It’s paying our bills and making a nice profit… are you sure? ;) We are incorporated as a California LLC, so I think we meet the technical definition of being a business.
The short answer to your question is stop being afraid and start googling. To put things in perspective, if there was a college class taught on all the non-geeky stuff we needed to learn in order to start MealSquares, everyone reading this site would sleep through it and get an easy A. Sometimes being a bold agent really is all that it takes. Being highly intelligent and analytical makes you overqualified for most tasks that “regular” people routinely do. For example, to name MealSquares, I generated lists of nouns and verbs in text files and combined them until I stumbled on something we really liked. In principle our product could have been named by a “regular” marketing person who studied communications in college, phones it in at their 9 to 5 corporate job, and keeps thinking of names until they find one their boss doesn’t hate, but we’re hoping having a clever name is something that will give us a cumulative edge.
Or to give you another example: When our employees bake MealSquares at the commercial kitchen we rent space at, they bake them using square molds we had custom made at a factory in China. Sounds impressive right? Here was the procedure for getting those molds made:
Search on alibaba.com for a manufacturer who creates food grade silicone molds for a good price with a relatively small minimum order quantity.
Draw up some plans showing the exact dimensions that we wanted our mold manufactured in. (Getting the dimensions right was actually pretty important; Romeo wanted things set up so the squares packed tightly in to a flat rate shipping box so our shipping costs would be lower. I ended up using a turtle graphics library for Python to write a program to draw the molds, because I kept making subtle but slow to correct errors using free hand graphics programs I found online. Again, these are examples of how being smart and strategic gives you an edge even when doing tasks that a “regular” person could easily accomplish themselves, even if in a slow and mediocre way.)
Throw emails and money at the manufacturer until our molds arrive in the mail.
The key to startups in my opinion is making something people want. You want to pay a lot of attention to what’s going on in the economy and what sort of products succeed and fail, without suffering from hindsight bias and seeing all success as obvious in retrospect. A good sign that you’re on the right track may be that you are sometimes confused when you hear that a product has succeeded, because then you know you are at the point where you are diffing the world against some internal model you’re building. MealSquares is my fourth startup attempt. The two before MealSquares were complete failures, so I generated a huge list of all my ideas and did market research on all of them trying to figure out which had potential. I concluded that none of them represented a sufficiently compelling need in the market and reluctantly redirected my surplus ambition towards other things (taking Coursera classes on machine learning after getting home from work). The meal replacements Romeo was playing with almost immediately struck me as representing a much stronger need than any of the ideas I had been looking at before, and fortunately I managed to convince him to work on commercializing them.
Thanks, so, to sum it up, the world is moving from ownership-based capitalism where you must own a shoe factory in order to manufacture shoes to everything is a service.
There is just one thing I don’t fully understand. How comes a fraud did not start it earlier nor do you get outcompeted by a fraud?
Because I would expect that scenario. Businessmen, who understand the market, not smart science geek stuff, should notice the demand earlier. But not knowing how to satisfy it, they would just make up something, like market any random fruit bread as nutritionally complete.
Well, there are laws preventing outright fraud, so lying catches up with you eventually. But customers are also smarter than you think: http://www.cluetrain.com/ In the long run, the best form of marketing is having a great product. Google is a good example: they entered a crowded search engine market and focused mainly on just having a better product. Now they’re one of the world’s most valuable companies.
On the other hand: our biggest competitor is Soylent, whose sales volume vastly exceeds ours, mainly because they were first to the market and got a lot of attention. But people who understand nutrition are much more interested in eating our product. So we’ll see if we can oust them in the long run.
To comment further on your build vs rent a factory point: My general model of how building a business works is that you are constructing a plane as it takes off. At the beginning, a cheap biplane will do as long as you have all the basics in place: landing gear, wings, propeller, etc. Once you’ve gotten in to the air and your concept has proven itself, you want to gradually be upgrading your plane’s components: replace wooden wings with an aluminum alloy, replace your propeller with a better one. Then through gradual upgrades you get all the way to supersonic fighter jet. You don’t want to invest all of your time and money in an expensive jet engine while you’re still on the runway: it’s not going to fly your plane by itself (you’ll also need wings, a fuselage, etc.) and you’ll waste a lot of money if it turns out you’re building on the wrong runway. So in general when starting a business you want to prove your concept as cheaply as possible before going to the next stage: survey customers to make sure they actually want what you’re making before you make it, experiment with prototypes before doing batch production, etc. We left the cooking in a kitchen stage of our operations component a while ago and are now in the rent kitchen space stage; if we’re lucky, we’ll eventually have to upgrade our operations component again as demand grows.
