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It’s one of my small, sillier ideas. I’m excited about it because it’s easy to implement, and I love food! It also relates to my other idea, which is the school/club for the retired folks idea.

The idea is : Cooking classes for retired dads, in Kathmandu. Taught by retired dads.

It works because our dads, when younger, didn’t cook much and didn’t help at home. Now that they’ve grown older, there’s nobody else to help at home. The expectations from men (even retired ones) to help their wives have changed. My dad would barely cooked anything back in the day, but in the recent years he’s cooked more than ever.

The expectations from the retired man in Kathmandu with cooking and helping with the household chores has increased. They’d probably take the opportunity to get better at it. Plus, it’ll be something interesting to do outside the house.

With my mom at least, she’s out with her friends a bit (the most ever, actually!) and keeps herself busy at home. I’ve seen that dads are lonelier, and the scope of things they can get involved with is limited.

The idea is to open up a new skillset for them, which can make them more useful in the house, and impress friends and family. From my perspective, it’d be a really cool test-run of my school/cub for the retired idea too. It could be its own thing, regardless of classes or anything else. It’d probably be easy to find a cooking instructor too. I can think of several friends’ dads who could act as instructors, including my friend SB’s dad.

There’s two things (maybe three) that’s probably going to be tricky:

1. Finding a commercial kitchen to do this with 10-ish people
2. Figuring out the pricing and the charging policy
3. Marketing? I don’t have a big network of people in Kathmandu. Could i do away with just friends’ parents?

If the idea catches on, we could have celebrity chefs like Santosh at some point too! It could be a one-time event, or a weekly expensive event that people will attend without a miss because they’ve paid so much money for it.

It could lead to a greater interest in socializing with others in shared hobbies and interests. It could create more inertia for the schools for parents and grandparents idea. It could create new friendships too. It doesn’t have to be just a bougie thing that only the wealthy people do.

Buuuut. Who is our target customer? Who’s going to come?

I could probably get a couple of my relatives to come…We could get a couple of dozen people for the first few months, just by begging… But is that enough?

I wonder what the total addressable market (TAM) for this might be… How many people could we even theoretically serve if this caught on?

Wonder what cadence the classes would have to be run at… What if there’s a class once a month and we keep doing it for six months or a year with different people every month? It reaches 120 people, which is a decent number. Perhaps if we did it every week, that would be cool. Because instead of reaching 120 people, we would reach 520 people, but more realistically 450 people. But, would there be 10 interested dads every week?

I gotta look deeper into the financial side of this, and how it might play out…

Things for consideration:

• Commercial kitchens for rental, where you could run cooking classes in Nepal like this.
• Kitchen rental costs.
• Work out logistically and financially. Who will do the logistics of purchasing supplies and arranging the rentals and equipment? Where would the equipment go?

I’m probably the most worried about marketing though.

How would we market? How would we reach our target audience?

We could try advertising to young folks living outside Nepal, with the idea being that they’d purchase cooking class passes for their dads. The other would be to outreach to the dads and granddads directly through various events they might be involved in locally. A Lion’s Club event, a Jaycees event, so forth. But oh the marketing costs!

It feels like this is a minimum one lakh investment idea. And profits need to be a really good amount to justify that.

Lets do a ballpark estimate with one approach. Let’s say 10 people show up for four hours of session, and they pay 2,500 rupees per session. 25,000 rupees per session. Between the trainer and the kitchen rental and ingredients, how much could we spend? I don’t see a way to spend less than 20,000 rupees. But let’s say somehow we spend 15,000. To be viable, we would need to do at least seven to ten classes. And the assumption would be that all the classes have full attendance.

An alternative idea is to maybe not spend as much money on the marketing. How about we create a gift card option to give to your dads or your parents, so that they are kind of forced to follow up on it. We could sell gift cards to cooking classes for dads, to their children in US, Australia, Canada, Europe, etc.

Call the dads from a Nepali number, using a Nepali contact, who will follow up on the gift cards and schedule those classes. If we sold each gift card for $25, we’d be selling about 50 gift cards to make sense. $1,250 is not that much money. We would have to still sell about 100 gift cards.

If tried it with my dad and my relatives, we could probably push it for a class or two. Am I okay with that? Would it be satisfying if we served 30 people (possibly repeated) until we discovered the idea to be unviable?

One big concern is cooking could be challenging for the elderly as it is. They’re not very dexterous with their hands, and picking up heavy things is challenging. They have limited mobility as it is. Would it be perhaps rubbing limited physical capacities on their face? We’d have to find a way to make it suitable to their physical abilities. And obviously we could use easier equipment and pre-cut or semi-cut things, and give a lot of time for prepping. Should we prep and chop the veggies and ingredients before hand? How would that affect the price? What’s a healthy balance between pre-prepping and the costs?

A really cynical approach: it could be an opportunity to do cross-marketing for kitchen equipment designed for the elderly. Get the equipment for free, and give a sales pitch on every training course. It would go something like, “Oh yeah, these are our sponsors. If you liked using them, we’re selling them, BTW!” We’d take a commission on that, obviously.

But I don’t know how I feel about that. Disgusted, possibly, but then I’m not a very good businessman. My concern is that the premium feel of the whole thing would dissipate if your trainers/instructors are trying to sell sponsored kitchen items. We’d lose our clients for not a lot of money….

I want to explore more on how the recipe development for this idea might work. I want to create recipes that would be friendly/representative of Nepal’s diverse ethnicities and food cultures. Like Newari food one week, Limbu food the other, Thakali the next, and so forth. If nothing else, our dads could say, “Hey, I know how to make Thakali food! I know how to make Limbu food”. That would be a cool addition. But perhaps I’m more excited by the idea than my clients might potentially be?

I want to go explore this idea in detail when I’m in Nepal in Jan/Feb. Talk to a few friends and judge interest. Market research would be cheap and easy.