Finally getting started!

[Saint]

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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[Saint]

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]

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!

 

[Saint]

Thanks @Robdavis! I'm so ambivalent about the progress right now, so I appreciate the encouragement. Just so much going on in life, I've made basically 0 progress on website/digital stuff. Work was crazy for the last two months and we just took a little vacation. My wife left her job, but we haven't really been able to take advantage of the free time yet since we just got back Tuesday. But the good thing is she delivered on that corporate order, then baked a ton each day after for the new market that we did yesterday.

That more actively promoted market was about 2 weeks ago, and it was incredible! Well, actually, apparently it was a very slow day compared to how this event organization usually does, but we did 2x the sales we normally do, with almost no friends/family showing up! And there was finally enough foot traffic to actually learn things. I started talking to every person who came close or looked at our booth, and probably got 30% more people to buy by getting their attention and then talking to them about our products. Once they look at them it's usually game over. It was so fun to try out different ways to (hopefully tactfully) get people's attention. I have no shame about being a carnival barker! And it was so much fun. We noticed most vendors were just sitting around and many didn't even talk to people when they walked up to their booth, which blew my mind.

Anyway, it was awesome to make the money and sales we did. What was most cool though is that after a few hours we started to get a noticeable buzz going around the market. People were talking about our products. Several people came up to us because someone else told them how good they were that day. And we had several repeat customers. That alone was such a huge encouragement compared to this dead market we'd been going to.

After two weeks, there haven't been any additional orders from that, so we still have a lot of work to do on getting regular customers. Our # of regulars via friends, family, coworkers, etc. is slowly growing though.

Then yesterday we finally started at this really high quality market, which we're hoping to attend every weekend day we can. We finally got a bigger sign for it, which really made us feel official. By about 9 AM, it was getting pretty busy. We started selling at a fairly consistent clip. I was getting people's attention as they went by like I did at the previous market, and plenty of people just walked up too. We had so many great conversations, and half a dozen people came up to us after they tried our products and complimented us on how good they were. Several people signed up for our mailing list too.

The best part is, the market ran from 8 - 4, but by 2, we were sold out!!! The first market we started going to, we'd have half left over. And apparently this market only gets more popular as the spring and summer wear on. I think we could've made another $200 easily if we'd had enough product.

With the success yesterday, between the markets this month (we only made it to like 4), and a few orders, we hit our goal of $1000 in sales this month. We're so thrilled about that! If we go to this market every weekend next month, which we plan to, our next goal is to double our monthly sales to $2K, which should be very attainable. Hopefully we start getting additional orders during the week too. Tomorrow my wife and I should finally be able to start working on the other marketing channels we think our low hanging fruit.

We know we have to get beyond farmer's markets eventually, but wow it's one of the most exciting things of my life to be hustling and making money on our own!

 

[Robdavis]

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]

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]

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]

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.

 

[techvx]

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]

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]

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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[LateStarter]

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]

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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[Saint]

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.

 

[Saint]

Our goal this month is $2K, which means we need to double our sales the next two weekends we go (we're missing this coming weekend for Easter). If we double our production and sell like we have these first three days at the market, I think that's achievable.

My main task this week is to finally do Google keyword research to figure out how to drive more traffic to our website. I think there are several low-hanging fruit things I can do to improve there. My wife is going to research social media of our competitors, and some of the vendors at the market that do very well, to see how we can start upping our game there. She's going to create a content calendar too so we know what we're doing at all times.

I think if we execute on those two things we'll get a much better sense for whether this thing has legs beyond the physical markets.

One thing I'm keeping in mind is that if we could do this kind of sales on Saturdays and Sundays, it seems worth it to me to think about having something every day of the week. Whether it's a full-time retail location, pop-ups, or working out of a ghost kitchen, it just looks to me like we could replace my income pretty quickly if we could even do half of what we're doing on the weekends. I'm seeing retail locations available for less per day than we pay for this market. I also saw a coffee shop near us that has a regular retail location and does 3 of these kinds of markets. If we just got to doing 3 of these markets a weekend I think we might be replacing my income. Really gotta start getting repeat orders outside of the markets, but it's so exciting to even thinking about going full-time on a physical location.

 

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[Saint]

You have been posting this thread for around two and a half months and you have really great progress already.

I really enjoy reading this thread, thanks for posting it and updating it too.

It is starting to sound like, from the feedback you have been getting that you may have a productocracy. If that is the case then you will be able to get steady growth in your business for a prolonged period.

Thanks so much @Robdavis! Your continued encouragement means a lot, and I'm glad you're still enjoying it. It's been a blast already!

I'm still waiting for confirmation that this is a productocracy that can really take off, but it's pretty clear to me that we can create a keep regular customers once they try our products.

 

[Saint]

Exciting updates:

We missed the market last weekend because we went out of town for Easter, but we're going to be in the game for the next 6 weeks straight at least. And after this weekend we're crazy motivated!

Seeing that we were selling out by 2 PM with the quantity before, we made about 50% more for each day than the previous weekend. We thought we had enough for each day, but we ended up completely selling out of our bestselling item Saturday. It was amazing, but also not ideal because we had to go back home and make more after the market Saturday. We were still thrilled though since it was an all-time, eye-opening amount to make in one day. Double what my wife would make in a day of work at her old job.

