Finally getting started!

[parabolic]

Nice work. Wholesale can be great but make sure that you're charging enough to make it worth your time and that wholesale orders won't disrupt your retail order production. You'll have to find the most practical and profitable balance of the two.

Delivery is an amazing platform for baked goods. Many of the problems that plague other types of food delivery are far less problematic or nonexistent when delivering shelf stable baked goods. Customers are always happy to get baked good deliveries. You could utilize existing apps or develop your own system - potentially even a low tech version that could be as simple as adding a generic "delivery" item to your existing e-commerce setup.

I was recently working on a baking business but have pivoted to a retail venture that will include packaged baked goods and utilize delivery heavily. My partner and I had trouble finding a suitable location for the bakery in our area so we decided to move on from that exact idea for the time being. It's great to see someone making it work!

 

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[Saint]

Nice work. Wholesale can be great but make sure that you're charging enough to make it worth your time and that wholesale orders won't disrupt your retail order production. You'll have to find the most practical and profitable balance of the two.

Delivery is an amazing platform for baked goods. Many of the problems that plague other types of food delivery are far less problematic or nonexistent when delivering shelf stable baked goods. Customers are always happy to get baked good deliveries. You could utilize existing apps or develop your own system - potentially even a low tech version that could be as simple as adding a generic "delivery" item to your existing e-commerce setup.

I was recently working on a baking business but have pivoted to a retail venture that will include packaged baked goods and utilize delivery heavily. My partner and I had trouble finding a suitable location for the bakery in our area so we decided to move on from that exact idea for the time being. It's great to see someone making it work!

Thanks for replying! The wholesale for this particular opportunity seems solid - we're just sharing revenue with us getting 60%, and we're charging more than usual per item. We'll find out tomorrow if we actually sold anything. If we did, I think this model would make a lot of sense. I actually know someone who did something similar and had a lot of success with it before covid wrecked hanging out at coffee shops.

We're still very early thinking about whether nationwide delivery, retail locations, or wholesale is the best option. Retail location would probably be our last move just because it seems like the most expensive to get started. But right now we can't ship outside our region either, so maximizing deliveries in our area and looking for wholesale opportunities are our main focuses.

Seems like you have a lot of experience in this area, so I'll check out your posts!

 

[Robdavis]

Just read your last few updates. You seem to be making amazing progress. Can't wait to read more of them.

 

[Saint]

Geez it's crazy how quickly a month flies by. Not a ton to update, as things have continued to go well at the market. We bought a storage cabinet that has saved about 50% of the work of setting up. It's now not too difficult, and we're still loving it. Also starting to get more frequent online orders (we got two last week!), which is really exciting.

We did have one breakthrough though. We've been meaning to start outbound efforts to various other businesses. We finally made a list of 15+ different types of businesses that could use our products. My wife went to a few and gave them free product. Turns out one of the five she hit up a significant need for our products, and have struggled to find someone to supply them regularly. We're on the verge of completing paperwork for a weekly order for them. If we could get 10-15 more like this we'd be making more than the farmers market on a recurring basis, and there are thousands of this kind of business in our area.

So our goal is to focus down on prospecting to this kind of business by showing up and giving free product! So far the reaction has been really excited and wonderful feedback on the product itself.

Also outlined a few goals to strive for in the next few months. Currently we have:
130 Instagram followers
~120 unique website visitors per month
69 people on our email list
5 businesses we've given free product to

By November, our goal is to get to
1000 Instagram followers
1000 unique website visitors per month
500 people on our email list
400 businesses hit up

We've split up some of the responsibilities, and we think this gives us a good track to run on in some key areas which, if we put this effort on, will start to keep us really busy during the week with orders. Hopefully we get some hockey stick growth going in some. I'm going to post separate threads about ideas and strategies for each, but I already have more ideas than I know what to do with for each area. We also have $6K in the biz bank + what we make at the market that I'm trying to decide where to invest. We're basically good on farmers market equipment for now, so I'm thinking google ads to raise awareness for the website.

