the businessman Juan Jos\u00e9 Guti\u00e9rrez Mayorga<\/a>, to share some tips about building a food business, I\u2019ve decided to capture the five most important pieces of advice I often find my self giving to very early stage startups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n1.Focus on the product and keep it simple<\/h2>\n\n\n\n Get busy in your kitchen make small batches and go out to make people trying your product. Product is the king, so spend the least possible time developing the rest (eg. branding, packaging, IP protection). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m not saying those aren\u2019t important, but at the beginning it\u2019s not your priority. And yes, when you start you don\u2019t need an expensive commercial kitchen to begin with or professional tools. Remember you need to validate whether you can make a product people want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Start selling from day 1 & ask for feedback<\/h2>\n\n\n\n The best (and only) validation for your product is sales. Start from the low hanging fruits: your friends, colleagues, neighbours are the best beta testers for your product. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once you feel you\u2019ve created something people may like, get a stall at a local market to scale your test by selling your products to as many strangers as you can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Be obsessed with gathering data<\/h2>\n\n\n\n Data is your compass for making informed decisions. Ask all the people who try your product for their email address. Then build a simple survey (eg. using Google forms or Typeform) and send it to all the people who get to try your product, that\u2019s the only way you can ensure you can improve your product by capturing their feedback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Extra tip: Usually tech people are pretty good at collecting data, if you have a geek friend ask her\/him to help you out with it \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Review feedback and be ready to go back to the drawing board<\/h2>\n\n\n\n Put your (best) \u2018I don\u2019t take it personally\u2019 hat on and be completely open in this process, I know it\u2019s your baby but in order to succeed in this game you need to develop a product that people love and (more importantly) want to keep buying. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once you have a new version of it, send\/give it to all your customers and ask for more feedback. You need to be prepared to \u2018lose money to make money\u2019: send samples, attend events to learn from fellow entrepreneurs and use every occasion you have to tell your story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
5. Success = selling + building your own tribe<\/h2>\n\n\n\n Embracing selling early on is of pivotal importance. Understandably, most food entrepreneurs feel more at ease in their kitchen but with no sales they just can\u2019t keep producing their products, right? Ultimately you\u2019re the best person to sell it\u2026if you think about it, none knows the recipe, how good are the ingredients you put in it, and so on, better than you do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s never too early to start building your community so do the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You may also be interested in: Steps To Start Food Delivery Business<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since I\u2019ve started building Crowdfooding almost 2.5 years ago, I believe I\u2019ve been engaging with more than 2,000 food and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":688,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[73],"class_list":["post-691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-centroamerica","tag-food"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.6","language":"en","enabled_languages":["es","en"],"languages":{"es":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t