How my startup failed, even when its users love it

Three years ago i launched Mishi, not as a startup, but half TED and half Gourmet event!

The plan was to merge all my meetings into one Gourmet + Networking event, to increase social effciency between my friends , to learn from other industry's leaders' experience , and to enjoy genuine food from best chefs.

The core team was me, working as event & speaker curator; Bonnie, as cofounder & event planner; Jax, cofounder who works on the operation/marketing side

My friends were enthusiast, but soon we realized that was not easy job curating great speech, food & right audience all at same time!

We ran out of chefs & good food, so we needed to design from scratch every dinner, by choosing ingredients, chefs & menu, and most importantly a speaker & his topic, ranging from travel, startup & design, it was really time consuming & not scalable from the operation side.

After 6 months of operations , we started getting request from media to cover our story, after the first year we even landed in a reality Cooking show financed by Siemens, with alleged production cost of RMB 25 Million (most of money are spent on buying the show rights from a german media company, and on advertising time slot on CCTV9 )

We thought this momentum can be used to launch a Social-Dining product, but we were wrong about the PMF:

30 days at the production house, here is what we get:

• a program without any real market impact
• my room mate Chris, winner of the program g0t 1 week of local media attention
• Siemens canceled the 2nd season due to the low watching rate

Here is the post mortem on the show & Chinese audience:

• most chineses grow up eating at the university cafeterias, with low quality ingredients & tons of msg, that set the bar of food benchmark
• chefs are an underpaid class in China, renegaded to closed kitchens,
• food ingredients variety is poor China, most local fresh ingredients don’t circulate
• users still care more about the ambience setting than the food itself

Here are the execution mistakes:

• We focused to much on the Branding side
• We paid to much attention to the quality of the events, attendants love us, but we didn’t figure out a viable business model
• We didn’t iterate from the initial idea, the concept was out from the collective mind category, was really hard to market

Finally some good output from this venture:

• New long lasting friendship were born from Mishi
• 2 startups take off from the Mishi community
• It refined my sense of Design & my palate

My final observation :

You cannot fight a century long lack of Food-Education!