts planning a dinner at home with professional chefs who will cook it. A host describes the occasion, chefs reply with a proposal and a menu, and the two sides settle the details in chat before any money moves.
The client had tried twice before to get a working product built. We came in for the third attempt, started from an empty repository, and launched it.
The challenge
Two failed builds, and a marketplace's worth of hard parts.
Arriving third means the idea is proven and the patience is not. The priority was a product in front of real customers, without cutting the corners that make a marketplace work at all.
And a marketplace has no soft launch. Payments have to split correctly between platform and chef on the first booking, strangers have to trust each other enough to let one into the other's kitchen, and a cancellation has to unwind money that has already been captured.
The solution
Rails 8 and Hotwire, shipped in one pass.
We built on Rails 8 with Hotwire and Tailwind — one codebase, server-rendered, no separate front-end application to keep in sync. For a small team shipping against a deadline, that decision bought back most of the schedule.
Booking runs on proposals rather than fixed listings: a chef prices each occasion individually from reusable menu templates, and the host accepts. Stripe handles the money, including the platform's fee split, refunds on cancellation and instant payouts to chefs after a service. Trust is built in — Persona verifies every chef's identity before they can take bookings.
Around that sit the details a marketplace lives on: real-time chat over Action Cable, Twilio SMS for time-critical updates, Klaviyo driving lifecycle email, service-area and cuisine search, and listing recommendations to fill a host's brief when no exact match exists.
Outcome
The attempt that shipped.
Chef2nite launched and is taking bookings — the first of the client's three attempts to reach real customers. We continue to build on it.