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Anything considered a "hustle" and not necessarily a CENTS-based Fastlane

Saint

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After all the family and festivities in December, my wife and I are finally getting started with our bakery! This seems like the right place to share my progress. I'd welcome any feedback along the way.

First thing - I got my wife to start reading Fastlane. People have been paying her for baked goods for about two years (on a very small scale), and she's always wanted to do it full time, but she didn't quite have her eye on the ball of Fastlane. We're about 35 chapters in, and it's been as eye-opening for her as it was for me. Every day we're getting more aligned on what we're trying to do with the business

Progress so far:
  • We have a logo
  • Website created
  • Instagram page created
  • Facebook page created
  • Yelp page created
  • Nextdoor page created
  • Zola and Carat & Cake profiles created for weddings
  • Applied to ~8 farmer's markets; most are starting for 2023 in March/April
  • Bought supplies and signage to attend a market
  • I have a system going for tracking our sales and expenses
  • I'm learning SEO/digital marketing
  • She's learning design and growing an audience on Instagram
We got our first online order through Yelp last week, and our first 5-star review, but none since then.

We also got approved for a market last week. We checked it out last Saturday, got encouraged by some of the vendors, and we're going to show up this Saturday and see what we can sell.

We haven't gone all-out on posting on platforms and advertising yet (we set up a lightweight ad on Yelp with their free trial), but next week we're going to start posting regularly and looking for business to reach out to and visit about buying from us.

In this second reading of Fastlane, I do think this can become a fastlane business, but it may not be as optimal as other paths. Regardless, I'm excited to learn digital marketing, managing finances of a real business, and selling our own product! Maybe we just get some extra cash, maybe it can be the foundation for a money tree. Either way, people love these desserts, so we're going to get em out there and learn a lot in the process.

If anyone has any advice about a smart way to plan to reach people on all these platforms, or feedback on anything else, I'd certainly welcome it!
 
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Robdavis

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Well done on the action that you've taken so far. I hope that the market on Saturday goes well for you. Please let us all know how it goes.
Would it be worth pushing your Instagram page as a way of getting "free" advertising? Also could you use a site like Tiktok or Youtube to draw attention to your products?
 

Saint

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Thanks so much for the encouragement Rob!

We did post on Instagram to our 50 followers. But honestly we're wanting to just see how it goes without a bunch of friends and family showing up lol. We'll definitely promote hard every week if we start going every week.

We're going to use TikTok and Youtube eventually, but we're still working on mastering the other platforms. There's still so much to make the website half decent.

Really appreciate your advice!
 

Saint

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Well the market was a huge success in our book! We sold 100+ items in about 5 hours. Made a decent chunk of change, and more importantly, got to directly connect with dozens of people and make a positive impression about our product.

We got there at about 8:15 and set up. When I was loading the car, it felt nice outside, but once we got to our spot and stayed outside for more than 10 minutes, the wind started hitting, and all I had was a light jacket. I quickly got really cold.

We were set up before the market started at 9. Nothing for the first hour, then I went to help set up some signs for the market, and when I got back, a woman had tried to buy a whole box! But we didn't have a credit card reader yet (only accepting cash and all the money transfer apps), so we missed our first sale. First big learning of the day!

Shortly after that, it started raining despite no forecast for rain for the day. I almost didn't get a tent to cover us, but the guy who runs the market strongly recommended it, so I bought one the night before. Good thing, because it actually rained pretty hard (and it was the first rain at all since Christmas).

Even with the rain, people kept showing up, and we finally got our first sale! Yet again, he would have bought a whole box, but once again needed a credit card for that, so he just paid cash for a few items instead. But we were so so soooo beyond excited to get our first sale!

Over the next few hours we sold to several more people. We had a lot of fun interactions, the other vendors were super kind and helpful, and we had a few friends stop by too. We were freezing, our feet killed us, and we were overall a pretty big mess, especially dealing with our supplies in the rain. But we had a pretty darn good looking table, we got our information out to dozens of people, and we learned so much.

We're going to go back next week with a laundry list of updates. The biggest ones are to have a cc reader, reorganize our volume discounting (it was a bit confusing to people), and collect emails from people to update them on when we're showing up. We'll also start promoting it on every channel we've set up.

