[Journey] Vegan Dumpling Business

[tripleyourtribe]

As we need a bit of capital for renting out our kitchen, I started putting together a few Instagram service packages to offer my existing audience I have built over the years on facebook, instagram and my email list.

I am partnering with a fitness coach friend and we worked out a structure to work together (giving him a cut as he will introduce me to interested businesses). Ive done these kinds of services for several years so it should be pretty straightforward. I’ll be offering a one-off package, and a recurring support/coaching option.

He will be interviewing me as part of getting myself known in front of his audience. I could also include several freebie resources for Instagram strategies for them.

I’m looking to generate at least 3,000$ in the coming month or so. (5,000$ as a stretch goal).

We will see how this goes.

In the meantime, we sold $150 worth of dumpling gift cards from our store and continuing to post about our dumplings on our Instagram, reddit, Tiktok and facebook. (gotta get on Linked-in soon)

[tripleyourtribe]

Updates:

• New website on wordpress is up and running, now with FRENCH for our Quebec friends (thanks to my gf for translating). We bought a woocommerce plugin to help us do it. (I can find it if you are curious)

• Here’s our website if you want to have a look: (dumplingnation.ca) <— we’re open to any critical feedback on any aspect of our website. I am pretty newbie at building sites but I can manage through the frustrating work, lol.

• We’re also working on our content planning + syndication for social media (IG, Reddit, Tiktok, Linked-in, email, Fb…) We’re getting the pillars in order and aligning me and my gf’s vision & messaging right. We absolutely want to have a fun feed, that shows how delicious our food is and interact with our customers on stories and DM’s.

• HUGE news: We finally found a potential kitchen to cook from. Wooo!! More news on this in a few days to finalize the deal with our realtor friend. Due to the setup, the owners might not like having people come pick-up orders from the location. So we might just do deliveries for now. And figure out a workaround for pick-ups later.

• We are continuously testing out gluten-free recipes (a previous one failed but we will try to have at least 1 working gluten-free option on our menu).

• I emailed my list of old clients and leads for working with me for Instagram services. I had a few people say they were interested but nothing more so far. I will be following up with previous customers this week and my fitness coach friend to see how he’s doing on his end.

Thank you for keeping up with us. We can’t wait to officially be open and serve our community. The wait is killing us haha. But it’s definitely going to be worth it.

[EauDeBo]

This right here.

@Race44

Where people subscribe to your dumplings and get delivery every week. Pay a monthly fee and get delivery every weekend

I like the subscription model very much!

You could pitch it at people with money but no time, a bit like Hello Fresh.

Good luck with your new journey, Leon!

[Bianca]

How awesome is to see a real, live, and exciting journey from one of the community members. Happy to hear that you found a potential kitchen to cook from, that’s a big step.

I like the website, it looks nice and clean. Oh and I love the logo

[tripleyourtribe]

Update: We opened last weekend!

So we opened our doors for pre-orders on Dec 21. We had $315 in gift card sales and we had 11 customers for Jan 2-3

3 of those customers were repeat from our soft-launch! (a great sign that people love our stuff!)

We had 2 x zero-waste clients who brought their containers to fill instead of using our containers (that was fun to coordinate via DMs) These guys also shared on their social media too - which got us a followers on insta .

We also got a shout from a local vegan insta page and got a lot of attention! (followers jumped on the days that followed)

this also helped for getting website traffic:

Extra notes:

• We received our packing bags for frozen dumplings just in time (Uline is a lifesaver!) Find yourself a reliable supplier.

• We removed the fortune cookies from our menu since they were burning our fingers and ended up being too much of a hassle to make. RIP to the first and last order of fortune cookies this weekend.

• Customers were able to order without paying delivery. I had to fix plugins on the website for hours to figure it out! We still gave the free delivery for helping us troubleshoot the issue.