 

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[Saint]

Updates from June:
153 Instagram followers, 3 over goal for the month
137 unique website visitors per month, 13 short of goal for the month
74 people on our email list, 1 short of goal for the month
15 businesses we've given free product to, 10 short of goal for the month

Goals this month:
200 Instagram followers
200 unique website visitors
100 people on our email list
25 businesses given free product

A few other updates:

• I set up Hubspot's CRM to start tracking our progress with hitting up businesses
• We found out that with the commercial kitchen, it should be a pretty simple application to be able to start wholesaling and shipping product. That'll open up coffee shops and the whole country for shipping.
• I've started migrating our website to Shopify
• We closed the recurring office order, and have delivered several dozen the last few Fridays. We've gotten rave reviews, and the property manager said she'd likely order more.

In another thread @Andy Black emphasized focusing on the one thing to move forward. Right now that one thing for me, besides continual action on the above goals, is migrating to Shopify. That's my one thing for a few reasons:

• I've seen a few places that Wix, our current website platform, tends to get a bit crappy looking as you customize the pages. That's definitely the case with ours...it looks OK, but not professional. I'm probably 50% done migrating to Shopify after just a few hours, and it still looks WAY better than on Wix.
• I believe the amateur look is reducing people's likelihood to order
• Wix's ecommerce setting are, as far as I've been able to figure out, not very effective. I've heard and read numerous places now that Shopify is better, and as far as I can tell from my work migrating to Shopify, that seems to be the case. And if we're able to start shipping soon, that'll be even more important
• I want to start testing advertising, but I don't think it will be as worthwhile to direct people to this amateur wix site. Once we have a good looking Shopify storefront, I think it will be worth testing that.

So those are the big updates. We're in the middle of preparing a huge wedding order that we've already been paid for. We'll produce almost 1000 items this week, but unfortunately that's meant we don't have any that can go to businesses. We'll have to make up for that next week.

 

[Saint]

Now that I've simplified the business goals here, I'm going to start posting an objective weekly around the "One thing" to focus on.

This week, I'm going to finish migrating to Shopify. The key things I need to do to get there are:

• Add the rest of our products
• Update photos everywhere
• Go through their migration page and make sure I've done everything

There are a few other things we need to do at some point in the next week or two, but these don't necessarily have to be done to finish the migration:

• Add our instagram feed at the bottom of the home page
• Create copy and add pictures for our main target audience pages
• Add our previous blog pages

 

[Saint]

Still working on the Shopify site. I've:

• Gone through the whole migration doc and believe I'm ready to go
• Tested orders
• Added a delivery date picker
• Add instagram to the bottom of the home page

But I haven't updated all the products yet. My wife was taking new (and 10x better) pictures, so I mainly just need to create the products and add the picture. We have an idea for how to manage the products in collections that I think will make it easy for customers to choose. One day we'd like to have a "build your own product" capability like domino's pizza, but that's a ways down the road. Once I do this I think it'll be time to cut over from Wix to Shopify.

Another big update - it hit me that the coffee shop that's been selling our cookies is almost like our retail location. I talked to the guy who runs it about treating it as such, and he was totally on board. So I need to get our google maps page to point to that location. To really treat it as such, we also need to complete a food wholesaler application, which is a pretty big step. We'd also be able to start shipping if we got it!

In bad news, we're pretty stalled on the outbound sales. Right now, between our current recurring order from the office building and the demand we're getting from the farmer's market, we are having a hard time keeping up with demand. We need to either find a more flexible commercial kitchen, or work out better arrangements with the current one. It's connected to the coffee shop, so I think we can work something out, we're just not there yet. But we need to have that ready, because if got another 10 dozen weekly order, we'd be killing ourselves to service it.

Other good news - we have dozens of regulars at the farmers market. It really hit us that we'd want to run this booth, even if it was just staffing it for marketing and hopefully breaking even. There are so many people we love seeing who would hate to not get our products if we stopped going. So hiring employees is another challenge we need to tackle son.

