Sept. 30, 2022

How to Validate an Idea | Eran Henig, Founder of Thriver

You have a startup idea. You tell 10 friends and they tell you it's awesome. What does that prove? Unfortunately, not much. Validating your idea requires you to go outside your building and talk to real customers. Not only that, real validation means having customers pay for your product. But how do you do that without having to build something first? Find out from Eran, the CEO of Thriver on this episode. Eran and his co-founders generated thousands of dollars in sales before ...

You have a startup idea. You tell 10 friends and they tell you it's awesome. What does that prove?

Unfortunately, not much.

Validating your idea requires you to go outside your building and talk to real customers. Not only that, real validation means having customers pay for your product. But how do you do that without having to build something first?

Find out from Eran, the CEO of Thriver on this episode. Eran and his co-founders generated thousands of dollars in sales before writing a single line of code. By the time they started building, they knew for sure there'd be demand... because they'd already closed real customers.

Send me a message to let me know what you think!

01:20 - Identifying a market need

03:27 - Building a landing page

10:05 - Fake it till you make it

11:55 - Reaching potential clients

22:08 - Customer discovery

28:18 - Investing in scalability

30:00 - Recap

WEBVTT

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I think that it's really hard to focus early on.

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However, it's extremely necessary because time is a scarce resource.

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Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show brought to you by Mistral, a seed-stage firm based in Canada.

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I'm Pablo.

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I'm a founder turned VC.

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My goal is to help early-stage founders like you find product market fit.

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Today we have Eran, the co-founder and CEO of Thriver, a platform that curates food and experiences to help enterprises build better workplaces.

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Thriver is based in Toronto.

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They have about 60 employees and have raised over$50 million.

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Eran, it's an absolute pleasure to have you here today.

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Thank you, Pablo.

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It's pleasure to be here with you.

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Look, the topic of today's episode is how to validate an idea.

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Just for some context for the listeners, I mean, Thriver was kind of a pivot from the original company, which was called Platters.

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When COVID happened, you decided to move from Platters over to Thriver.

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For today, we're actually going to jump back in time into the early days at Platters.

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Maybe kind of the first question that I have really around Platters, because when I tell people, they ask me, what was Platters?

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It's kind of this corporate catering platform.

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One of the things I get is, corporate catering is kind of a– it's a thing, right?

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It already exists.

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Why are these guys using so much money?

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What's the technology here?

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What's happening?

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My first question is what did you see, kind of before you really had this idea about Platters, what did you see that made you think that a tech startup focused on corporate catering could be a good idea?

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What we've noticed is that when we used to go meet my co-founder, to visit other companies over lunchtime, it used to be complete chaos.

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You go and speak to some of the team members and you find that many of them don't enjoy the food.

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It's really hard to curate.

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New mom-and-pop shops that are providing spectacular offerings cannot bring their food into the office because they don't have the technical tools to and the marketing tools to even reach the big clients and then the guidance in terms of how to deliver towards it.

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We went ahead and we were like, you know what?

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We are going to build a platform that allows you to trust us curating providers for you.

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Trust is something on the web today that can be facilitated relatively easily in a straightforward way with reviews and other mechanisms.

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From there, we used to– we thought that maybe the right thing to do is to show you an enormous amount of offerings that are curated for you.

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Then you don't need to use anymore the sticky notes that you used to keep on your computer before deciding where to order food from.

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If you put yourself in the shoes of the person that decides about what foods come into the office and who are the providers that you're going to be dealing with, suddenly you understand how risky that is.

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A company that has 100 employees, 150 employees, 500 employees, and have to feed them every single day, it's a whole logistical nightmare of who's coming, where from, when, everyone is to line up on time, who has to be good enough so that nobody yells at you.

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Tt keeps going on and on.

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We went ahead and we just decided to test it out.

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Look, we had this hypothesis that there is a need for a solution that uses technology to facilitate all that, the exploration, discovery, the curation, and the trust, the confidence, and the finances afterwards as well.