We made a lot more of the bestseller for Sunday, but we were pretty light on the other flavors. We did pretty well with the quantity on the bestseller, but by noon we were starting to sell out of other flavors. Then a few big sales came through on the bestseller and we were wiped out by 2:30.

Throughout the weekend, we had several people come back and buy more after having tried our products in previous weekends. We also had numerous people buy, then start eating as they walked away, and turn around with an excited look and a thumbs up to say "wow that's really good". We also had a few people buy 1, eat it, then come back and buy more. Such huge validation in our mind that there is really an desire for what we're offering

Our goal this month was $2K, and after this market, we're up to $1,200. So we're already up over last month, and we have 2 more market weekends to go. If we just match what we did this weekend, we'd hit our goal this coming weekend. We're certainly going to make a lot more product to make sure we can well all the way to the end though, so helpfully we'll see WoW increases too.

Maybe more importantly, this weekend really validated to me how incredible the possibilities are for getting out there and solving problems or providing an offering to people. We certainly want to make our current offering successful, but it also hit me that every weekend that we get out there and build and learn on this little sales machine, we're getting more comfortable that we could do this with anything. The possibilities are so dang exciting!

 

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[Saint]

Updates:

• Another full weekend at the market. It was even busier than the last one, but we got rejected way more. There was another event that I think took a bit of appetite from our products. It was still our second best day ever, but it felt way harder and was a bit disappointing since we were hoping to keep growing week over week. Still made about $800
• A competitor who actually hustled showed up and appeared to do really well. She offered free samples, which we don't do. That probably impacted our sales. Also made us wonder if we should consider samples. It was weird to feel "worried" about a competitor when there are technically lots of competitors at the market every week, but her product was so comparable. We did a good job of executing despite our initial concern.
• Our display is getting better every week, and I think we'll start building out a bit more
• We got several repeat customers who raved about our products
• We got more email sign-ups than ever!
• our Instagram follower count has almost doubled in a month, and we got engagement the last two days after the market
• We found a commercial kitchen that's very easy to work with and cheap that should allow us to cut our production time by maybe 90%, and conversely enable us to produce 10x as much
• We now have 6 5 star yelp reviews and 14 5 star google reviews
• We're now "break even" on the money we've spent on equipment and whatnot to get started

And even more exciting, word of mouth from an order in january has resulted in $600 paid for a weddng in July, and $500 paid for a nonprofit event in August! So excited to start hammering after those kinds of opportunities.

Still haven't figured out how to get consistent interest from digital marketing. We've updated the website a bit, but besides the order from someone we met at the market last Monday, no inbound orders.

 

[Saint]

Awesome few weeks! We've consistently earned $700-$1000 each week at the farmer's for the last month. We've also now doubled the money we invested, and that's with only doing this market for two months. We've got a solid group of regulars that rave about our products, we're up to about 50 people on our email list, and 120 followers on instagram, which is more than double from a month ago. Our setup is looking more and more professional too. People are actually starting to complement us on how nice it looks. I think we're actually starting to give people the impression that we're an established business.

Some other big progress milestones:

• We found a commercial kitchen that we can make product 10x faster in. It's basically given us a day back compared to making everything at home
• That kitchen has a coffee shop, and the manager runs both the kitchen and the shop. He loves our products and we hit it off, and he asked to sell our cookies wholesale through his shop. Our first wholesale customer, and a great initial test of that concept!
• I set up quickbooks to start organizing our P&L. Entering in Excel had already gotten to be too mind-numbing, and now that I have it organized I'm realizing this is just another foundation that I have forever, whether we keep doing this business or something else
• We've started to get orders during the week from people who tried our products at the market. We've had a few orders at large corporations that we're really excited to cultivate
• We've really bonded with the other vendors at the market. They're all fellow entrepreneurs, some of whom are making more than we made at our day jobs combined selling their products at the market and during the week. We're learning so much from them and really feel a sense of community there, though we don't plan to be at the market forever

We still are only scratching the surface of what we could do. We haven't even started reaching out to other businesses or coffee shops. Our website is still not that optimized, and we haven't done much content. But I'm so excited - it feels like we have a really solid revenue stream, the pieces and parts are coming together, and it's actually getting easier as we optimize our market setup and now that we have commercial capacity and our books are in order.

I'm most excited for the coming months because:

• We've gotten MASSIVE validation of how good our product is. We started offering samples just last weekend (finally read the chapter in Rate Race Escape on offering samples right as we were planning to do that!) And we're now seeing so many people try our stuff and be truly wowed. That plus the growing regular customer base is really validating me that this is a worthwhile track to run on.
• We have about $2K of cash to spend on things to get more customers and make our operation more efficient. And as long as the market continue to go well, we have a fairly solid revenue stream that has plenty of potential to grow
• And most exciting - this month we'll make more money from our business than my wife earned at her job, which she actually just finished up doing part time last week. And at 100% return in three months, it's looking like not only a great income, but an incredible investment

 

[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]

Thanks for the update. It sounds like you made fantastic progress. Well done.

 

[savefox]

How are you going to make it fastlane?

 

[Saint]

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!

 

[Robdavis]

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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[Saint]

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]

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]

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]

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!

 

[Robdavis]

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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