Starting a Company in Three Days: Samosa Slingers
Starting up 🚀
I’m one of those ideators who’s constantly jotting down ideas in notebooks and outlining the possibilities of them, saying, “wow, wouldn’t THAT be cool?” Yet, not a lot of those ideas see the light of day immediately. Often, I take time to marinate over some of them, revisit them after a couple months, only to ditch them because I’ve realized they’re no longer useful, or put them on my everlasting list of things to build.
It’s never happened so far that I have an idea that’s put into effect almost instantly. Yet, I spent the second half of last week in an excited frenzy over a new idea that my friends and I came up with.
It started when Isaiah, one of my cofounders in this glorious enterprise, was trying to buy frozen chicken tenders online. Nishant was helping him out, and as I overheard their conversation, the entrepreneurial gears in my mind starting churning. People on campus loved things being delivered to them. People on campus loved chicken. Why not put both together?
I immediately got excited at the possibility of us delivering chicken to students at Bentley University. That’s when Isaiah came up with the name of this potential new venture, “The Bok Bok Boys.” It was hysterical. I loved it.
What followed was a day of debate. Do people want chicken? Why wouldn’t they just go to the grocery store? Where would we get our chicken from? Wasn’t there plenty of chicken on and off campus available to people?
It’s that last question that got me thinking. There were definitely things that people loved that they wouldn’t be able to easily find, on or off campus. And that’s when it hit me. Samosas were perfect. They’re a snacky South Asian street food. You can think of them as savory pastries. As South Asian guys who love our food, we knew where to get samosas and we knew people who would want them on day 1. From the ashes of Bok Bok Boys, The Samosa Slingers were born.
As Nishant and Isaiah embarked on a financial adventure to make a budget for our first test batch, I designed a landing page and quickly put together some branding materials. We decided to launch that very Saturday — because we wanted to experiment and see if we got any bites, literally. “Fail fast,” was my mantra during this accelerated beginning.
For the two days before our launch, we worked quickly and we worked scrappy. I came up with a logo in Sketch that looks more like a tortilla chip than a samosa, but it serves its purpose well enough. A couple trips to local Indian grocery stores and Target later, we were in business.
I set up an order form with Typeform and Isaiah and Nishant got working on the Facebook page to try to get the word out however we could before the first batch. Bentley’s activities fair was that Friday, and Isaiah and I found ourselves in a sea of students, handing out mini-fliers to familiar faces. On Saturday night, armed with Red Velvet cake from Nishant’s birthday, we opened up the form at 10PM and started slinging.
What we learned 📚
- You can make a brand in a day. All it takes is some friends with character and a carefree attitude. We started this because it’s fun, entrepreneurial and honestly, educational. I think that’s reflected in our quirky and funny brand image.
- There was a lot of energy around Samosas Slingers. More than we initially anticipated. We fed off of that. It was really exciting to see people on campus hyped up about ordering something from us. There’s really no better feeling than delivering a product or service that people really want and enjoy.
- Being reactionary is often necessary in business, and especially business experiments. In the first ten minutes our form was open, people asked us for multiple orders because they wanted more than the 4 samosas we were selling in a single order. We never thought about how to handle multiple orders, naively thinking that one person would want one order of samosas. We worked on the fly to incorporate double orders into our form and into our delivery/frying process. Now we know to expect larger orders.
- Failing fast is the best way to be motivated to do better next time. It would have been easy to start the next Saturday night with a more “perfect” business strategy. But the amount of learning we would have lost doing that would have been immense. We know so much more about what people want from The Samosa Slingers now that we tried it out once.
What we’re working on and why you should be excited 😎
- We’re introducing new flavors for our next batch! Like us on Facebook or check our website for our flavor reveal, coming soon.
- We’re trying to streamline the experience of someone ordering samosas with the ability for people to reach out to us directly via Facebook Messenger. The order form will be available too, but we’re excited to see if people will find reaching out via Messenger a little easier.
- We’re going to be delivering later in the evening! We’ll be starting later as well. Our new hours will be 11pm to 3am — so you can come back from your late night adventures and order samosas before bedtime!
For all things Samosa Slingers including the introduction of new flavors, check out our website:
Till Next Time,
Saalik (Chief Executive Slinger)