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You're not going to pay for a$5,000 order, any type of person, like any random person that you never ordered food from easily.

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Sometimes they want down payments as well.

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Can you pay 50% up?

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We went ahead.

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We put a landing page, only landing page.

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That's all we've done first.

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We explain the value prop on the landing page.

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Box says, sign up here, like add your email address.

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Someone will reach out to you today to help you with your and that was something that was very cheap and easy to put up together.

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We've done that.

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We reached out a few companies.

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We directed them to our website to sign up and get a phone call and sign up and schedule the demo and they've done it.

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We were surprised many companies have gone ahead, word of mouth went out, and more companies came on board as well.

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Of course, when they plugged in their email, we did schedule a call, reached out and we bridged a gap.

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From there, the next step was, okay, so now let's show them the next step of our value properties and actual website platform that allows us to look through what we curated for you.

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That was very, very bare bone was experienced that where the search box didn't do anything.

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You could just like plug whatever you want, press enter, nothing works, this report box all the time.

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It’s like we never invested into that.

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We just wanted to showcase and prove that if we show you and allow it to discover great offerings around you, while us giving you the confidence to use them, we can get going with something.

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Once that worked and we started ramping up orders, I think at a time we were doing 25,000 a month, something like that, in terms of just goods, it wasn't much, wasn't less.

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It was good enough to prove the point.

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Then quickly just we went on, we decided to code the rest and plugged in the search bars, plugged in the filters, plugged in the processing for the credit cards as well.

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Then we started rolling out with that.

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That's kind of how we proved the point, one piece after the other.

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There are two different ways you can start by going to everyone that you know, to other companies that you know, reach out to them, be like, hey, would you mind using the platform?

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Which is good.

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I think it's easy and quick to target them.

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It's also an art to get from them a genuine type of feedback on what you've been doing.

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I'm more on the other side of, okay, so the point here is not to prove that we can make money.

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The point here right now is to prove that there is a need and there is a pain point that has to be solved.

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I like going after the ones we don't know and cold calling and that's kind of what we brought into the platform early on.

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Just maybe backing up, I mean, corporate catering existed, but the options were very limited and the entire workflow around it was very kind of analog and therefore painful.

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You saw a way that platform could make it much more expedient, but also just really amplify the number of providers that could come in, and so therefore, how much happier the employees could be and so on and so forth.

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That makes sense.

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Now, the instinct, and you kind of touched on this, but the instinct of a lot of founders, once they have an idea is to build, right?

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You could have said, okay, well, let's maybe get ten providers, like ten food providers and let's build the platform, and then like, let's go out.

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What you did was started the other extreme of let's just put up a landing page.

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What do you think drove you to do that?

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Why do you think you didn't do what many founders would've done and just start building?

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Frankly, it's just experience.

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It is just because I've done it the other way and it's good.

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You suffered the pain building.

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That's the thing.

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It was fun to practice the skill.

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However, after a few years, you get a point.

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I think you're trying to allocate the resources effectively versus trying to just rush and build something.

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I did build immediately something earlier on in my 20s when I used to go and try something.

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It used to be full-fledged perfected type of product that goes out and then I used to iterate on that.

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However, I used to spend every day, every night, every weekend.

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I got there quick, but I think after a while you realize it's not sustainable in any way.

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On the contrary, working smart and working wise, stepping into that value prop slowly probably proved to be a much, much, much better strategy.

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However, it's extremely hard to convince early entrepreneurs and early initiators of different products and ideas to go this route early on.

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They do tend to instantly go build, build big and wide horizontally.

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It's almost human nature, but the reality is why waste your time on a problem that doesn't really exist, right?

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It's kind of that, I think, real focus on, you know what?

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I'm just not going to put effort into something unless I'm really convinced that this is a high, high priority for people that is a big pain point, and then I'll go in and solve it.

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You have this experience.

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You're like, I'm not going to just build to build, right?

