Pivoting Moments
Greetings from Ottawa yet again,
We realized this year is basically the exact opposite of last year for us. Last year we traveled to a lot of different places doing the same thing in each -- talking to people in tech and learning about the ecosystem there. This year we’re spending it in the same place doing a lot of different things -- exploring , , webinars, drip campaigns, digital communities, and most recently .
Well… Kuluin didn’t work out so we are once more onto some new ventures! Fail fast, right?
Kuluin Post Mortem
Kuluin was going pretty well. A week after launching, we had customers excited to try our product. Some were referrals from friends and some were found on Instagram via hashtags like #danceteacher. Many were non-committal about timelines for creating courses, but one customer already had videos recorded and wanted to launch a dance subscription program to their hundreds of students in just two weeks!
… Only problem was we didn’t yet support subscriptions, nor brand customizations, nor some other meaty features they needed. Other customers also had those feature requests, so it made sense for us to implement them for their launch. Those two weeks Owen worked from when he woke up until he went to bed all day everyday, scrambling to finish it all.
The weekend before their launch, the customer decided to go with a different platform. They were really communicative about it, no hard feelings were had. They explained it was because they had many other desired features that we didn’t have but another platform did. We think it was also because they encountered some bugs in our app the week before and lost trust in our product. Owen was completely overhauling everything and didn’t always do a good job with QA and testing before deploys. He has learned some lessons on doing better on that front.
Losing that first customer was a blow to morale but not the reason for us quitting. Even before it happened we were already questioning if we were working on the right problem. One of our main motivators was that we could help all the teachers who were affected by studios closing during COVID-19. The customer persona we had in mind was the teacher struggling with $10 Zoom classes. With recorded classes they could offer the experience they wanted and reach more students online.
All the competitors we found charged hundreds a month for a service that didn’t make sense to be so expensive. They were tailored for people selling high budget courses like Ivy’s career coaching, not cheap dance classes. But as we began building, we heard about Teachable, which eluded our competitor analysis. Teachable’s prices were in line with what we planned and were years ahead in feature completeness. Suddenly we were down one of our raisons d’etre.
Another problem was that giving teachers a medium for reaching more students wasn’t enough. A common objection Ivy got on calls with teachers was, “so how am I going to find students to take my online course?” We had forgotten the lesson that Ivy just learned from career coaching.
To teach online with little following, you need to start with 1:1 high-end coaching because you only need a few clients to pay the bills and you can tailor it to their specific needs. After Ivy’s 1:1’s filled up, she was able to get a sense for what could be generalized, and from there was able to start group coaching and recording courses. Recorded courses help coaches with an existing audience/email list scale without trading time for money. Just offering teachers a platform for hosting courses did not solve the audience issue.
After we lost our first customer, we finally had time to sit down and re-evaluate. Were we really providing that much of a value proposition still? Were we really passionate about serving these customers? We decided we weren’t for either of those, and so we chose to move on.
One of the biggest reasons startups fail is because they give up. We definitely feel that now. You’ll face many hurdles along the journey. You better really believe in your vision if you want to make it through them all.
So what are we up to now? We’re separately testing out some new ideas! It doesn’t mean we aren’t working together anymore, we just both found ideas that excite us more so we’re validating them in parallel. We’ll revisit later what we continue with, whether together or not.
Owen's New Venture
Imagine if you could open a new restaurant simply by creating original recipes / concepts and marketing them. The kitchen operations would all be taken care of for you. You just pay for a share of the costs proportional to your needs (for example you think you can sell 100 plates over a weekend) and you’re off to the races.
This is Owen’s sales pitch. His goal is to run software assisted kitchens that’d handle everything from staffing to food procurement to day to day operations for restauranteurs. One team of chefs would be responsible for the food across multiple restaurants. Tooling is built from the ground up for this scenario, to help them with making new and unfamiliar dishes everyday, to the standards of the restauranteurs.
For new restauranteurs, getting started would be much less risky and overwhelming of an endeavor, almost akin to opening a Shopify store. They could focus on the creative parts of concocting recipes and not on the menial repetition of the day in and out.
For existing restauranteurs, testing new locations and markets for expansion becomes way easier. They just pay for as much demand as they think they can generate in each place, instead of having to rent and operate entire new facilities.
The initial demographic is a TBD subset of delivery-only fast casual, operated out of ghost kitchens. We’d be only handling back of house operations to start. In the distant future, Owen envisions the possibility of running food court-esque social dining spaces for front of house and horizontally scaling front/back separately like AWS services. Recipes would be created in a fashion similar to programming. Robots would handle the repetitive and precise parts of cooking.
Carnitas and pico de gallo on potato brioche buns with a side of miso soup.