We'll see if we get any orders this week from people who tried the cookies too!
 
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Saint

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Thanks @Robdavis! I'll keep updating here how things go once we post about the market for this Saturday.

@savefox I've been thinking about that a lot. "Intentional Iteration" via chains or franchising is the most obvious play. Several businesses in our niche have done that in our region. We could also stick with online orders only and have essentially infinite scale on the production side. Then I guess it would be a question of can we win in the market.

I think the quality is there to be a player (we had a previous customer show up and clean out one of our items when she heard we were there), but I don't know how big or profitable the market is at scale.

There's also the possibility of building the brand and even my wife's ability and create more passive products around this, but that's far down the road.

I'd welcome any suggestions about how to get there faster though! We're mainly using the farmer's markets to test the market and get in front of customers while I keep learning digital marketing.
 
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Saint

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Well no online orders this week. It's been a few weeks since we got that first one. We posted an ad on yelp that got views and a few website clicks, but no orders came through. We've been more focused on preparing for the market because we see that as such a great way to get in front of people, but we haven't done as much work on the digital side.

But we made a lot of progress for these farmer's markets. We got approved for what looks like a fancier market. It required jumping through a few more hoops, but when it starts in a month or two I expect it to have a lot more traffic.

We've done a lot to be much more prepared this week. I got Square cc readers so we won't miss any more sales for folks with only a cc. Those just arrived yesterday, and Squaare's whole system seems to make keeping track of sales and inventory a lot easier. We also got a another table and containers for supplies (partly to protect from rain), and we'll have a sign-up sheet to be able to update people on offers and where they can find us.

We also have half the product ready for the market tomorrow. And we feel a lot more prepared now that we've done it once - we'll pre-package everything so we're not having to restock as we go along. We'll also have heavy enough clothes to not be miserable!

I'll update about how it goes. Looking forward to interacting with and serving customers!
 

Saint

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What ups and downs! We got our second online order Friday, wanted it delivered that night or Saturday morning...tough to pull off while we were preparing for the market, but we did it. It was also our biggest individual order ever (nothing crazy, but biggest). We were so beyond excited. It was honestly better than a $20K sales commission. The customer found us by googling a phrase I used in the website copy...unbelievable! The next day she said it was a huge hit, and there was nothing of the order left at the party she brought it to, and said she would be ordering from us again.

Then we went from that ecstasy to the market. We'd prepared a lot of extra product since we could've sold more last week. We had a card reader since we missed several sales without one. Optimized a few other things. It was cold, but not even as rainy as the week before, but somehow it was even slower. We only made a few small sales. And only got to use the card reader once! But it worked, so at least that's confirmed on a live sale.

We had a lot of time to chat with other vendors, and actually learned a lot from them. Overall it was a super disappointing day (except delivering on the online order). We'll chalk this up to dues-paying, but we still learned a lot, and I gotta start doing a lot more website work to get more of those sales.
 

Robdavis

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What ups and downs! We got our second online order Friday, wanted it delivered that night or Saturday morning...tough to pull off while we were preparing for the market, but we did it. It was also our biggest individual order ever (nothing crazy, but biggest). We were so beyond excited. It was honestly better than a $20K sales commission. The customer found us by googling a phrase I used in the website copy...unbelievable! The next day she said it was a huge hit, and there was nothing of the order left at the party she brought it to, and said she would be ordering from us again.

Then we went from that ecstasy to the market. We'd prepared a lot of extra product since we could've sold more last week. We had a card reader since we missed several sales without one. Optimized a few other things. It was cold, but not even as rainy as the week before, but somehow it was even slower. We only made a few small sales. And only got to use the card reader once! But it worked, so at least that's confirmed on a live sale.

We had a lot of time to chat with other vendors, and actually learned a lot from them. Overall it was a super disappointing day (except delivering on the online order). We'll chalk this up to dues-paying, but we still learned a lot, and I gotta start doing a lot more website work to get more of those sales.
Was this the same market as before or was it a different one?
I guess that if you spoke to other market vendors they were able to tell you whether this weeks market was less busy than usual?
It's great that you are still making progress and learning as you go.
 