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I'm going to make sure there's a real problem.

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How do you dissect that?

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Do you think of, okay, here are the ten assumptions.

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Let's go solve one by one.

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When you build that landing page, what are you trying to de-risk?

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What are you trying to figure out?

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The landing page has to be well crafted in terms of the communication to the user.

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It important to communicate well as well, because when you have someone afterwards calling into these value props, they have to align with this landing page, right?

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That's the step of, it's not just any random landing page that's kind of hiding what you're trying to solve.

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There is always this fear of, okay, so I'm going to expose so much that someone can just go and copy it.

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Yes, but I think we're in the game of moving really quick.

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Expose a lot, move quick, and make sure to learn from that.

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I think the mechanism we are building is an innovating mechanism.

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It's on a mechanism that tries to optimize on every single resource and keeping it at home.

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It's more about let's go out.

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Let's see how fast it resonates.

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Even if someone comes, we go quicker.

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For your landing page, what was the message?

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I know this was a while ago, but if you can remember, what was the kind of call to action?

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What was the pitch on that landing– on that first kind of landing page?

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If I remember correctly, the call to action was to go browse.

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At some point it was go browse, click here to browse more providers, here are the providers for you.

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I think at some point it was as well schedule a demo with us, or schedule a call with us.

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That was a call to action.

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Everything it detailed up to that point was all about, we are your trusted partner in corporate catering.

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We are your trusted partner to find providers in the kitchen.

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There is no strings attached.

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It's free to use for you.

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Just come in, we'll help you out.

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We'll see how it goes.

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Now, to be clear, on this page, you had actual content.

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You had the providers.

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Did you just randomly choose some?

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Did you even call the providers to see if there was any remote interest in doing kind of corporate catering?

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How did you think about that kind of supply side of the platform?

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We didn't communicate with them too much.

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Let's put it like that them up.

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I think it's everyone says– call it fake it till you make it in a way.

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I think that we came out of the gate thinking that if we bring them business, it's going to be good for them.

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Substantial business, not just like few thousand bucks a month, but substantial business.

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Some of them were doing over a quarter million bucks a month with us.

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Let's get them substantial business, and with that, we're game.

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Assuming that, let's try to be respectful of who they are, but at the same time, we just need to move right now.

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We just listed a bunch of providers as quick as we could and it took a few minutes.

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Got it, okay.

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That makes sense.

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Then the other question I have is your call to action was ultimately for them to book a demo.

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Were you pretty maniacal about tracking behavior on that page, like how many people browsing, what were they were browsing for, or did you not really care?

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It was really just about, are people visiting it and are people calling us?

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It was too early to start tracking things.

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I think that, from that point of view, it was mostly by the purity of the communication with the user.

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I think tracking came way later on, way later on.

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The scale was small as well.

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The team was small at the time.

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We hired– when we got out of the gate, it was me and Yishay, my co-founder.

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Then we hired three additional team members to join us as the founding team pretty much.

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They were the ones that helped us ramp up everything.

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There is no resource allocated for analytics that early on.

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There are not enough calls to try to figure out which calls need to go where.

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It's just like one person answering all the calls and everyone is listening on.

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That's kind of what we went with.

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Got it.

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Okay, that makes sense, so kind of more hand-to-hand combat really focused on those calls.

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The other question I have before we dive into the calls and what happened there, as I think that's important, is this is almost a million-dollar question.

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Anybody can put up a landing page, but then you have to drive traffic to it.

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How did you– on little to maybe no budget, right?

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How did you drive traffic to this page?

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Where did it come from?

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What were your channels?

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How did you think about all that?

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We called out.

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We didn’t put ads up front.

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We started by, first of all, getting a list of companies in the area.

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We were very focused as well.

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We started in a specific geography, and a specific intersection even, in Toronto and we expanded from there.

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We expanded north and then south and to the sides.

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Then we had a playbook for how to launch a city and we replicated all across North America afterwards, but we were very systematic.