Joining the bread making bandwagon.
This idea grew out of some brainstorming he did on where he thinks the food industry is headed. For the demographic of people that go to restaurants for convenience and a taste of something new, he sees ghost kitchens being the most optimal form factor for that in terms of convenience and cost, with only minor compromises on taste (better than Soylent).
One ghost kitchen that makes the food for multiple restaurants would be even more optimal, but how kitchens are run right now would not be suitable for that. He already had many ideas for how operations could be improved from his time , and this gives him a chance to expand on them further.
Owen’s venture doesn’t yet have a name. Some under consideration are Kitchen Concierge and Kitchentender, but he’s open to other ideas if you have any. Also if you know anyone that operates a ghost kitchen, he’d love to chat!
To test his initial core hypotheses, Owen is planning to run a pop-up once a week making Chinese food for pickup. Ivy’s mom is an influencer in the Kanata Chinese community and was able to get him a waitlist of interested clients already! He’ll be making and tweaking the software to facilitate the operations as he runs the pop-up.
Ivy's New Venture
Since early last year, Ivy had been talking about how she wanted to help teenagers better learn about modern opportunities and career paths. In February, we had organized a trip for Ivy’s sister and Owen’s cousins to meet some of our friends in Toronto to learn about their careers and what’s possible, but that got tabled because of world happenings.
This idea resurfaced in Ivy’s mind. Ivy’s best friend since middle school, Yifan, just finished her MBA and her start date for work got postponed to November. After one brainstorm session about the possibility of working together on something, they went full speed ahead on building a virtual summer camp for high school students on business, tech, and entrepreneurship. Check out BETA Camp.
*Note: Please share BETA Camp with any high schoolers, teachers, or parents you may know!
TLDR Here’s how the last 2 weeks went:
Days 1-3: Built a website, mapped out the program, and found initial speakers
Days 4-8: Initial outreach mostly led by Ivy’s mom (yay local influencing again). We had built a 140 member WeChat group by our first information session of Chinese parents. We thought since parents paid the bills, seeing if we can sell to parents would be a good first step.
Day 9: 60 of the 140 parents attended our information session and likely dragged their begrudging teenagers to it. We got a lot of questions from teenagers like “what even is this” and decided that going for parents was the wrong way to go. Teenagers have no interest in what their parents recommend.
Day 10 - 15: We doubled down on social media and partnerships. Ivy reached out across Facebook groups looking for channels to students and reached out directly to students of Shad Valley, First Robotics, and TKS. Yifan outreached to school boards, organizations, and teachers. We now have 180 parents in the WeChat group and 105 individual students signed up for the information session. Over 70% of the 105 students heard about us from Instagram and we only have 150 followers.
Day 15: Second information session with 45 attendees. We’re hoping to get 50 solid applicants in the next week - wish us luck!
Fun facts we’ve learned about these Gen Z kids in the last weeks:
Ivy’s 16 year old sister doesn’t know what FOMO means. Ivy explained it as “slang that kids use” ..oh wait. “Slangs that old kids use…”
Teens use Instagram like we use Facebook. 0 posts, 1k+ followers, 1k+ following is the typical teen. The psychology on not trusting an account with 50 followers doesn’t seem to exist either.
There are tons of for-youth-by-youth organizations promoting opportunities on Instagram. It’s pretty easy to get a share for share story and if not, Ivy has virtually mentored a hackathon in Vancouver and is scheduled to podcast for Youth of Canada in exchange for exposure.
One last meaningful learning has to do with what’s going on in the world today and all of our efforts to create more inclusive businesses, friendships, and communities. An acquaintance pointed out that when BETA Camp says: We are looking for “exceptional” high school students, it will not resonate with students who don’t think they are exceptional - particularly students who don’t have the same luxuries as tutors, quiet study space, or support at home as students who live in affluent neighborhoods. They think they don’t measure up.
Marketing is about refining your messaging and target audience and speaking to them in a way that resonates with them. From our own life perspectives, this kind of language is normal for competitive summer programs. We want great kids to participate in our program. But what about the kids that didn’t have opportunities to become exceptional? What are we really looking for?
We wanted bright, curious, and passionate kids who are ready to learn. Just by putting the word “exceptional”, we were excluding and deterring certain groups of students from applying.
We are still thinking and learning about how to balance inclusivity with our marketing, our mission as a business (that is not primarily focused on social entrepreneurship), and the role we should play in bringing up the groups of people that may have been left behind. Should we lower standards for certain groups, offer more scholarships, form more partnerships to ensure that minorities and underrepresented groups apply and are not deterred at any stage?
Hope everyone is doing well, let's keep learning together!
Onwards,
Ivy & Owen