• I found another plugin that prevents people from adding certain items designated for delivery only. (we only cook dumplings for deliveries, otherwise, frozen)

• This coming week, we are organizing our prep days to avoid working 10-12 hour days lol. This should help reduce it to 5-8 hrs.

• When we created content, we foudn it super easy to create videos on tiktok, then share them as reels. This got us followers in the days when we werent open yet.

• We got clients from reddit, and leads from twitter so far too.

Weekend 2 will be interesting! So much to share… tryhing to document as we go. I had a call with my cousin’s wife, and she said she felt she was so invested in us because the way we share on Instagram.

It was nice to hear…

Our goal now is to see how soon we can break-even for our monthly rent for the kitchen. I have yet to go into detail on calculating the costs per order.

Anyway, update you guys again soon.

Leon

[tripleyourtribe]

Weekend 2 is now complete!

We increased our number of orders this week. half of which came the hours just before our Friday deadline to order for the weekend.

(Which we adjusted to end earlier next week so that we prepare better and just produce a bigger batch ahead of schedule ~ the extra ones we make can be frozen. But we cannot freeze our fillings, which caused us to think about how to do it.)

Dumplings sold: 430 (+102 from last week)
Avg order size $49.07 (+$9.54 from last week)
Orders: 15 (+4 from last week)
Frozen: 246 dumplings (+102 from last week)
Cooked: 184 dumplings (+98 from last week)

Our social media was not as active as we were focusing on production this week, but we still grew every day this week woo!

We also tested a GF option as we had a lot fo requests for it. and sent it out to a local influencer. (it was out of our delivery range but i drove to her anyway because we thought it was worth it for her to try)

AFter she tried it out, she shouted us out and we had a flood of new followers! (we flew passed 500 overnight - we had just over 400 last week lol)

There was a little freak out earlier in the week where someone tried to slander us by saying we arent doing things according to the food laws here… (but the photo they took was out of context ~ we were making food for family without gloves…) And we have all our certificates and in the process of getting inspected. So we had nothing to stress about anyway.

Someone also reached out to us saying how drama was being stirred within a fb group because we are a non-asian owned business with the term “dumpling” in our name. Most people in the thread didnt mind. One of my friends warned me something like this might happen within the community. We want to make our foods the right way with the respect to each culture (since we inspire our flavours from all around the world, we don’t mainly focus on one)

Besides that, we are extremely thrilled with how things turned out this week! A lot of positive feedback from clients, and some even brought us to tears to know that they were blown away from our foods.

We did an internal weekly review as well (1) what we did right, (2) what we can do better next time. Would that list be of interest to share to you guys? or on social media? to document our journey.

Anyway, today is my day off so i will go sledding after we go food shopping

Happy monday y’all!

Leon

[aman1809]

You are going Awesome,Truly very Awesome.I am Following this Journey with significantly more Curiosity now,Looking for the Future Updates!

[Alexnvo]

Excellent !! …

[Race44]

As someone who is part Chinese, I don’t find it offensive. Dumplings are made all over the World by many different cultures. If you started call them Dim Sum then that’d be something different, but you’re doing different styles with city names which I don’t think is offensive. Also, it sounds like the Washingtons are your most popular any way. I personally love Polish dumplings (Pierogi) over Dim Sum lol.

Keep going!

[Nieco]

Awesome journey! Keep it up.

You’ll absolutely get a lot of flames here and there, especially with the whole society thinking they are “woke” and the overall online cultureLOL.
But stay consistent, be good to the good customers and they’ll be your loyal crusade!
I can’t wait to start something /craft with my own hands too! (hopefully Q2-3 this year)

[tripleyourtribe]

@Race44

I personally love Polish dumplings (Pierogi) over Dim Sum lol.

Haha that could be a good one for comfort food. Gotta think about what sauce would be interesting to dip those into!

And our Washington’s are getting more sales but not as much as our “butter chicken” ones. We’re thinking of including a few for next weekend as a little surprise treat. The caramel sauce with that is so delicious wee hoping we’ll get them coming back for more.

