We have no money, no connection, no time and we have tons of R&D to do.
A few months back, the only thing we had was an idea. The idea that “maybe some people somewhere may want to cook something but don’t know how would spend money on a magic kit that suddenly transform them into real Chef”.
OK.
Not only this is the worst pitch ever, this also shows how many assumptions we got to validate before we commit to something crazy.
We need to learn more about these people, who are they, do they really have a problem, what is the problem, how do they deal with the problem today, how much this problem is worth to them, what solution they’d be looking for and is our solution really helping them.
So we started writing down all the different ways we could validate each of these assumptions and then, we thought about the “MVP” we got to create that would help us to validate these assumptions.
Making plans was hard, yet quite fun. Especially because we are a bunch of nerds who like to think about problems and find ways to solve them. I won’t spend too much time writing about it today because there are already so many books and articles about iterative learning and all the “lean start up” thing.
But one thing that these books don’t cover well is: how do you even finance your iterative process?
By definition, iterations take time. This costs you. And the more time it takes, the more it costs.
Sure, you can do it fast and the faster you iterate, the better. But nothing’s free and in general, if you aren’t using time, you are spending something else.
We were all working hard for different companies and none of us have rich parents or “free money”. Oh, and we aren’t even friends with any Silicon Valley guru or rockstar. We are just “normal people”.
So how do we deal with this situation?
What if we could turn our “iterations” into a profitable “business” and re-invest the money we make to buy more time for iterations?
I read somewhere that in every business, you got to do 3 things: 1) create value 2) communicate this value 3) do the first 2 steps faster.
The value we want to create is “the awesome way to help anyone to have fun baking great pastries at home and be successful doing it”. The first thing we got to figure out is what people want to bake (and if they actually like pastries at all).
We looked on Google Trend and typed some of the most popular pastries to see which one comes high. We made a first list of candidates.
Then, during our lunch break, we went to visit all the office managers at all the companies in the area we work at. We are talking about small/medium size companies. Nothing like Google or Facebook.
It was really easy to talk to the office managers because, to start, they are all nice people and, because they work in small companies, they have a lot of decision powers.
We told them that we are having this cool baking project and we make awesome French pastries for catering and wondered if they’d like to try some.
We quickly realized that no one cared about our list of candidates because almost none of them knew any of these pastries.
But, we also immediately closed a deal. Why? Because we told them while everything is handmade and we only use the highest quality ingredients, we can also deliver the next day.
These office managers are really kind and they are really committed to their work so they want to make the other employees happy. When we told them we can make quality products that can be delivered almost on the spot, well, there is no reason to not try (actually, I see so many reasons to not try but hey, that’s why I’m not a good office manager). The value we create here was clear: we help them to be awesome by making their employees happier.
Not only they didn’t even bother negotiating the price, they actually paid full in advance. Wow.
Now, we have our pockets full of cash for a promise we made. And that’s great because we already validated something, we know the users a bit better and we have our next step: deliver.
We went shopping for the best and the freshest ingredients we could find. But we got to remember that we aren’t a catering business so we got to focus and only do things that eventually serve us.
So, instead of baking pastries as is, we decided to create different pastry kits and then use these kits ourselves to bake pastries and see the results.
Not only we delivered the value we promised and made our customer awesome, we also helped ourselves!
What came next was even better: when we delivered the pastries to the company, we’ve been asked to bring all these tarts, cakes and pies in their kitchen. In their office. Where we met their employees. Who asked questions. And asked talked to us while eating our pastries. And asked more questions about us when they liked what they eaten.
By the way, after talking to 2, 5, 10 different people and trying tell them about what you do, no matter how bad is your initial pitch, it will become better.
Finally, nothing is random: our first sales came from the employees who liked what they tasted that day and were interested in making these pastries at home.