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techvx

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We did post on Instagram to our 50 followers. But honestly we're wanting to just see how it goes without a bunch of friends and family showing up lol. We'll definitely promote hard every week if we start going every week.

We're going to use TikTok and Youtube eventually, but we're still working on mastering the other platforms. There's still so much to make the website half decent.

If the concern regarding friends and family has to do with them just coming for grabs without paying anything, sure - you might want to avoid giving them another reason to tap into your brand new inventory for free over there.

But if you just want to keep a "low profile" for any reason, I'd highly encourage you to reconsider both the reason itself and keeping people that genuinely wish you well out of the loop.

You don't know who they can share your new venture with. You don't know who those people, in turn, may know themselves. We, as a society, are nodes in the network - do the math and see how many connections you are away from a million people, even if each and every one of us only knew a hundred other people.

It can very well happen that, after paying you a visit, they tell a bunch of their friends about your new business. If any of them happens to have a recurring need for your kind of baking produce, guess what happens if they like what you're selling? They'll keep coming every X weeks to load up at a quantity that will make all of those individual orders pale in comparison.

Also, in terms of the website: given how much Zuck and Co have invested in making their digital tappy-tap and scrolly-scroll apps, there's literally zero sense in not doing anything other than focusing on the website, when you have a ton of people mindlessly scrolling through their feeds and being in the perfect kind of a condition for an impulsive decision to buy some homemade baked wonders of yours.

Begin posting everyday, literally anything related to your bakery - how you make it all, where do you find the highest quality of supplies, how much time you put into this and that. Begin building your reputation from the get go - don't wait until you've mastered the web before diving into social networks. 15 minutes a day, one step at a time, will build you a massive market over the next weeks and months. Afterwards, you'll see what people like more, what they care less about, and adjust accordingly. Just get it going.

Once you've begun posting regularly, don't forget to print out some cards with all of your social media handles ready, and give them away with each order to encourage people to have a one-direct-message away method of ordering some more of your creations.

Lastly, can't know what kind of courses and learning you're doing there when it comes to marketing - just don't over-learn and under-do in the process. Marketing is the art of generating attention for the sake of growing your business. As any form of art, it's always in a constant flux, always changing, always going out of fashion in one way and adopting new trends in another.

Other than a few basic psychology principles (read Robert Cialdini), the most viable formula to market your business, in your situation, given your current circumstances, can't be learnt - it can only be discovered.

Interact with as many people as you can. Build as much good will with them as you can. Let as many people as you can know about what you do, how you're better, and why they should definitely at least try ordering from you - once.

Service them the way they could only dream a homemade bakery can service people, and watch what happens. (Might want to prepare to drastically increase your production rate soon afterwards, though - just in case).

Your passion for what you do can be sensed from a mile away, even in writing - keep at it, don't get distracted by doubts, disappointments and down swings, they are the part of the process. Keep your eyes on the fastlane way, making sure to avoid business-ing yourself in just another dead-end job, and you'll be golden.
 

jdm667

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What ups and downs! We got our second online order Friday, wanted it delivered that night or Saturday morning...tough to pull off while we were preparing for the market, but we did it. It was also our biggest individual order ever (nothing crazy, but biggest). We were so beyond excited. It was honestly better than a $20K sales commission. The customer found us by googling a phrase I used in the website copy...unbelievable! The next day she said it was a huge hit, and there was nothing of the order left at the party she brought it to, and said she would be ordering from us again.

Then we went from that ecstasy to the market. We'd prepared a lot of extra product since we could've sold more last week. We had a card reader since we missed several sales without one. Optimized a few other things. It was cold, but not even as rainy as the week before, but somehow it was even slower. We only made a few small sales. And only got to use the card reader once! But it worked, so at least that's confirmed on a live sale.

We had a lot of time to chat with other vendors, and actually learned a lot from them. Overall it was a super disappointing day (except delivering on the online order). We'll chalk this up to dues-paying, but we still learned a lot, and I gotta start doing a lot more website work to get more of those sales.
Watching this thread - nice work on taking action and getting some sales.

At some point, you might need a bigger/commercial kitchen to scale up or comply with gov regulations.

Talk to some of the other Farmer's Market vendors. See who would be interested in renting space at a kitchen.

Take down their names and contact info for now. Later on, you might be able to rent out any kitchen time that you don't use (to help offset your costs).
 

