The Cheezus Thread - A Startup Journey

For example, if you take the new users from the last 30 days and their locations:
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Sure, UK is second highest, but the total of the rest by far outweigh it. So while it did frustrate me some, it validated that the market is there in general and people care about cheese :P The truth is I was up untli 3am that morning I heard making sure the things I was doing or had planned would be finished in half the time. I now have the sync tool being developed offshore and will be done next week. The UI work is underway. Feb I'm looking to be testing it all and trying to onboard first producers in the UK. Will see how it goes but don't think I'm dead just yet :)
 
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This is the last 30 days, so to build on the above, it hasn't been a worry for us. In fact, it's been the best month we've had worldwide on all accounts. The most use, the most new cheeses, the most new users worldwide. So while I was a bit peeved at that whole thing, it just kicked me up the arse really.

I'm in the process of testing the sync plugin that will sync all producers sites using WooCommerce to our woo instance. Seems OK so far. This is the 3rd batch of testing I've done. I need to test it in anger to make sure I can't break it, which I tend to be a great use case for this sort of thing. "what happens if I click this and then do this weird thing?" :D

Either way, it should be finalised and code handed over next week.

Ahmad is working on updating the ionic codebase at the moment to the latest version. That will be released early next week, with App Store optimisations, then starting on the UI for buying from the app. Dan is currently implementing some monitoring for our infra/ load so we can stress test our systems prior to pushing something out.

Just a little update but a good one :)
 
Have I Got News For You were talking about ‘Cheezam’, a Shazam for cheese today. Made me think of you! How are things going? I take it it’s not cheesus they were referring?
 
Ahleckz said:
Have I Got News For You were talking about ‘Cheezam’, a Shazam for cheese today. Made me think of you! How are things going? I take it it’s not cheesus they were referring?
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Ha I saw this as well. And of course have been sent it by people, too. It was not! I know of them though, it's a company that built it, they have 9000 images, which is pretty small for ML models, but they have money being a company :P We're doing OK though, growing nicely still. Having the best month to date I think this month, fixed a lot of things and building out intended stuff to be able to purchase from the app, still. Just passed 2000 users, which again, is small, but considering the cost vs. user base it's pretty good.
I'm fine with competition. I think they've done great with PR of course, but when you have a big company it's much easier :) Much as vivino did though, the value for me comes with working with producers and this upcoming shift should be hopefully where we can make a difference and our model will be entirely different in that way. See what happens. I still haven't invested huge sums at all in this, so for me it's been a really interesting journey.
 
Ahleckz said:
Have I Got News For You were talking about ‘Cheezam’, a Shazam for cheese today. Made me think of you! How are things going? I take it it’s not cheesus they were referring?
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Worthy said:
I saw this in the paper the other day too, AI cheese identification and I so thought it was you @randomshenans!
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So a funny thing happened since my last post on this. Firstly, we had mega traffic this week because of it. Our downloads have been great. Best month we've had in fact.

On top of this, I get an email from a US publication I hadn't heard of asking for an interview. I was like sure, why not. As I was chatting with him on Zoom, I checked out their site stats and viewership. They average between 500k-1m readers a month to their publication. They were started by the founder of vanity fair and have a massively high end following!

The guy who interviewed me was an ex FT columnist, who was recruited over to them. It's AirMail.news - Nothing I'd heard of until this point. Anyway, he'd heard of the cheezam stuff but couldn't find anything about them or to use it. He was like everything I search for on cheese apps I kept finding you guys (lol **** you and thank you app store optimisation/ SEO work!) and you seem to be the top cheese app in the world? I was like ha thanks.

He interviewed me and reiterated their foodie, high end, cosmopolitan readership saying "Tom Cruise once bought what I recommended in my column" - erm, cool? I mean, it would be cool to say Tom Cruise was a cheezus user I suppose? ha

The fact I was an English guy, living in France and drove a Black London Taxi around with Cheezus on, making a cheese app, was something he thought the American's would love. So yea, that's supposed to come out in a couple of weeks!

It's just funny because of all the ground work that's gone into those things as well. I spent a long time and still do on app store optimizations. I looked at where most our d/ls came from and 75% were app store searches. Hence the work that went into pushing it. Same with general SEO as well. Anyway, no idea what will come of it.

Been generally fixing things and pushing small updates as we go, still working to get this big update out for producers, it'll come. Just wanted to improve some of the core things first, like search and data which I've worked on.

Have a good weekend!
 
Any chance you could "borrow" their idea and have the camera AI cheese identifier? That would be awesome.
 
Love seeing this progress, keep it up dude :D

If you want some feedback let me know. Actually, here's some:

The socials on your site need sorting, this looks a bit scruffy:

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The images don't render all that well on my 1440p monitor, might be worth uploading some higher resolution images.

And possibly the most important one, "the vivino of cheese" - sounds like you're coat-tailing someone else, come up with a new slogan like "Every cheese lover's companion" or something.