If you’re interested in learning more about starting a business, especially one that eventually grows to be large and profitable, I recommend Paul Graham’s essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html He’s a brilliant and extremely knowledgeable entrepreneur/investor.
Stupid question: I looked up Soylent, and I am confused: you have a large group of people who totally doesn’t care how their means feel in the stomach? I mean, who don’t care about the joy of eating as such, and don’t want the kind of warm and glowy effect in the stomach that comes from say a good greasy Chinese takeaway? (Taste in the mouth is IMHO not so important, things like the greasy feel in the stomach, the weight felt from filling meat, or the carb high on rice matter more.)
At least your product looks like some kind of a wholemeal cake, although I still doubt I could feel satisfied from something not warm and not greasy, but that is a step closer to a normal meal. (But why five a day portions? Because the kind of health-oriented people who buy this are also the same kind of people who buy the health industries many small meals thing instead of the standard 3? I personally think 3 meals work better because you get to feel stuffed and enjoy that, with 5 you are never hungry but also never feel a full house feeling.)
I think the next best thing could be health food that does not taste like healthfood, for people like me who don’
t go anywhere near health food. Say, the least bad carb is probably wholemeal rye. The issue with wholemeal pastas is usually that they feel like chewing sand, but if ground down really fine, like Graham, maybe one could make borderline enjoyable noodles from them. Stir-fry vegan mystery meat and vegs with spices and souce in an ample amount of coconut oil, as coconut oil is close enough to grease, add to the noodles and you probably get a health food that feels like a not health food.
It’s paying our bills and making a nice profit… are you sure? ;) We are incorporated as a California LLC, so I think we meet the technical definition of being a business.
The short answer to your question is stop being afraid and start googling. To put things in perspective, if there was a college class taught on all the non-geeky stuff we needed to learn in order to start MealSquares, everyone reading this site would sleep through it and get an easy A. Sometimes being a bold agent really is all that it takes. Being highly intelligent and analytical makes you overqualified for most tasks that “regular” people routinely do. For example, to name MealSquares, I generated lists of nouns and verbs in text files and combined them until I stumbled on something we really liked. In principle our product could have been named by a “regular” marketing person who studied communications in college, phones it in at their 9 to 5 corporate job, and keeps thinking of names until they find one their boss doesn’t hate, but we’re hoping having a clever name is something that will give us a cumulative edge.
Or to give you another example: When our employees bake MealSquares at the commercial kitchen we rent space at, they bake them using square molds we had custom made at a factory in China. Sounds impressive right? Here was the procedure for getting those molds made:
Search on alibaba.com for a manufacturer who creates food grade silicone molds for a good price with a relatively small minimum order quantity.
Draw up some plans showing the exact dimensions that we wanted our mold manufactured in. (Getting the dimensions right was actually pretty important; Romeo wanted things set up so the squares packed tightly in to a flat rate shipping box so our shipping costs would be lower. I ended up using a turtle graphics library for Python to write a program to draw the molds, because I kept making subtle but slow to correct errors using free hand graphics programs I found online. Again, these are examples of how being smart and strategic gives you an edge even when doing tasks that a “regular” person could easily accomplish themselves, even if in a slow and mediocre way.)
Throw emails and money at the manufacturer until our molds arrive in the mail.