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There was no going out of these boundaries.

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Why is that?

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Like deep dive on that because I do think a lot of people would just, okay, cool, like smile and dial, right?

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Let's just call anybody and everybody.

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Why did you think about it, the geography piece?

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What else?

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What other constraints did you have?

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Maybe company size, but I'm really curious about how you thought about who to call?

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The way about– when we were thinking about it, who to call was where the biggest segment will be that's easiest for us to onboard.

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It was mid-market companies, tech companies in a specific area, and we just went after them.

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There wasn't like– if someone would've come in from a big enterprise or a small company saying they're going to be big soon, there was– we just couldn't.

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We just told them we're going to reach back to them as soon as possible.

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Then we reached out to them when time was right.

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Otherwise, there was no reason– it was too early to– I think that it's really hard to focus early on.

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However, it's extremely necessary because time is a scarce resource.

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We are trying to just make sure to, like in econometrics, we just got to control as many variables as we can.

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If you control the geography, it's much easier to get supply.

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It's much easier to get repetitive business for that supply.

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If you control geography, it's easy for you to go and exit if you need to.

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If you end up with a salesperson on the ground or a salesperson to meet with the customers for a quality review, it's so easy to do it if you have a very fenced geography to go to.

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You can do everyone one day.

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You get a lot of benefits by focusing on different aspects you might have not thought up upfront.

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It's going to be easy to focus on.

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Once that worked, we opened the gates.

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Then it worked, we opened the whole geography.

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Once we opened the whole geography, we started launching our digital side.

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Once we launched the digital side, we launched it geography by geography as one allocated, but towards it.

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It was much more systematic, but we already knew how far can we get, so we were better off putting the capital up front to launch that.

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You start with very specific geography, very clear idea of who your target customer is, and you start– I'm really curious about the details.

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Are you doing cold email campaign?

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Are you literally calling?

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If so, who are you calling in the company?

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Then what's the flow?

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How did you think about, okay, let's call them, send them to our landing page and then get a full Demo, or are you just demoing on the first call?

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How did you think about all of that piece of it?

00:15:05.679 --> 00:15:07.720
We started by calling them, by cold calling them.

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We got companies online from different email lists we used to call them.

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You can use Zoom info.

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You can use LinkedIn sales navigator.

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You can use any tool that works for you.

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I think Clearwith at the time was working.

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You can use pretty much any tool, really.

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From that, you just focus the data set in a specific area and you cold call.

00:15:26.679 --> 00:15:29.159
You just raise the phone; you cold call.

00:15:29.480 --> 00:15:31.159
Yeah, I can see the landing page.

00:15:31.320 --> 00:15:33.120
It gives credibility like, hey, we're calling from Platters.

00:15:33.440 --> 00:15:35.960
We assume that that you have corporate catering needs.

00:15:36.480 --> 00:15:48.759
If you want to be more clever, you can tell them one of your friends asked us refer to you and and see if we can help you with corporate catering, whatever you want to tell them that will attract them to listen to you for a second, because everyone's busy.

00:15:51.480 --> 00:15:54.279
This is the office manager on the other side, or who do you typically get on the other side?

00:15:56.460 --> 00:15:56.879
Yes.

00:15:56.880 --> 00:15:58.360
For that, it was mainly the office manager.

00:15:58.679 --> 00:16:02.759
Later on when we expanded, we started closing multisite corporates, multisite enterprises.

00:16:02.760 --> 00:16:16.600
Then we went to the CFO into VPH or to the executives who were leading the HR functions, sometimes procurement as well if it was big organization, but that was– you're talking about like two and a half years down the line.

00:16:16.561 --> 00:16:16.600
At first it's office managers, and your goal is to get them to book a demo either on the phone or after the landing page.

00:16:16.561 --> 00:16:16.600
Was that kind of the objective of the call?

00:16:24.399 --> 00:16:26.879
The goal is to get them to try us to, give us a day.

