The Cheezus Thread - A Startup Journey

[randomshenans]

Ah you guys! You're too kind!

One thing I setup was a revolut business account, but thinking I should get some finance software too? What's good and free for the basic offering?

 

[randomshenans]

Thanks @Martynt74 dude! I've signed up to XERO as I got it for 6quid a month down from 12 and it links to revolut business, which I say I have... but they seem to have ****** up my account creation so it doesn't actually work right now but I have a support case open either way. I've then looked at the possibility of using this: https://www.brixx.com/xero-financial-modelling-app-get-started-with-brixx/ to pull them all together for forecasting and planning. The full loop together which is important and **** for futures.

Now I need to explore software/ apps to help me manage the business partner relationships. I might see if I can use Streak for Gmail, as I'm using gmail anyway and you can do things like pipelines and track things that way. I'll see how it works out with that at the start anyway. Saves money!

 

[randomshenans]

I know you are trying to save money at the moment, but if things start to take off (or if you want to invest a bit of ££ now) and you need someone to take care of all your digital marketing stuff, websites, social media etc, one of my best friends is a graphic designer and now runs his own design group. I'm sure I could sort out an OcUK discount

Thanks man, appreciate that. It's something that I've been doing at the moment but know at some point that won't be worth it and I'll need someone else to, so I can do other things. Just at the moment it's money! I spend about 3 hours each sunday creating content for the week, which is working OK at the moment vs. the amount it'd cost me to get a proper person doing it.

I am going to have to spend tonight inputting previous transactions into Xero so I have all the past stuff in there and have a solid footing. I hate all this ****, it's all a pain but need to make it as accurate as I can. My account with revolut business is still locked though, they're like "open a chat in the app" OK, I don't even have that option soooo? I've signed up for a BRIXX trial too, so will see once I have expenses of the past all in there if I can look at that.

Two things that have happened though, we're now at 452 users, so on track to pass our 500. It's slow going but it's going and we're on track to have our best month for the second month in a row, so that's a big plus and shows having put 2 months of real work in, that it's working. With this I spoke to the lady running the virtual cheese awards and we agreed to sponsor a cheese category, in fact the cheddar one, for 500quid. You get a lot of coverage and it's expected to have about 5000 people present throughout the event, which will also have us on all their social, and all the stuff on the day as well as the MC of the day plugging the app to everyone too. So for me, it's 500 which is a chunk, but for the potential reach I need to do more than what I am as 2-6 new users a day isn't enough! I am rolling the dice and worst case it's not a good use of 500 but least it's not 5000! I can take that risk and track the ROI.

I also spoke to that investment company from LinkedIn - Launch. They target companies looking for seed, but that are on the market and hitting early growth stage. They look for 10% MoM growth and $1-10k MRR. Then you can join their 14 week program to help you take that to the next level. You get $100k for 6% equity, which isn't bad really, and by the end of the 14 weeks you should have pitched to over 100 other investors too. I knew we were too early at shy of 500 users. You need to be in the 1000s at least, and he said that there is a trade off on the MRR, so if you aren't bringing in $1k a month minimum but have a large growth in users then this could swing it, but we need that too. He likes the idea and wants us to send through monthly updates on what's going on with our charts and figures, so will definitely do that.


All going nicely, as always though need the technology side to keep up. If I were to get someone else to do the app work I think it'd cost me at least 5k (and it'd be properly offshore work as well) and at the same time I know they'd have to learn how it's put together now, which I don't have with Ahmed, but I need a bit more speed! Either way, we're putting in some good stuff and good things are happening. Gotta keep plugging away!

Once I've got the finance software side and all that info in there I'll feel a bit more on top of things and then can look at setting up this lightweight Streak gmail CRM so I can start to properly do some business outreach for partners too. See how I get on this weekend with it all.

Thanks for all your support in here! I really appreciate it and your comments etc. I only like typing this up as it's a way to get it out my head and think about what I need to do. Otherwise, when you're doing it on your own there is no way to vocalise it!

 

[randomshenans]

I posted a job for free on linkedin for a CFO (part time / sweat equity deal) and have had about 30 applicants so far. 100% most of them haven't read the JD and realise it's sweat equity! I also posted that and a CMO role on https://cheezus.co/jobs

Need to find some time to go through all of this and message everyone/ setup time to speak. It's loooong, but good longterm.

I also had a thought. I want to increase the effectiveness and accuracy of the machine learning. To do that we need more pics of all of the cheeses. Which isn't so bad until you look at the numbers. We started with 10 cheeses and 1000 images of each. As such, often if something is a light coloured cheese it probably thinks it's provolone as that's one it has 1000 images of. We now have 350 cheeses, but a lot of those have just a couple of pics of each. Some have more that I've put some time into. Mont D'Or has probably 100-200 pics tbh, same with some others but not consistent. How can I make it better?
I thought I could just outsource data entry, so hopped on to upwork and put a $200 budget on a job to input 100 images of all 320 (which is the list really), that are all different as well. This is important. I mean, I wouldn't do the job, it's mind numbing but hey, apparently people are keen! I engaged one dude who thought he could automate it, which I thought was cool. Good thinking. But then came back after doing about 300 images telling me he just couldn't do it. