There Is a Market for Bad Coffee, Burned Toast, and Cheap Tinned Baked Beans.
Just make sure you burn the toast every time.
This is from a lesson my father taught me as a young budding entrepreneur. I used to sell my own homemade peanut butter cookies at school. I was 11. On realizing I wasn’t making the right margin, I took it upon myself to reduce the amount of peanut butter and switched from butter to margarine.
If I couldn’t make enough money, I wasn’t going to continue baking the cookies. That in itself is a good lesson to remember. Vanity projects do not pay the bills.
I had one or two complaints regarding quality when I arrived with the first revised batch. So I went to my dad after school and asked his advice. His reply was a life lesson that I have kept throughout my business life:-
Bad coffee and burned toast have a market. But if that is your market, never make good coffee or perfect toast. Because the moment you do, the customer will expect that as the standard.
I changed nothing. And carried on selling all my production. I learned the value of a captive market too.
It’s akin to understanding price points. The cheaper your product, the bigger your market, but equally the greater your competition. There are millions of…