00:16:27.000 --> 00:16:28.679
You are carrying every single day.

00:16:28.919 --> 00:16:30.679
Give us next week, one day.

00:16:33.200 --> 00:16:34.840
You're trying to do that on the first call?

00:16:36.200 --> 00:16:36.480
Yes.

00:16:36.639 --> 00:16:37.639
Let's see how it goes.

00:16:37.640 --> 00:16:39.600
What does it take to give us one day?

00:16:39.750 --> 00:16:43.120
I think it's always easy to answer what does it take versus can you give us?

00:16:43.120 --> 00:16:43.639
It's like, no.

00:16:43.640 --> 00:16:44.320
What does it take?

00:16:44.909 --> 00:16:45.879
Then things start moving.

00:16:47.820 --> 00:16:48.840
What did you get back?

00:16:48.841 --> 00:16:50.200
What were some of the answers you remember?

00:16:50.320 --> 00:16:57.120
I'm sure some people just said kind of screw off or whatever, but then there's that 10% or that 20% that were– and what kind of answers did you start to get?

00:16:58.120 --> 00:16:58.960
I think it's everything.

00:16:58.961 --> 00:17:00.279
I don't have time for that.

00:17:00.280 --> 00:17:03.279
We have something that works and then you talk about okay, so what actually works?

00:17:03.280 --> 00:17:06.599
We have this provider that comes in every single day for the last two years.

00:17:06.601 --> 00:17:07.720
Does everyone on the team like it?

00:17:07.721 --> 00:17:17.680
I think that as long as you can get to a place where someone feels that they've exposed something that needs to be solved to you, then you know how to– that your end core in a way.

00:17:17.681 --> 00:17:24.160
We got lot of answers, anything from we don't need it right now, we don't have time for that, but we also got many surprisingly, because corporate catering specifically is something that you can switch every single day.

00:17:24.161 --> 00:17:28.279
You can give it a shot.

00:17:28.280 --> 00:17:30.400
It might even be exciting to try it out.

00:17:30.401 --> 00:17:35.839
So as long as you reach out, be like, okay, so we have some providers for you.

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
We know you're at Young and St.

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
Claire in Chiwan and England Tunnel, and King West.

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
We know where you're at.

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
We have these five providers.

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
They would love to get for you.

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
You've probably never tried them.

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
They're fantastic.

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
How about give us one day?

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
Everyone's going to be happy.

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
Trust us.

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
Suddenly, oh my God, what is it going to be?

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
The switch for that person is nothing.

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
What's going to happen?

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
They control the lineup.

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
I think it worked pretty well.

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
Then we had to translate that to email marketing, like you said.

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
That closer for communication is, in a way, easy versus how do you get someone to get an email from you, which is colder.

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
Then how do you get someone to be exposed to an ad from you, which is even colder.

00:17:35.641 --> 00:17:35.839
I think going, meeting someone at the office, that's the strongest we can do.

00:17:36.529 --> 00:17:39.480
So as long as you reach out, like, okay, so we have some providers for you.

00:17:39.480 --> 00:17:42.000
We know you're at like young and St.

00:17:42.240 --> 00:17:44.039
Claire in Chiwan young and England tunnel king west.

00:17:44.040 --> 00:17:44.759
We know where you're at.

00:17:45.250 --> 00:17:48.559
We have these five providers they would love to get for you.

00:17:48.630 --> 00:17:50.240
You've probably never tried them.

00:17:50.240 --> 00:17:50.880
They're fantastic.

00:17:51.299 --> 00:17:53.400
How about give us one day, everyone's gonna be happy.

00:17:53.401 --> 00:17:54.000
Trust us.

00:17:54.000 --> 00:17:55.839
And suddenly like, oh my God, what is gonna be?

00:17:56.319 --> 00:17:59.440
Um, so the switch for that person is, is, is, is nothing like what's gonna happen.