Saint

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Was this the same market as before or was it a different one?
I guess that if you spoke to other market vendors they were able to tell you whether this weeks market was less busy than usual?
It's great that you are still making progress and learning as you go.
Same market, almost same vendors too. And yes, it was much slower for everyone. In fact, the honey vendor (who's been super welcoming) who had the register ringing constantly the week before was only getting about one or two customers per hour. So I think it was mostly that day. It was just cold and yucky. Thanks for the encouragement! We're keeping it up.

If the concern regarding friends and family has to do with them just coming for grabs without paying anything, sure - you might want to avoid giving them another reason to tap into your brand new inventory for free over there.

But if you just want to keep a "low profile" for any reason, I'd highly encourage you to reconsider both the reason itself and keeping people that genuinely wish you well out of the loop.

You don't know who they can share your new venture with. You don't know who those people, in turn, may know themselves. We, as a society, are nodes in the network - do the math and see how many connections you are away from a million people, even if each and every one of us only knew a hundred other people.

It can very well happen that, after paying you a visit, they tell a bunch of their friends about your new business. If any of them happens to have a recurring need for your kind of baking produce, guess what happens if they like what you're selling? They'll keep coming every X weeks to load up at a quantity that will make all of those individual orders pale in comparison.

Great points! The concern wasn't at all about inventory or low profile, in fact, several friends did show up, and they all purchased, which meant so much to us. The only reason we didn't want to push for friends and family to come is because we wanted to treat it as a test to see if we could make sales to strangers, and if so how much. We knew we could get friends and family to support us, but we didn't want it to feel like a huge sales day just because initially a bunch of friends came out to support us. Now that we've seen what we can do without friends and family, we want to become this and any other market we attend's biggest promoters, even to friends and family.
Also, in terms of the website: given how much Zuck and Co have invested in making their digital tappy-tap and scrolly-scroll apps, there's literally zero sense in not doing anything other than focusing on the website, when you have a ton of people mindlessly scrolling through their feeds and being in the perfect kind of a condition for an impulsive decision to buy some homemade baked wonders of yours.

Begin posting everyday, literally anything related to your bakery - how you make it all, where do you find the highest quality of supplies, how much time you put into this and that. Begin building your reputation from the get go - don't wait until you've mastered the web before diving into social networks. 15 minutes a day, one step at a time, will build you a massive market over the next weeks and months. Afterwards, you'll see what people like more, what they care less about, and adjust accordingly. Just get it going.

Once you've begun posting regularly, don't forget to print out some cards with all of your social media handles ready, and give them away with each order to encourage people to have a one-direct-message away method of ordering some more of your creations.

Lastly, can't know what kind of courses and learning you're doing there when it comes to marketing - just don't over-learn and under-do in the process. Marketing is the art of generating attention for the sake of growing your business. As any form of art, it's always in a constant flux, always changing, always going out of fashion in one way and adopting new trends in another.

Other than a few basic psychology principles (read Robert Cialdini), the most viable formula to market your business, in your situation, given your current circumstances, can't be learnt - it can only be discovered.

Interact with as many people as you can. Build as much good will with them as you can. Let as many people as you can know about what you do, how you're better, and why they should definitely at least try ordering from you - once.

Service them the way they could only dream a homemade bakery can service people, and watch what happens. (Might want to prepare to drastically increase your production rate soon afterwards, though - just in case).

Your passion for what you do can be sensed from a mile away, even in writing - keep at it, don't get distracted by doubts, disappointments and down swings, they are the part of the process. Keep your eyes on the fastlane way, making sure to avoid business-ing yourself in just another dead-end job, and you'll be golden.

This was so freakin encouraging and motivating!!! Thanks for the helpful advice. We're ramping up the social posting. We made a schedule for what we'll post about each day, and we're tossing in random stuff too. And we're adding new platforms (just getting Facebook going, will move on YouTube soon) as well.

The markets for us are an obvious way to get out there and talk to people like you're saying, but there are so many other ways we can share what we do. I still haven't gotten in the habit of talking about the business in new interactions, but that's a great point. That's what I do now, so better start talking about it.

