This is a guest blog post by Nate Yu, the non-technical business savvy founder behind Seek and this is his story of starting his internet startup and getting his first customers.
When I met Rishi for the first time, it almost felt like I was being set up on an awkward blind date. All I knew about the guy was that he was the cousin of my good friend, Jamie, and was supposedly some sort of startup/marketing wünderkind. Or as Jamie so eloquently put it, “the type of guy that just gets. shit. done.”
Started with a Romantic Meal
As we shared a romantic meal for three (his business partner Robert also joined us) at Sunflower Vietnamese Restaurant in the Mission, Rishi and I started talking about a project I was working on based around the concept of supper clubs.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, let me start at the beginning. My introduction to the world of supper clubs came when I volunteered at a dining event. It was held at a secret location that was only privately revealed a day before the event. The location was a mansion in the South Loop of Chicago, where I shared an evening with twenty strangers over seven courses meticulously prepared by chef Efrain Cuervas. While it had the feel of an intimate dinner party hosted by a close friend, the food was on par with Chicago’s most celebrated fine dining restaurants. Simply put, it was incredible.
Dining Experiences are Hard To Pull Off
As memorable as these dining experiences are, however, they’re deceivingly difficult to pull off. Logistically, it’s a handful for one chef to manage: beyond the monumental task of cooking and entertaining 15+ guests, there’s website creation, newsletter management, ticket/payment processing, publicizing your events, securing a venue, and a whole slew of other operational hassles. Further, there is a major communication disconnect between chefs and patrons; unless you subscribe to their individual newsletters or hear about events through word of mouth, discovering and booking seats to these extravaganzas can be quite a challenge.
A Business Idea After a Brainstorm
After brainstorming with my chef and foodie friends, I set out to create a platform to ease all the pain points that were preventing chefs from throwing these events and diners from finding or attending them.
Like many new entrepreneurs, I had an idea I was passionate about and one, at least from the early feedback I was receiving, that would actually be useful to chefs and adventurous eaters. This, did not however, mean I had any clue on how to build it. Enter Rishi.
Start Small and Build It Today
While I debated several options, like partnering with a programmer, hiring a freelancer, or sucking it up and enrolling in a ruby on rails class through Code Academy, Rishi’s advice was this: “Start small and build it today.” {tweet} And by today, he meant, literally today. Like immediately after lunch.
Rather than building my site all at once, Rishi suggested that I focus on one chef at a time, building individual landing page for them to host their very own supper club.
Immediately, I thought of my friend Alia, a recent culinary school grad who had just started her own catering company. We’d already been tossing around the idea of hosting dinners as a fun side project and way to get her name (and amazing vegetarian cooking) out there, so I decided she’d be perfect as the first chef for my site!
After lunch, I headed up to Rishi’s office and dedicated the next couple of hours to seeing what I could build with the meager programming knowledge I was equipped with. To my surprise, it was way beyond what I had expected.
After Several Hours… I Had a Functioning Site!
After several hours of tinkering and leveraging tools like Weebly (for web design) and Eventbrite (for payments and ticketing), I had a functioning site. Albeit, a pretty ugly functioning site, but at the very least an easy way to test out the concept and see if something like this was actually helpful to chefs.
I spent my remaining days in SF working on the site design, asking friends and family for feedback, exploring other useful tools like MailChimp and ChartBeat, and eventually presented it to Alia. When I returned home to Chicago, we made the exciting decision to use the site to launch Seek, a vegetarian supper club with a focus on whole, natural ingredients.
Success!
As we were both in uncharted territory, we weren’t quite sure what type of response we were going to get. To our surprise, however, within a few days of bringing the site live we were picked up by a food blog and had hits from total strangers, who signed up for our newsletter and even booked seats to our first dinner! Additionally, we received a request to host a private corporate event. Soon after, we put together our first e-mail newsletter and sent it out to forty of our closest friends and family members. To our delight, our first dinner sold out by lunchtime.