And trying to tie in the subscription model you initially proposed! So fun to build this thing

Btw as we launched our gluten-free ones today, we got two orders already so excited

[tripleyourtribe]

Been hella busy with weekend 3&4. Every week has been beating the previous in sales and orders. We saw repeat customers already and our new gluten-free was super well received!

We are considering removing the cooked options as it was beginning to be a bottleneck in our growth. Only offering frozen will simplify ordering, production and extend our delivery zone.

I’ll share more numbers after this weekend. I also updated our homepage like crazy and added testimonials from the feedback we got so far.

We realized our next month we will focus more on frozen and increasing our production. We are aiming to hit 4k in profit per month as our goal to make this business and lifestyle sustain itself.

More details coming soon. Hope you guys are well!

Leon

[Micky]

Amazing Leon. I just saw your post! Glad that it works out for you guys. Best of luck to you guys, and thanks for sharing your journey with us

[EauDeBo]

@tripleyourtribe

We are aiming to hit 4k in profit per month as our goal

Wow! When do you think you might hit this? Not many startups can say that at such an early stage and that’s testament to how well you’re smashing this journey!

[tripleyourtribe]

Thanks @EauDeBo ! Our first month is not over One more week to see what we can do! (we’re lucky January has so many weekends haha)

@EauDeBo

When do you think you might hit this?

I’m blindly guessing by maybe end of March we should hit it, if all goes well with our transition to only-frozen options. Edit: And probably hitting that much in revenue in Feb. But I am probably being very optimistic. We will see.

By then, we should also be starting a subscription model, offer bigger frozen batches, increase our delivery range, and in talks with zero-waste shops to carry our dumplings there. Maybe even remove one of our current items on the menu because the labor takes too long to make and it’s not a big seller (despite it being our favorite to eat! ~ it’s the Madrids btw)

[Micky]

Leon I fell upon something today and I immediately thought of you and your business.

Now this was a gourmet pizza shop. Italian. On their menu they offer to send you everything fresh, the pizza dough, sauce and the toppings you like to pick, and then someone can make their own freshly made pizza at home at any clock they find convenient. You get the idea? It’s still fresh, not frozen, you get to save the labor on making the actual pizza. Mostly machinery will be able to handle your orders. Basically you need a delivery guy as an actual working labor. I can see the idea as some will find it fun and a nice way to spend quality time with their families.

Now some will say, but why the heck not just buy everything from the store and do the whole thing yourself then?

Here is why. I do not know about Canada, but here where I am, mostly the delicious ingredients that restaurants offer can only be bought in specific stores by registered business owners only! And as a business owner the prices are also cheaper as it is wholesale. So you can’t just walk in and buy these “special” and different good tasting ingredients as an none registered business owner.

Other than that people won’t have the secret recipe to your super crispy dough or on how to make the best pizza sauce. All those your business will stand for and supply.

Your business is based on vegan Dumplings, and that too I can imagen can be done.

Now I am sure you got loads of ideas yourself. But I thought of this as a possibility.

[tripleyourtribe]

@Micky

I can see the idea as some will find it fun and a nice way to spend quality time with their families.

Great idea Micky. We could arrange for something like this. We would have to do a limited small test run to see how ppl like it.

As we transition to frozen only dumplings, it requires some cooking instructions already. So it will be interesting to see how our customers take that first step in cooking the dumplings at home (our instructions are pretty straightforward but there is still room to simplify even further so it becomes easy for anyone to cook them. )

[Micky]

Exactly what I thought. The whole idea of “believing” that the costumers have put their own stamp making the dish theirselfs is appealing.
A small test run might be worth it.

I really wish you all the best. And look forward to follow the rest of your journey. Keep us updated.