00:18:00.118 --> 00:18:01.720
They con they control the lineup.

00:18:01.809 --> 00:18:03.400
So I think it worked pretty well.

00:18:03.420 --> 00:18:06.400
And then we had to translate that to email marketing.

00:18:06.401 --> 00:18:20.000
Like you said, that close of for communication is in a way easy versus how do you get someone to get an email from you, which is colder, and then how you get someone to be exposed to an ad from you, which is even colder.

00:18:20.000 --> 00:18:22.920
So I say, I think that's going meeting someone at the office.

00:18:22.921 --> 00:18:24.240
That's the strongest we can do.

00:18:25.039 --> 00:18:27.079
Were you going in person at all or was it all on the phone?

00:18:27.440 --> 00:18:27.440
Yes.

00:18:27.759 --> 00:18:28.599
We're going in person as well.

00:18:28.720 --> 00:18:29.559
We are doing that as well.

00:18:29.779 --> 00:18:32.960
Did you find one was better than the other or not necessarily?

00:18:33.279 --> 00:18:43.559
Well, I think in-person is always better, over the phone, which is always better than email, which is always better than– however, the more distance you get, the cheaper it is.

00:18:43.560 --> 00:18:47.358
Putting someone on the ground to go meet with customers is the most expensive one.

00:18:47.359 --> 00:18:54.319
Suddenly if you start bidding on ads and you optimize on that– we used to have ads that were really, really cheap, one or two bucks.

00:18:54.320 --> 00:18:55.039
It's for conversion.

00:18:55.040 --> 00:18:55.920
It's not not as expensive.

00:18:55.921 --> 00:19:01.599
I think that it really depends where you fall on that spectrum and what strategies you want to deploy.

00:19:01.601 --> 00:19:21.640
What we have done is that when we start over the phone at the beginning, and then we moved down to email marketing and digital and email marketing and digital and everything else, we started pushing our phone calls to bigger and bigger companies, more lucrative companies, the ones that have a score that's higher than the others in terms their qualification score with us.

00:19:21.641 --> 00:19:25.640
The heavy lifting in terms of sales always moved to the higher value.

00:19:30.539 --> 00:19:40.519
One question I have is around if you had any expectations and ask– this is a kind of funny tangent, but maybe 2013 or so, me and my co-founder then started a different business.

00:19:40.720 --> 00:19:45.480
We actually explored a business that was– maybe Skip the Dishes was six months old at that time.

00:19:45.480 --> 00:19:46.759
Uber Eats wasn't around certainly in Canada.

00:19:46.760 --> 00:19:51.000
That idea came to us, and we said let's go to 10 restaurants and just see what happens.

00:19:51.000 --> 00:19:53.358
I think two of them said, oh yeah, this delivery thing sounds great.

00:19:53.579 --> 00:19:55.079
Eight of them shut the door in out face.

00:19:55.080 --> 00:19:56.640
We said, ah, it's not really worth it.

00:19:56.641 --> 00:19:56.920
Huge mistake.

00:19:56.921 --> 00:20:04.480
My question to you is did you go into this saying, okay, let's call a hundred restaurants or a thousand restaurants and if at least this many say yes, then we'll move forward?

00:20:04.480 --> 00:20:09.759
What were you looking for as kind of the signal that– because if you call enough, somebody will say yes, right?

00:20:09.760 --> 00:20:12.440
So what are you looking for to say this is worth it?

00:20:12.441 --> 00:20:12.960
Let's build.

00:20:17.430 --> 00:20:19.160
I think with restaurants, it was the opposite.

00:20:19.279 --> 00:20:21.720
I think that we went to a different strategy.

00:20:21.721 --> 00:20:24.000
All the efforts went to the clients.

00:20:24.000 --> 00:20:29.839
If the client said yes and they gave us a day and they gave us a trial, then you go to the restaurants.

00:20:29.840 --> 00:20:30.200
It's game over.

