Could a peer-to-peer marketplace make hiring a private chef as easy and trustworthy as booking a ride or a room?
The core decision was whether trust, discovery, and coordination — not supply — were the true barriers preventing people from hiring chefs outside their personal networks.
Hiring a private chef was a fragmented, opaque process dominated by word of mouth. Both sides of the market faced uncertainty:
Chef Surfing was founded in Buenos Aires and later incorporated in Delaware. The startup participated in Startup Chile and Local Food Lab.
I was co-founder and led user research, product strategy, and experience design.
This was my first startup — and an important learning environment where research, design, and business decisions were tightly coupled.
Rather than starting with features, I focused on understanding how chefs and customers made decisions under uncertainty — and what signals created confidence or hesitation.
Research revealed that customers wanted control over the request — while chefs wanted visibility without heavy technical overhead.
The product enabled customers to post requests and receive proposals from chefs, shifting discovery from closed networks to an open marketplace.
Chef Surfing ultimately shut down — but it fundamentally shaped how I approach product and research today.