[tripleyourtribe]

Week 5 just ended (it was a slower week but we had a lot on our plate to prep) and we’re now entering Week 6 with loads of changes to our business:

• Removed COOKED items entirely: they caused us a LOT of stress and limited our delivery radius since we had to keep them HOT. With frozen, we can deliver further. (plus, our snowy weather in Montreal helps)

• Redesigned my entire website with Elementor Pro (I previously designed it with Flatsome theme and UX builder) With Elementor Pro and their Hello theme, the website feels WAY FASTER and clearer to checkout.

• Added QUANTITIES for each product: so people can buy 10-20-30 dumplings of a certain flavour. They more they buy, the more they will save, basically.

• EXPANDED our delivery zones! Im still the sole driver, but we are scheduling all our deliveries into a single 4 hour slot on Saturdays. So I can optimize our routes and have all our dumplings stay in our cooler during that time.

• Added a FREE DELIVERY over $70 option for those who don’t like to pay delivery fees.

• Added a SAMPLER pack option with 3 of our flavours. They can get 5 or 10 of each dumpling kind in this pack.

• We ordered the last of our required equipment to be fully GLUTEN-FREE for 2 of our dumplings. Once we receive them, we can cater to our Celiac customers (this one was a popular demand!)

Although Week 5 was not our best week in sales, I saw it as a week to prepare our systems and organization. Now, with Week 6, we are excited to see how people respond to our changes.

There’s still a lot of room to change. But I think a few weeks with these new options should be good enough to see if we’re on the right track.

I absolutely do NOT want to grow too fast. (ie: too many sales, or expanding our delivery zone too far, or grow our followers too fast.) I want sustainable growth.

We’re hovering at about 644 followers on Instagram now. And we want to keep building the way we are. We get 97% of our customers through Instagram. Most came from us leaving comments and we love the relationships we are building with our current audience over there.

Our metrics on stories feel strong when we do polls to ask where our customers want deliveries, which new flavours they prefer, etc.

We also saw the most amount of engagement / Comments / DMs come in when we recently shared a bit more backstory on my gf’s journey to building the business. We also share some of these changes with our audience. There is a growing sense of friendship with our followers and they get to feel like they are seeing a business make changes right in front of their eyes. It’s amazing to see.

We even received a sample of cannolis from another vegan baker when she came to pick up her order. We shouted her out on our stories and saw a jump in her followers. It’s great to be able to help others in our community this way and now that we have a bit of a platform, we feel we have a certain voice and we can be heard.

Anyway, just a little update. Less numbers this time, but I will share those maybe after Week 6.

Have a great week guys!

Leon

[tripleyourtribe]

We’re at Week 15 now… we’ve grown a lot in terms of local presence and the way we do our processes in our kitchen.

We also reached the 1k followers milestone - no fullow/unfollow or giveaways done. We dont want to do those as we only want hyper local fans who actually love what we do.

We’re adding the subscriptions very shortly. I just need to sort out the right plugins on the website so customers can add / remove / pause their subscriptions.

We started talking with a local vegan ecom store who carries local branded foods. Huge win! It will help us with delivering to places we currentyl do not.

We launched a new flavour and eliminated another.

We sent a local influencer of 83k followers a sampler pack, and we did not see any traction come back to our account ~ which was very disappointing. Goes to show to do our due diligence for the next ones we want to work with.

Repeat customers have gone up. We’re nearing 19% of customers who buy once, come back again. And we are seeing that number go up. Likely due to the new flavours, or we expanded our delivery zone to accomodate them.

I recently sent out a customer survey to know more about why they chose to buy from us and that gave us some good insights on what to tweak in our messaging in the future.

We also did a bunch of IG story surveys asking if people would like our sauces sold separately, about haivng the GF option as a DIY dumpling kit at home, and for our subscription model.

^^ Needless to say, we had a LOT of interactions on those posts and super valuable to info to move forward with.

We’re averaging around 380 views within 24 hours on our Instagram stories. It’s our most active platform at the minute.

Anyway, I thought id update the thread since its been a while.

Excited to take this to the next steps! This is all beyond my comfort zone now…

cheers,
Leon