I appreciate the reminder about the nature of marketing too. I'm definitely someone who wants to learn, learn, learn, maybe to a fault, but I know the best way to learn is doing. That said, I'd welcome any suggestions about especially helpful stuff! My main learning besides this forum has been a few copywriting books, and a udemy course that has some marketing principles, but mostly walks through how to set up all these channels like google business pages and setting up a landing page. We're definitely applying a lot too, but I'm always worried I'm just missing the piece of knowledge that would bring it all together.
 
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Saint

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Watching this thread - nice work on taking action and getting some sales.

At some point, you might need a bigger/commercial kitchen to scale up or comply with gov regulations.

Talk to some of the other Farmer's Market vendors. See who would be interested in renting space at a kitchen.

Take down their names and contact info for now. Later on, you might be able to rent out any kitchen time that you don't use (to help offset your costs).
Thanks so much for the feedback! Great advice - we will need to use a commercial kitchen at some point, but we could start doing a few thousand in sales a month before legally needing to. I know of one that would be available regularly, and I've seen that time can be rented regularly pretty easily in my area at other kitchens too.

We're definitely talking to the vendors (only four at this market last week)...we've learned so much from them already!
 

Saint

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So another update - since we got a second website order through my crappy free site, I finally got a real domain name and connected that to our landing page. We've also cleaned up that page a lot, and I'm going to start working on setting up online orders.

I'd welcome any advice on SEO and getting seen. I've read a lot on it, but the specific tactics are always helpful.

I've also applied to two more farmers markets, and I'm working on getting a permit for a much better one than the one we've been going to.
 

Robdavis

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So another update - since we got a second website order through my crappy free site, I finally got a real domain name and connected that to our landing page. We've also cleaned up that page a lot, and I'm going to start working on setting up online orders.

I'd welcome any advice on SEO and getting seen. I've read a lot on it, but the specific tactics are always helpful.

I've also applied to two more farmers markets, and I'm working on getting a permit for a much better one than the one we've been going to.
You could try asking @Fox , as far as I know he is a bit of a wizard at websites.
 
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Saint

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You could try asking @Fox , as far as I know he is a bit of a wizard at websites.

I'm starting to read his stuff! And I scheduled a meeting with Superspreader Media since I saw a good post about them that was approved by MJ.

Just a few updates:

We didn't do the market this week because it was too cold, and we're moving next week, so we needed to get some stuff done for that. Probably won't be able to go to the market the next two weekends. But our new place will have far more space for baking, supply storage, and work. No more storing ingredients on top of the dryer LOL.

But we have made some good progress on other fronts:
  • Asked to do nice-sized orders (bigger than any of our online orders) for a baby shower and a wedding shower. Hopefully those will translate into Zola reviews too
  • We can now accept online payments on our website. I'm using Wix, which I feel like I might come to regret, but that took some updating to get approved for online payments. Super excited to launch that. I'm hoping it'll get more conversions since it's less effort and looks more legit.
  • My wife is learning about instagram marketing. She learned to use Metricool to schedule posts, and we already have some scheduled (including V-day and Super Bowl promos). Big next step is to think carefully about our marketing plan to use leverage that scheduling ability.
  • We finally got the city permit we needed to sell at a much nicer farmer's market that we were approved for, which starts in March.
  • Applied to a few more farmer's markets whose applications became available.
Hopefully we'll see some online orders for the big events next weekend!
 

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But our new place will have far more space for baking, supply storage, and work. No more storing ingredients on top of the dryer LOL.
Have you looked into renting a commercial kitchen instead of doing this from home? It won't help with your ingredient storage, but it will certainly help with throughput, batch sizes, and consistency. Normally you can rent these by the day or hour.
 

Saint

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Have you looked into renting a commercial kitchen instead of doing this from home? It won't help with your ingredient storage, but it will certainly help with throughput, batch sizes, and consistency. Normally you can rent these by the day or hour.
Yes I've looked into it a bit! And I know of a commercial kitchen we could use pretty easily. We haven't bothered because right now we don't have enough orders to really need to scale that much. It would cost more money, and in the time it would take to get there and get set up we could've already made all we need. Although if we start selling a lot more at farmers markets it may make sense sooner.

It's nice to know that we can scale supply really quickly though. It's like 10x what we can do now, and we could already produce $100's worth in a few hours.
 
