Saucedrop behind the scenes: Chapter 1

Saucedrop behind the scenes: Chapter 1

This post was originally published and bundled with our inaugural June subscription box. This series of blog posts are dedicated to telling you the story of how we — Saucedrop — are doing as a company, and our experiences as we grow.

We believe transparency is a core component of how businesses should operate in order to keep everyone’s best interests at heart. Each blog post in this ‘Behind the scenes’ series will focus on a different aspect of how we initially set up Saucedrop, and how we are progressing. We hope you find our story interesting as we add new chapters every month.

Setting up shop

Saucedrop began as a a bit of a jokey idea, but after sharing it with close friends and acquaintances we had so much positive feedback right off the bat, that we felt compelled to make it happen. It all began when a series of well timed events happened in quick succession — namely Jana (my wife) and I got really bored of the eating the same old hot sauces stocked at our local grocery store. Shortly after this, I overheard a heated lunchtime conversation between a few of my colleagues about which hot sauce was better — Cholula or Tabasco. This was the ‘light bulb’ moment — wouldn’t it be cool to have a new hot sauce sent to you every so often?

Within a few hours I pulled together a very simple landing page website using Squarespace that would let people register their interest in such a service. The goal with this was to measure market demand for a hot sauce subscription service. This is a standard technique known as value proposition testing — which we use all the time at my day job at ustwo.

In order to establish whether there was any market demand for our idea, we had to try and communicate our value proposition. To do this, we paid a visit to Court Street Grocers and Stinky Brooklyn, and loaded up on all the gourmet hot sauces we could get our hands on.

We then used these hot sauces to stage a photoshoot, aiming to communicate the idea that our boxes would carry a variety of gourmet and exotic hot sauces.

We also had to convey the idea that we would indeed be sending out a box containing a sauce to our customers, so we had to mock up a prototype box from whatever we could find. Our first box was cobbled together from materials found at paper supply store Paper Source. The shredded crinkly “shred” we used to cushion our sauces was gifted to us by the very sympathetic proprietor of We Olive on Smith Street, who liked our idea.

The design for our landing page and prototype box went through at least 10 different iterations before arrived at our current design, which resonated well with people arriving at our website.

Once we had established that there was a fair amount of interest (we had about 50 signups in the first week, purely on word of mouth), we had to make a decision about whether we wanted to turn this into a viable business, as it required considerable investment in time from us. Luckily as you may have gathered by now — we LOVE hot sauce, so this question was easy to answer.

The following few weeks were a flurry of figuring out what to do. Figuring out a business model, establishing all of our potential setup and ongoing costs, refining what our value proposition was, creating branding & packaging, building out our website, setting ourselves up as a legit company, learning about shipping and fulfilment and starting our marketing efforts to help grow our brand new company.

It’s been a great trip so far, we hope you stick around for Chapter 2 next week, when we explain how we created our initial branding, and challenges we faced while trying to define our value proposition, and our pricing model.

- Dave