 

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[Saint]

July goals review:
Revenue - Increased MoM, but didn't quite get to our May # that was bolstered by a few big wedding payments
200 Instagram followers - got up to 182
200 unique website visitors - Perhaps over 300; switching from Wix to Shopify I'm not sure I'm comparing apples to apples, but on Shopify we're showing 237 unique visitors
100 people on our email list - got up to about 90
25 businesses given free product - maybe 10

So we missed on Instagram, but it really felt like we grew it a lot this month. I think we were at under 150 at the start. We had one reel get over 1000 views, and we're getting better at automating posts.

On the website, I finally launched on Shopify! So far it's been soooo much better than Wix. Everything looks better, and the ordering process seems to work way better. We got 3 orders within a week of launch after averaging about 3 per month. More importantly, it's finally a website we're excited to drive traffic too. It looks legit and professional. I'd say it actually looks better than many of the other dessert vendors we've met who are full time and doing $10K+ per month. It's also so much more flexible for promotions and product offerings. I have so many ideas for using the site to create exciting offers.

On our email list, we had a few market days where not a lot of people signed up. I'm reading Russell Brunson and it's really hitting home how valuable the list is, so we're going to focus even more on getting people on it. Something about the new website makes that even more exciting - with the offerings we can do with the website, we feel like we have a better reason for people to be on the list.

I've mentioned before, we're slowing down on taking product to businesses. We're hitting capacity issues, and until I go full time with it, I don't know how much more large order work my wife can support. We did finally start getting the checks from this recurring order - added almost $1K to our total this month! So this seems an amazing opportunity, and our plan is to focus on this heavily in the near future.

Our biggest accomplishments this month:

• Launched Shopify website
• Got an incredible review from someone we did a wedding for
• Got some mini-viral instagram reels
• Applied for our food manufacturers license to be able to ship our product nationwide
• Profit of nearly as much as my wife made at her job

I also made some new connections I'm really excited about, such as a bona fide SEO expert who's agreed to meet with me.

My "one thing" for the month: I've created pages to put specific offerings we'll have for particular marketing personas that we're starting to have success with. I'm going to write up copy for each (and maybe get feedback here on it), so that we can drive traffic for specific keywords to each page.

We're also figuring out what to do with the baby on the way in November. We're thinking we'll have at least a week totally off, but we can service orders otherwise, and we'll skip the market entirely for a month or two. We need to determine this in more detail, but there's also still so much unknown about that. Either way, our plan is to do a big "re-launch" around our new website and the coffee shop after the baby's born, probably in January.

 

[Saint]

Revenue - about half of last month; reasons below
200 Instagram followers - got up to 192
260 "store sessions"
100 people on our email list - stuck at just under 90
25 businesses given free product - paused for now

Revenue is down because it's been so hot where we are that we were making about half what we had been at the market. Fewer people showed up in August, and with my wife pregnant, we were leaving by 1. So a really weak month.

Our new Shopify website started off with a bang, but we haven't gotten online orders in a few weeks. I have written the copy for personas (been reading some threads here on copywriting). I still need to do more research, have conversations, etc. with these personas we plan to target, but it was a fun start.

We got our food manufacturer's license, so we can now potentially ship. That's gonna be a project once we're done with the markets for the year, to test shipping methods and see how we can make sure they arrive in good condition.

My one thing for September: learn how to do keyword research and to create pages to target keywords. I've already researched this topic a fair amount, but I need to actually do it to really understand it. Writing the copy for the personas helped make it clear what the next step is, and I found I really enjoy copywriting. Probably wasn't great material, but it was fun to start.

Another big project to figure out is how we're going to handle everything with the baby coming. We're taking the market week by week at this point, and the latest we'll do them is end of this month. It could be nice to have some time to focus on other projects, like digital marketing, shipping, holiday promotions, and our boots-on-the-ground gameplan when we get back.

 

[freek]

Revenue - about half of last month; reasons below
200 Instagram followers - got up to 192
260 "store sessions"
100 people on our email list - stuck at just under 90
25 businesses given free product - paused for now

Revenue is down because it's been so hot where we are that we were making about half what we had been at the market. Fewer people showed up in August, and with my wife pregnant, we were leaving by 1. So a really weak month.

Our new Shopify website started off with a bang, but we haven't gotten online orders in a few weeks. I have written the copy for personas (been reading some threads here on copywriting). I still need to do more research, have conversations, etc. with these personas we plan to target, but it was a fun start.