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I haven't been able to make much progress on the website or anything else since last week between preparing to move this weekend and other obligations, but I do have a few quick updates:
  • We got a repeat order from an online customer on Thursday! She placed another nice-sized order. When we delivered yesterday, she asked my wife how she makes things so good, which was really nice to hear. I'm going to ask her how they were and ask if we can use a quote from the last order from her on our website.
  • We have orders for a wedding and a baby shower coming up in the next week or two
  • We got an order for a Valentine's promotion we ran
  • Yesterday we checked out the new farmer's market we were approved for, and the place is awesome. It was like an open-air barn in the middle of one of the wealthiest suburbs in our area. Despite the cold, it was pretty busy, and there were plenty of vendors there too. It's actually more like having a short-term storefront than a farmer's market. We'd either pay $60 per day for a Saturday and Sunday stall, and commit for 3 months, or pay $150 per day and be able to pick and choose 4 days at a time. Based on the feedback from another thread, and much thinking and discussing, we're planning for my wife to quit her job in a few weeks and focus on this full time while I keep working, so she could do these all weekend. Assuming that works out, we'll just go ahead and commit to 3 months and see how it goes.
  • Haven't been able to make much progress on website or calling with the move and other obligations, but the new place will give us much more space to do everything from business work to baking.
 

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Wow I can't believe it's already been a month since the last update!

The move and getting settled in took a lot more effort than expected, so we didn't make it to a market in February. But we still had an OK month for so little effort.

Since the last update:
  • Delivered on the wedding and baby shower, and a few individual orders. We have a lot more kitchen space in the new place, which allowed us to produce a lot much more quickly
  • Got an inquiry to bake for a corporate event
  • Finally got back to the market last week. It was still slow, mainly because there were only a few vendors, but we made a decent little profit. We're now pretty comfortable with set up and taking payments
  • This weekend, we're going back to that market again, and we're going to a much more heavily promoted and (we believe) active market Sunday
  • Everything is in place to start selling at a permanent market Saturday and Sunday starting the last weekend of March. We went back to it a second time, and the place was hopping. It seems it'll be quite popular aas the weather warms up. There is more competition too, but way more foot traffic
  • Not much progress on website/online. No online orders in the last month. We're starting to ask for Google reviews, and we're up to 10 5 star now. We're ready to start really campaigning to get that a lot higher
Probably biggest news is that my wife is leaving her job to focus on this! Her last day is next Wednesday. Since I already work from home (but she didn't), I think we'll both be able to get a lot of sales/marketing done throughout the day. We're going to start calling local businesses, giving out samples, drumming up pop-up opportunities, and really hitting digital marketing hard.

Will post about how the markets go this weekend!
 

Robdavis

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Wow I can't believe it's already been a month since the last update!

The move and getting settled in took a lot more effort than expected, so we didn't make it to a market in February. But we still had an OK month for so little effort.

Since the last update:
  • Delivered on the wedding and baby shower, and a few individual orders. We have a lot more kitchen space in the new place, which allowed us to produce a lot much more quickly
  • Got an inquiry to bake for a corporate event
  • Finally got back to the market last week. It was still slow, mainly because there were only a few vendors, but we made a decent little profit. We're now pretty comfortable with set up and taking payments
  • This weekend, we're going back to that market again, and we're going to a much more heavily promoted and (we believe) active market Sunday
  • Everything is in place to start selling at a permanent market Saturday and Sunday starting the last weekend of March. We went back to it a second time, and the place was hopping. It seems it'll be quite popular aas the weather warms up. There is more competition too, but way more foot traffic
  • Not much progress on website/online. No online orders in the last month. We're starting to ask for Google reviews, and we're up to 10 5 star now. We're ready to start really campaigning to get that a lot higher
Probably biggest news is that my wife is leaving her job to focus on this! Her last day is next Wednesday. Since I already work from home (but she didn't), I think we'll both be able to get a lot of sales/marketing done throughout the day. We're going to start calling local businesses, giving out samples, drumming up pop-up opportunities, and really hitting digital marketing hard.

Will post about how the markets go this weekend!
Really interesting update, thank you.
It seems that you are making really good and also steady progress.
 
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