00:20:31.839 --> 00:20:31.839
Right.

00:20:32.240 --> 00:20:34.358
Sorry, with the clients– I said that wrong.

00:20:34.440 --> 00:20:37.118
If you called however many offices, somebody's going to say yes, right?

00:20:37.960 --> 00:20:38.880
How many were you looking for?

00:20:39.118 --> 00:20:39.599
What were your expectations?

00:20:41.880 --> 00:20:43.400
There was no qualitative expectation.

00:20:43.720 --> 00:20:50.829
It was feeling that the market needs that and that feeling is really hard to quantify.

00:20:51.509 --> 00:20:58.630
However, you start getting it after the first few weeks when you get the phone calls, when you on the calls, when you deliver on your promises.

00:20:58.789 --> 00:21:00.230
You deliver the value and they come back.

00:21:00.230 --> 00:21:07.309
I think that's when you start feeling– that recurring behavior and expansion of the accounts, when they're signing, they call you back.

00:21:07.470 --> 00:21:10.430
A subset of them is take every day.

00:21:10.829 --> 00:21:11.549
Do every day from us.

00:21:11.710 --> 00:21:11.710
Done.

00:21:11.829 --> 00:21:11.829
Impressed.

00:21:12.029 --> 00:21:17.180
Then that expansion of the accounts makes you feel immediately that something is going on.

00:21:17.339 --> 00:21:21.559
Writing quotes and asking early on, that's not going to work well.

00:21:21.759 --> 00:21:23.839
There is barely data to[0:00:21:30]. It's the only thing that's more significant than that. With Thriver, yes, we have done that immediately. With Thriver, we sell very differently, but with Platters at the time, early on, not enough to get significance. So it's more about getting the feeling, getting the vibe that something is going on. When the client said yes, when a client wants more from us, we went to providers and were like, you want to come on board? We'll give you right now five orders next week. They're like, oh, sure. How big are the orders? Fifty bucks an order? No, no, 5,000 bucks an order, 3,000 bucks an order. Oh my God, you guys have a money printing machine. What's going on? Sounds good. Sign us up. That's kind of how everything's started rolling up.

00:22:08.339 --> 00:22:09.240
Got it, okay.

00:22:09.368 --> 00:22:10.358
So that makes a lot of sense.

00:22:10.359 --> 00:22:13.920
One other question I have before we kind of move through it is customer discovery.

00:22:13.921 --> 00:22:20.960
A lot of people would say, okay, first step, you have this idea is more traditional customer discovery about call 20 offices, but don't sell to them.

00:22:20.961 --> 00:22:22.880
Just ask them how they do catering, all this stuff.

00:22:22.881 --> 00:22:24.118
It seems like you skip that step.

00:22:24.119 --> 00:22:32.358
Is that because you feel like you already knew enough about the workflows of an office manager or just about how these offices ran that you didn't need to do it?

00:22:32.359 --> 00:22:36.000
What are your thoughts around just more traditional customer discovery versus just going in and starting to sell?

00:22:41.329 --> 00:22:45.480
So the customer discovery was part of all the launching the website and launching with it.

00:22:45.480 --> 00:22:48.559
However, prior to that, I did do a model.

00:22:48.680 --> 00:22:51.559
There was an Excel model for the whole market, though.

00:22:51.560 --> 00:22:52.160
I was like, okay.

00:22:52.161 --> 00:22:53.759
I looked at stats.

00:22:53.760 --> 00:22:55.880
How many companies are in these sectors?

00:22:55.881 --> 00:22:56.839
How big are the companies?

00:22:56.840 --> 00:22:58.039
Let's segment them down.

00:22:58.040 --> 00:23:00.880
Let's assume we only take 1% of the market.

00:23:00.881 --> 00:23:02.279
How do we look like?

00:23:02.280 --> 00:23:03.799
How much money could be made?

00:23:03.800 --> 00:23:04.920
We looked at catering statistics.