We got our food manufacturer's license, so we can now potentially ship. That's gonna be a project once we're done with the markets for the year, to test shipping methods and see how we can make sure they arrive in good condition.

My one thing for September: learn how to do keyword research and to create pages to target keywords. I've already researched this topic a fair amount, but I need to actually do it to really understand it. Writing the copy for the personas helped make it clear what the next step is, and I found I really enjoy copywriting. Probably wasn't great material, but it was fun to start.

Another big project to figure out is how we're going to handle everything with the baby coming. We're taking the market week by week at this point, and the latest we'll do them is end of this month. It could be nice to have some time to focus on other projects, like digital marketing, shipping, holiday promotions, and our boots-on-the-ground gameplan when we get back.

Really enjoyed reading this thread, looking forward to the updates!

 

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[Saint]

Thank you @freek! I'm glad you've enjoyed it.

Another opportunity we're starting to see - pop-ups at office buildings and coworking spaces. We got invited to do one at a coworking space through a friend, and another location of theirs invited us to do it at their place! The folks at the first one seemed to really enjoy it. Then another office we dropped our product off at invited us to come to their location and sell for a few hours. Could be the start of a "food truck without a food truck" scenario.

 

[nopalmer]

Thank you @freek! I'm glad you've enjoyed it.

Another opportunity we're starting to see - pop-ups at office buildings and coworking spaces. We got invited to do one at a coworking space through a friend, and another location of theirs invited us to do it at their place! The folks at the first one seemed to really enjoy it. Then another office we dropped our product off at invited us to come to their location and sell for a few hours. Could be the start of a "food truck without a food truck" scenario.

That sounds great! Hope there'll be some chatty folks there to spread the word so that you get more opportunities of this type.

 

[Saint]

Well a few weekends ago we reached the end of our "first act" in entrepreneurship. My wife's been pregnant, and we're to the point that she can't really handle the baking it takes to prepare for the farmer's markets, or being at the farmer's markets themselves. I want to spend these last few weekends before the baby comes with her, not at the market, so we're pausing our time there. We've really missed being there, offering our product, connecting with customers, etc. in the few weeks we've been gone. It was so cool - on the last weekend we were there, several of our regular customers and several vendors gave us baby gifts. Such a great community we've developed being there, and we're hoping to get back by December.

We've maintained our regular customers, the coffee shop we sell at, and fulfilled several online orders since we stopped going to the market, but revenue will definitely be super low until we get back to the markets. I thought this would be a good time to recap what we've accomplished this year. We basically started in January. Since then here our key results:

• Almost $30K in sales
• Almost $15K in profit
• Sold to hundreds of customers
• grew our Instagram followers from 0 to 212
• Launched a nice looking Shopify site
• Reached the first page of Google for one of our local areas, and second page for the main metro
• Got up to 3-4 online orders per month
• Successfully serviced 4 large weddings and a large philanthropy event
• Developed a base of regular customers, several of whom became friends
• Developed friendships with other business owners at the market
• Learned sooooo much. It feels like I'm a different person with how much more I know I'm capable of now!

I know these aren't crazy big or fast accomplishments, but I'd never made a dollar outside of a job before this year. It's felt amazing to make enough to start approaching replacing our income with our own business. It's not Fastlane yet, but I learned so much already. The path to going Fastlane is certainly a lot more clear than when we started.

I should be getting 2 months of paternity leave from my job starting at the end of the month. I'm going to use a big chunk of that time to start planning and putting the pieces in place to go 10x as hard at this next year. I believe we can be paying our monthly expenses through this business alone with a few months of dedicated work, so I'm planning to leave my job early next year. I have enough saved up to feel pretty confident that we'll be alright if I also go full time with it, even if it takes longer to get there than I expect.

If we can cover our monthly expenses with this, I'm free of a job working for someone else. If we can keep growing from there, then we'll be building a real Fastlane wealth stream - profit + asset value. For next year, I'll continue to use this as a vehicle for learning entrepreneurship. I know it may not be the "fastest boat" to be in, but I'm confident I'll be learning skills that I can apply for whatever the the fastlane enterprise that can lift off will be.