Just my 2p, feel free to chuck it in the bin :)
 
Worthy said:
Any chance you could "borrow" their idea and have the camera AI cheese identifier? That would be awesome.
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That's what it does! See example: https://twitter.com/CheezusApp/status/1526862339642953728?s=20&t=nG-2Z8-7-culeM8dyTM0cA

@Russinating Totally! I have a long list at the moment and the app branding and app store stuff is updated but the site is very behind!

@Diddums 100% - I had a job out to get someone to redo the site but think I'll redo it myself. As above it needs aligning with my app store artwork and that. It's just not aligned and was the first thing done and desperately needs improving. It's next on my list!

I appreciate all the feedback from everyone, honestly. It's all good feedback and I don't take any of this stuff personally haha most I might know and it'll kick me up the ass to sort
 
I'm dairy intolerant but I can see your business idea as good. Only issue is in France people like their local cheeses and there's a fair bit of "local's best".

On your costs have you included your time at $X/hr ?
 
@randomshenans

So, as a start, have you either done or thought about doing an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)? It'll be incredibly useful for you to qualify everything you output, and it's actually quite a fun process. Do two, slightly varied, one male one female, give them names etc. There's plenty of resources online but in short you want to think about who "Paul" is. What kind of house does he live in? What does he read? What other brands does he like and buy? Where does he get his news from? What car does he own (if any)? What does he enjoy doing? Does he have kids? How old are they? What are his aspirations for himself and them? etc etc etc

You can be as detailed as you like but best keep it two concise paragraphs. The brands one in particular is super useful because then you can very easily look at what they look and sound like.

You can then start asking yourself, does Paul like cheese puns? Does he like your latest Twitter posts that are anti-Conservative?

You see where I'm getting at, because I would suggest maybe not. I mean crossing politics with business is just a big no-no if you're not Greenpeace anyway, unless you want to turn 40% of your customers away in a heartbeat. Or certainly not if your aspirations are to partner with artisan cheese makers etc, rather than going after Sharon, who reads The Sun, to let her know what to pair with her Yellow Tail rose.

That's where I think the brand starts to get confused. There's puns left right and centre which is a really common mistake for owner-led brands. "Brie quick", "Your cheesy partner" etc. It just doesn't work and I think it devalues your product.

In many ways creating a premium brand is easier than not. They're often simpler, cleaner and more minimalist than their 'lower' counterparts. Owner-led/designed brands often have the kitchen sink thrown at them because it's seen as being necessary but it's really not.

But yeah, as a start, do an ICP, see how you get on, and I think you'll find it really useful, from brand to advertising and aligning with other businesses.
 
Russinating said:
That's where I think the brand starts to get confused. There's puns left right and centre which is a really common mistake for owner-led brands. "Brie quick", "Your cheesy partner" etc. It just doesn't work and I think it devalues your product.
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Interesting points, mate! Thanks for this! I don't know how I missed it! I have done personas, way back to be fair. Would be worth going through them all again for sure.

I'll spend some time on this as I really want to complete the redesign of the site and everything, so can tie this into all of that. Thanks mate, appreciate your time in putting that together.


I got the nod from Ahmad we're getting closer to sorting **** out on buying cheese, so kicked off cheese producer outreach and am currently in the process of onboarding one producer with 15% commission arranged. I am in talks with 3 more and need to send an agreement to another on commission contracts. So still chipping away :) just passed 2200 users which is nice. Again, not massive but better than nothing for organic growth. I think all the work in branding @Russinating would then help with future campaigns, too, when I do plan to market more heavily as it'll hopefully lead to revenue then. I have been doing it organically at the moment for pure growth but when there is no potential of $$ back it's all a sink cost.
 
NickK said:
I'm dairy intolerant but I can see your business idea as good. Only issue is in France people like their local cheeses and there's a fair bit of "local's best".

On your costs have you included your time at $X/hr ?
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I also don't know how I missed these, too. It's been a time! I have not factored in my time in anyway at all. Purely out of pockets, and sure you could say I'm paying out time, but my wage would be far too hard to calc in this to be fair. That number is just to illustrate the $$ that went into it, not the effort.
Lopéz said:
Great news on the article mate, sounds really positive.
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Ah it was a little one, but it's not something I had even banked on, so?


Preview of the buying side on the app, it's not hooked up to the APIs yet on the backend, so will see how it looks like that. I would like payments and orders to be structured and labeled differently but it's getting there!

 
I am not sure I wrote about it above, but I had agreed terms with Butler's cheese, but their install of shopify is a bit unique, so things went a bit quiet as I was working things out. I reached out to ask some Qs and the guy I'd agreed things with had left. Nooo! Anyway, I got through to a new lady and we've had a back and forth for a week. Jumped on a call today, she's the operations director there and lovely. Rekindled the whole thing and she's agreed it'll be a great idea and we're back in the game.
That's on top of a couple more. I am jumping on a call this week to sort out a plugin install as well. I hope to hit 10 producers on board before Sept is my aim! Slowly slowly catchy monkey, but it's fine for me at this pace. Means I can balance it with everything else, which is the main thing really.

Just wanted to update as it was today. As you were.
 
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