[Journey] Vegan Dumpling Business

Instagram Marketing
#41

Its been a while since my updates here, but ill do my best to try to bring y’all up to speed.

Last week, we hosted a pop-up event at a local cafe. It went really well and finally got to see a lot of our customers and fans in person. We offered a set menu of 5 courses. We sold approx 60 meals in total, along with some drinks. (I don’t think we’ll do this again haha)

Since my last post,

  • we moved kitchens
  • scrapped the subscription idea (due to labour)
  • partnered with a local vegan ecom store and widened our delivery zone to 2 provinces!
  • we hosted a corporate team-building dumpling making class for a team of 22 people. All via Google Meet. They received dumpling kits which had our pre-made filling & doughs to make the class simpler.
  • sold in bulk to the local ecom store
  • partnered with a 2nd store
  • Started PURELY online dumpling classes (with a modified recipe to make purchasing ingredients super simple)
    …

Needless to say, A LOT has been going on… and frankly, we felt burned out. The labour was just too insane for us to justify to continue offering our dumplings.

So our last 2 moves are to:

(1) host a POP-UP event in person:
So that people can enjoy our dumplings the way we make them in the freshest way possible. (This was completed last week.)

(2) To sell recordings of our dumpling making classes. Showcasing how we cook every dumpling flavour along with it’s sauce.

I think this will greatly simplify our labour (record the class once, and create content around food to sell the classes).

My partner also wants to focus on other sources of income for now until we pick up on the revenue from the classes. As for me, I’ve started to apply at engineering positions, spoken to my list of previous Instagram service clients, and started to learn programming to get into that in the coming years.

Thanks for reading so far! I appreciate you, your ideas, and support.

Leon

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#42

Fantastic journey (thus far). Love reading the updates.

Good move to change to something more scalable for you both.
One thing that could help, in one level deeper, is to hire someone you trust to carry out the POP-Up events.

Obviously, most of the leg work would be to get them “stage-ready” to deliver a pleasant experience to your customers. But there are many benefits to this, the greatest of them are the following:

  1. You can let them become the persona of the brand (decreased dependence on your presence for success)
  2. You can [optionally] focus on creating/selling the recordings. (Increase scalable actions performed in a short period of time).

Both of your role’s will gradually shift from performing a job to managing a business once those people/systems are in place.

Good to see this update, looking forward to more!
Cheers!

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