I'll start posting about plans and strategy for next year in the coming weeks!

 

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[Saint]

Well we're back in the game!

Baby came healthy, wife's recovering. Starting to get used to having another person in our house, a very needy person!

I've used the last month to do something that's frowned upon in some circles - business planning. I read a few books and created a plan based on "One Page Business Plan", and I created a pro forma to create revenue goals for each of our LOBs we've developed. I also created marketing plans for each of those LOBs based on another book called "One Page Marketing Plan" (noticing a theme here) that was really helpful to think through who our customer are and how we'd reach and serve them.

I think this planning has been really helpful. It feels like we have such clarity of vision for next year. And because it's based on relatively aimless action and the results of that this year, it feels realistic to execute on and achieve.

We're going to wait until January to start executing on the meat of the plan, but the plan also enabled us to see how we can organize our key focus areas and day to day tasks. There is a ton of prep stuff we've been knocking out to be ready to hit the ground running in January.

I put all of our key projects, recurring tasks, and other to do's that have come up into this tool called ClickUp. Now we have a central place for everything we need to do, with due dates, statuses, etc. My wife loved it immediately, and we've been using it to plan our days the last week.

I attended the farmer's market last week, and will again this Saturday. It was so slow. But it's because there are so many other Christmas events going on, that's where the real action is. Wish we'd been sure we could commit to those. This year, December will be really slow, but next year I could see it being a bonanza.

We started back up with our coffee shop customer and our office building customer. They were stoked that we didn't melt away after the baby, so we're starting with that base. We're also finally testing shipping our product outside of our area...first trial sent off yesterday!

I'm so stoked to get started prospecting in January. I have a list of 500 caterers in the area that are gonna know us in a month or two!

 

[Saint]

A few updates:

• We started back at the farmer's market this weekend. Got a very warm welcome back from several regulars, sold relatively well for a cold, wet February weekend, and we got a new spot that should mean 50%+ more traffic. Could significantly boost both our sales and exposure this year.
• We now have the ability to ship our product nationwide. Just enabled the ability our website. Now we need to figure out how to get people to use it.
• We have an opportunity to lease a deli in an office building for not that much more than we'd pay for a few four hour blocks in a commercial kitchen each week. If we get it, our plan would be to outsource/break even on the deli, giving us a commercial kitchen for free, and cutting out our biggest expense.
• Local online orders have picked up significantly in the last month. We're averaging 4 a week, where we used to average 4 a month.
• Set up a CRM and started calling caterers in January, but with the job transition I haven't been able to keep up with that. Once I'm off full time from that in March, I'll pick that back up unless we get the deli. If we get the deli, that's gonna be full time.

Wife and I are tag-teaming with the baby. I think we'll be fine once I'm full time on the business, but right now it's pretty hectic and stressful. We've been making customers happy though, and we're loving getting focus on this full-time more and more.

 

[Saint]

Great Q1! Biggest news is that I quit my job. Put in notice in January and they asked me to stay through March. I did, and considered going part time, but it's gotten way too busy, no way we could do what we're doing in the last few weeks if I was even at 20 hours a week. And there is sooo much more opportunity we can keep chasing!

Q1 Highlights:

• All-time best month in March after our big deep November - January pausing for the baby
• Signed on two new wholesale partners that're selling through and reordering
• Online orders increased from an average of about 2 per month last year to 2.4 per week so far this year (and that number is accelerating through March)
• Sales through our first partner have increased compared to last year
• We had our three best Saturdays and weekends overall at the farmer's market in March
• We defined our mission, vision, and plan for the year
• Started at a new commercial kitchen that gives us 5x the production capacity
• Developed a content calendar we used effectively to never run out of content to post about

Q1 Disappointments:

• Continued working at W-2 through the end of the quarter, which delayed many of the sales and marketing activities we had planned
• We’ve done very little guerilla marketing due to above point
• We only added about 40 people to our Instagram following
• We invested in an annual membership for a new commercial kitchen, and in completing our booth at the farmer's market to make it nice. That drove our expenses in March to an all-time high, so our net for March was lower than we’d hoped

 

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