I’ve been in love with the sandwiches from Ike’s Place. I’m starting to fall even in more love with their business. Here is why:

1. Located on a side st. Near the famous Castro St. resulting in lower rent.
2. No table seating. Just enough room to make thousands of sandwiches daily. Resulting in lower rent + overhead (less waiters, no bathrooms, less utilities used, etc.). Customers pick up their sandwiches and eat at a nearby park.
3. They have specific menus for vegetarians and vegans. As a vegetarian seeing a menu dedicated to you is an instant win and makes me want to tell people about it.
4. The give you an awesome Carmel Apple candy to enjoy after your meal for free. Its like free desert. (Remember: Giving mints with the bill results in higher tips)
5. Everyone in the shop acts like your friend. I like doing business with my friends.

In summary restaurants are the worst businesses to get into. BUT with Ike’s unique menu that caters to niche audiences and has very very little overhead it seems like an unlikely event 🙂 (Also their sandwiches are seriously amazing – get the Meatless Mike)

Ike’s Team:

If you decide to order a sandwich from Ike’s – call ahead. They usually have a 2 hour wait.

Reminder: Twitter was started in 2006 and didn’t really take off until 12 or so months ago. It must have been hard to stay motivated, keep investors happy, and innovate from 2006-2008ish.

People sometimes think things like twitter just take off overnight. Nope. It took them a few years to get real traction.

Keep at it if you are still in year 1 or 2 of your business. Give your business at least 3 years.

This book was awesome! Tons of great stories, facts, and ways to become a better sales person.

My favorite tips from the book:
– Mirror people. If they lean in, you lean in. Obviously don’t make it obvious but people like people that resemble them
– People are more likely to do the right thing in front of a mirror. (People don’t like seeing themselves do bad things)
– More hotel guests reused their towels when they were told a majority of the hotel guests reuse their towels. People like going with the popular.
– Smiley faces on brochures go a long way

I really loved this book. Thanks Ziad and Amit for the recommendation!

The Colonel had a restaurant in Corbin, Kentucky, which
had been doing very well. A new interstate highway was
planned to bypass the town of Corbin. Seeing that his
business was about to dry up, the Colonel auctioned off
his operations. After paying his bills, he had nothing to
live on except his $105 Social Security checks.

In 1952, confident of his chicken recipe, he began crisscrossing
the country in his car, making an offer to restaurant owners:
He would walk into a restaurant, announce to the owner,
“I bet my chicken recipe is better than yours” and propose a
cook-off.

(The chicken provided by the restaurants he visited, using
his recipe, was part of his plan for feeding himself during
those lean days.)

If the owner was favorable, he would “franchise” his chicken
recipe to them at 5 cents per chicken.

In all, just over 1000 restaurants turned him down, without one
successful deal.

Then one day he was having his daily cooking duel with a
bar owner, who said to him, “Sir, I’m trying to sell beer, not
chicken. This stuff needs to be a whole lot saltier so
customers will get thirsty and buy beer!”

So he grabbed the salt shaker, poured some salt on, and took
another bite. “Now THIS is GREAT,” he said. “If you’ll add
salt to this recipe, I’m a taker!”

The Colonel took a bite and spit it out! it was terrible!

But Colonel Sanders had been on a NO SALT DIET for 30
years, so his tastes were obviously different than everyone
else’s.

The Colonel wasn’t stupid! He might not like the salt, but
it was better than poverty. Thus began the Colonel’s
enormously successful Kentucky Fried Chicken legacy.

Thanks to Perry Marshall for sending me this story.

I think the “Salt” for Flying Cart is improving our designs.
This is something we are going to focus on for the next
few months.

Disclaimer: I am not a fan of KFC.

The best thing I did for my business was switch my company to a recurring revenue model. Originally we were only taking a 3% cut which created little predictability for our bootstrapped start up. 3 months after launching we switched to having 2 plans: Free or $12/mo for an unlimited amount of products (of course we later realized that this was also a terrible deal for us and had to change our pricing model)

I just learned about another ycombinator/TechStars incubator called SproutBox in Bloomington, IN. What I thought was pretty cool is they look for ideas with recurring revenue – which is great! I really think it will save a lot of businesses from the inevitable “We couldn’t get funding so we had to go back to our jobs”

However….

Don’t fall into the recurring revenue trap like I have!
The biggest con to recurring revenue (especially in my case) is that it might end up being a small business. If it doesn’t fail you will keep moving it along trying to grow it since you can pay yourself and others (also there is no point in taking outside money since you have cash). What you have is an awesome small business not something that can be VC backed and grow to 100’s of employees.

My buddy Jonathan wants me to start a personal blog. I think its a good idea.