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About VibeKitchen

Why we built VibeKitchen

VibeKitchen gives anyone who cooks from home their own storefront and ordering system — one link for your menu, your orders, your pickups, and your customers. Here is how my co-founder Shuva Begum and I came to build it.

Doug Sillex and Shuva Begum, the founders of VibeKitchen, at an outdoor table at golden hour.
Doug Sillex and Shuva Begum, the founders of VibeKitchen.

The spark

It started at our kitchen table.

My partner and co-founder, Shuva Begum, grew up in Bangladesh, where food is how families and whole communities come together. It is something we share. We have spent years watching the world cook — Bangladeshi, Indian, Mexican, Thai, Jamaican, Italian, Vietnamese, and everything in between — in recipe videos and late-night reels. Food, to us, is one of the most human things there is.

One night in early 2026, Shuva told me she had been seeing people sell homemade food right out of their houses on Facebook Marketplace, and that she wished some of her own family could do the same. That stuck with both of us. We spent the next month watching how it actually worked: real people, real kitchens, selling plates to their neighbors.

What we saw

The food was great. Ordering it was broken.

I have spent my career in software and security, taking tangled, messy problems apart for a living. So when I watched these home cooks sell, I could not unsee the chaos around the order.

A tamale listing shows up in your feed — and then what? You send a DM. Sometimes you get an answer, sometimes you do not. How much is it? How many do I get? How do I pay you — Venmo, cash, something else? Where do I pick it up, and when? Restaurants solved these questions a century ago. The person cooking out of their own kitchen got none of those built-in answers.

That is the gap. Not the cooking — the cooking is the easy part for these folks. It is everything around the order.

Why it matters

Real food, real cooks, and a real shot at something you own.

Why now

A real shot for everyday families.

The timing is not an accident. Households are under real pressure right now — layoffs, the cost of nearly everything, families needing more than one income while childcare eats whatever that second income would bring in. A lot of people feel stuck.

Selling what you cook from your own kitchen is one of the few honest paths we have seen that an ordinary person can actually start. It is something you own and can grow — not gig delivery work, where a crowded driver pool and marked-up food split your pay two more ways and your own car takes the wear. If you are weighing that trade-off, we wrote about it in gig delivery alternatives.

And it gives you your time back. When your kid wakes up sick, you do not draft a careful email asking your boss for permission — you adjust your hours or close your kitchen for the day, and you go. That kind of control is the whole point.

The product

What VibeKitchen is — and what it is not.

VibeKitchen is your own storefront and ordering system — and it is not a marketplace. One link holds your menu, takes orders, collects payment, and keeps your pickup details and your customer list in one place. You set your hours. You set your prices — you keep 100% of what you charge, and your customer covers a 10% service fee at checkout. You decide whether an item is ready now, cooked for a scheduled batch, or made fresh to order.

What it is

  • Your storefront, menu, and brand
  • Your hours and your prices — you keep 100%
  • Your customers and pickup details in one place
  • Ready now, scheduled batch, or made to order

What it isn’t

  • A marketplace or a feed of other sellers
  • A delivery app that owns the customer
  • A gatekeeper on what you can cook or sell
  • Another monthly subscription to take orders

It is your kitchen, your brand, and your customers — the system the corner restaurant has always had, and you never did.

The real reason

The food is the whole point.

Here is the part that surprised us most. The food people make from home is genuinely some of the best out there, because their name is on every plate. When your reputation rides on the food, you cook like it matters — every time. That is hard to find at a chain, where a line cook has little reason to pour themselves into the order.

People have quietly been selling plates in their communities for a long time. What is new is that this is becoming a real part of the food world — a place for anyone who wants to take a shot at it. We built VibeKitchen to make that shot a fair one.

Who we are

The two of us.

Doug Sillex — that is me — is the builder. My background is in IT, security, automation, and full-stack development, and a long habit of taking complicated problems apart until they are simple. Shuva Begum is the heart of VibeKitchen: the one who saw what this could be for families, and who keeps us honest about the people we are building for.

We are a small team building something we believe in. If you cook, we would love for you to start your VibeKitchen.

Doug SillexFounder & Owner
Shuva BegumCo-Founder

About VibeKitchen

Start your VibeKitchen.

VibeKitchen is being built as your own order page for home food sellers: your menu, your orders, pickup details, and a customer list you own. Join the waitlist for early access.