00:23:04.921 --> 00:23:10.599
So once we figured out that at the time, it makes sense, but the time itself– if the opportunity works, it's valuable.

00:23:11.279 --> 00:23:13.180
There is enough dough to play with.

00:23:13.181 --> 00:23:20.900
Then we stepped in and at that point in time, it was less about the discovery before launching.

00:23:20.901 --> 00:23:24.858
It was okay, let's prove that we can capture slowly the market.

00:23:24.859 --> 00:23:31.259
If we can step towards it, then that big price is up high for us to grab.

00:23:36.180 --> 00:23:39.059
You start calling at some points and people say, yeah, okay, let's do it.

00:23:39.220 --> 00:23:42.500
Now in the meantime, as far as I understand, you don't really have restaurants on board.

00:23:43.059 --> 00:23:46.118
How did you figure out that timing piece of it?

00:23:46.240 --> 00:23:47.039
Walk us through it.

00:23:47.040 --> 00:23:51.118
I don't know if there's some interesting stories in there, but I'm sure there are.

00:23:51.119 --> 00:23:53.720
I don't know if you can think of any that are worth sharing.

00:23:56.200 --> 00:24:00.599
One of the other advantages of corporate catering is that you don't need the food from now to now.

00:24:00.759 --> 00:24:04.279
You mentioned Skip the Dish; you mentioned Uber Eats.

00:24:04.640 --> 00:24:06.200
You're hungry right now.

00:24:06.200 --> 00:24:06.640
It's 10 p.m.

00:24:07.079 --> 00:24:07.519
You're watching Netflix.

00:24:07.680 --> 00:24:10.599
You want your food to show up, if you can, in 20 minutes.

00:24:10.759 --> 00:24:12.759
It's very different with corporate catering.

00:24:12.880 --> 00:24:17.039
We could ask them, okay, give us in two weeks a day and it'll be fine.

00:24:17.190 --> 00:24:20.920
I think that first of all, that let us play around with the timing.

00:24:21.118 --> 00:24:25.839
Afterwards, once we started onboarding providers, we did do photo shoots with providers.

00:24:26.200 --> 00:24:30.039
My wife saw me one day in the evening gluing a white box.

00:24:30.509 --> 00:24:37.839
W white box is apparently this construct that you can put some dishes inside, take photos of them.

00:24:38.039 --> 00:24:38.200
Looks spectacular.

00:24:38.480 --> 00:24:39.400
It neutralizes the background.

00:24:39.401 --> 00:24:44.680
I just was reading about online because, okay, so now we convince providers to show up.

00:24:45.000 --> 00:24:46.440
We need to make them look professional.

00:24:46.720 --> 00:24:48.358
We need to look really good.

00:24:48.519 --> 00:24:49.440
They need to look good.

00:24:49.441 --> 00:24:56.599
I read online about how to make food providers look good, show this like YouTube videos of white boxes, taping things together in the middle of the night.

00:24:56.920 --> 00:25:03.240
We showed up at the restaurant with a white box that I put together overnight, a shower curtain so that there is no light reflecting.

00:25:03.480 --> 00:25:07.759
We just showed up there in the middle of one of the best coffee shops downtown.

00:25:08.519 --> 00:25:13.519
We took over with a shower curtain and this patched white box, taking photos for them.

00:25:13.640 --> 00:25:13.880
It was fun.

00:25:14.000 --> 00:25:14.440
It was amazing.

00:25:25.079 --> 00:25:27.519
One of the stories I'd love to hear is you're calling all these offices.

00:25:27.680 --> 00:25:29.960
You're trying to land a sale.

00:25:30.319 --> 00:25:32.680
What's the story of the first end-to-end sale?

00:25:33.000 --> 00:25:35.160
Somebody says, yeah, okay, let's do it on this day.

00:25:35.440 --> 00:25:38.920
Then you go out and you have to get the restaurant and deliver it and all that.

00:25:39.039 --> 00:25:41.160