I’m super excited to be hosting our first dinner in two weeks and can’t believe how much I’ve learned and accomplished since that lunch at Sunflower. So my thanks to Rishi for his invaluable advice to ‘start small, and to start now’. Looks like Jamie was right about Rishi after all.
If you are interested in a eating the best meal of your life, please sign up for Seek’s newsletter here to learn about their next events in your area.
Love stories and case studies like this – thanks for sharing, and for just going after it! Best way to see if it’s viable. Hopefully you’ll do another post on what you’ve learned after a few suppers!
Yes, I hope Nate comes back with a follow up post too!
I will try to feature more case studies as well. I’m really glad you liked it.
This is one hell of an inspiring post! Thank you so much for writing it Nate. Good luck!
Ash – I’m totally with you on that! I was super pumped after reading this post. Go Nate!
Checked out your website http://www.seeksupperclub.com/
I can’t believe you were able to pull that off with Weebly in just a few hours. I learned a lot from your post. I’m a software developer myself and I never thought to start off with just a simple website first.
Great story. One of our goals with http://www.kickofflabs.com has been to help people take step one with zero technical knowledge.
Thanks Josh – your product looks amazing.
Thanks! Feel free to tell 5 or 500 people about it. 🙂
Nice! Great story. So important to get something out there right away. Nice.
JAW – I believe you were the first people I met that practiced this philosophy. Launching a landing page for landlords interested in QuickBooks help.
My world view & negative experiences make me hate happy posts like this. It’s never as easy as you make it sound. Maybe after you’ve had a few crash & burn failures as you try to grow a web business without any technical knowledge, you’ll have more decency to stop being overly hyped up. You better pray you find a technical cofounder who can handle all the details to scale your idea without crashing. My experience in working with happy go lucky business entrepreneurs is once the honeymoon wears off and you have to get into the hard stuff of architecting and coding, the biz owner who isn’t technical ruins it for the technicals, they lose respect for the biz idea founder, and the biz falls apart. So make sure you show respect to the techs whos shoulders you’ll be standing on.
Having a reliable product that doesn’t suck is extremely important. Having a strong technical founder that can build a product that can scale is also important.
However the problem most new entrepreneurs face (including myself) is starting and identifying customers.
If you can identify who the customer is and build a product for them they will be more likely to use it. Currently Nate is in the customer development phase and therefore should focus most of his energy on figuring on who is customer is and what they will pay for.
It doesn’t matter how good your product is if no one will use it. It would be pointless to spend 6 months developing a product that no one needs.
Looks great. Very thoughtful. I would like to meet up with great chefs and specially vegetarians. Great article.
Thanks everyone for the overwhelming support and thanks again to Rishi for inviting me to write this.
@Pissy, I respect where you’re coming from, but feel like you might have misinterpreted my enthusiasm for naivete. While you’re right that I’m extremely ‘hyped up” about my idea (wouldn’t you think twice about working with someone who wasn’t hyped on their startup idea?), there’s not a single part of me that thinks this is going to be easy.
I have the utmost respect for those on the technical side and completely value how important they are in building a successful and sustainable startup. The site I built is definitely not an end product, but rather the best I could do to get this idea off the ground, test certain assumptions, and improve on it via customer feedback.
I’m by no means ignorant of how important a technical co-founder will be down the road, but also cringe at the idea of asking a programer to waste their own time to be a part of something that is simply an idea and isn’t tangible as a business. Since building my prototype, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to many talented developers who share my excitement and seem to appreciate that I’ve taken the time to build and test the idea on my own.
My point is this, if you dwell on the things that are preventing you from starting, rather than going with your strengths and leveraging tools to reduce your weaknesses (in my case, the ability to code), then all you’ll ever have is an idea. And while I fully expect my fair share of hardships down the road, in the end, “crashing and burning” is still so much more appealing than simply having a great idea.
Nate – that was a really insightful post!
My favorite part:
“I’ve had the opportunity to talk to many talented developers who share my excitement and seem to appreciate that I’ve taken the time to build and test the idea on my own.”
Thanks again for taking time out of your busy schedule to write this post.
Great article.