The key to startups in my opinion is making something people want. You want to pay a lot of attention to what’s going on in the economy and what sort of products succeed and fail, without suffering from hindsight bias and seeing all success as obvious in retrospect. A good sign that you’re on the right track may be that you are sometimes confused when you hear that a product has succeeded, because then you know you are at the point where you are diffing the world against some internal model you’re building. MealSquares is my fourth startup attempt. The two before MealSquares were complete failures, so I generated a huge list of all my ideas and did market research on all of them trying to figure out which had potential. I concluded that none of them represented a sufficiently compelling need in the market and reluctantly redirected my surplus ambition towards other things (taking Coursera classes on machine learning after getting home from work). The meal replacements Romeo was playing with almost immediately struck me as representing a much stronger need than any of the ideas I had been looking at before, and fortunately I managed to convince him to work on commercializing them.
I really hope MealSquares is a big success, and that I’ll be able to buy them in the Netherlands soon. Good luck!
Thanks, so, to sum it up, the world is moving from ownership-based capitalism where you must own a shoe factory in order to manufacture shoes to everything is a service.
There is just one thing I don’t fully understand. How comes a fraud did not start it earlier nor do you get outcompeted by a fraud?
Because I would expect that scenario. Businessmen, who understand the market, not smart science geek stuff, should notice the demand earlier. But not knowing how to satisfy it, they would just make up something, like market any random fruit bread as nutritionally complete.
Well, there are laws preventing outright fraud, so lying catches up with you eventually. But customers are also smarter than you think: http://www.cluetrain.com/ In the long run, the best form of marketing is having a great product. Google is a good example: they entered a crowded search engine market and focused mainly on just having a better product. Now they’re one of the world’s most valuable companies.
On the other hand: our biggest competitor is Soylent, whose sales volume vastly exceeds ours, mainly because they were first to the market and got a lot of attention. But people who understand nutrition are much more interested in eating our product. So we’ll see if we can oust them in the long run.
To comment further on your build vs rent a factory point: My general model of how building a business works is that you are constructing a plane as it takes off. At the beginning, a cheap biplane will do as long as you have all the basics in place: landing gear, wings, propeller, etc. Once you’ve gotten in to the air and your concept has proven itself, you want to gradually be upgrading your plane’s components: replace wooden wings with an aluminum alloy, replace your propeller with a better one. Then through gradual upgrades you get all the way to supersonic fighter jet. You don’t want to invest all of your time and money in an expensive jet engine while you’re still on the runway: it’s not going to fly your plane by itself (you’ll also need wings, a fuselage, etc.) and you’ll waste a lot of money if it turns out you’re building on the wrong runway. So in general when starting a business you want to prove your concept as cheaply as possible before going to the next stage: survey customers to make sure they actually want what you’re making before you make it, experiment with prototypes before doing batch production, etc. We left the cooking in a kitchen stage of our operations component a while ago and are now in the rent kitchen space stage; if we’re lucky, we’ll eventually have to upgrade our operations component again as demand grows.
If you’re interested in learning more about starting a business, especially one that eventually grows to be large and profitable, I recommend Paul Graham’s essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html He’s a brilliant and extremely knowledgeable entrepreneur/investor.
Stupid question: I looked up Soylent, and I am confused: you have a large group of people who totally doesn’t care how their means feel in the stomach? I mean, who don’t care about the joy of eating as such, and don’t want the kind of warm and glowy effect in the stomach that comes from say a good greasy Chinese takeaway? (Taste in the mouth is IMHO not so important, things like the greasy feel in the stomach, the weight felt from filling meat, or the carb high on rice matter more.)
At least your product looks like some kind of a wholemeal cake, although I still doubt I could feel satisfied from something not warm and not greasy, but that is a step closer to a normal meal. (But why five a day portions? Because the kind of health-oriented people who buy this are also the same kind of people who buy the health industries many small meals thing instead of the standard 3? I personally think 3 meals work better because you get to feel stuffed and enjoy that, with 5 you are never hungry but also never feel a full house feeling.)
I think the next best thing could be health food that does not taste like healthfood, for people like me who don’ t go anywhere near health food. Say, the least bad carb is probably wholemeal rye. The issue with wholemeal pastas is usually that they feel like chewing sand, but if ground down really fine, like Graham, maybe one could make borderline enjoyable noodles from them. Stir-fry vegan mystery meat and vegs with spices and souce in an ample amount of coconut oil, as coconut oil is close enough to grease, add to the noodles and you probably get a health food that feels like a not health food.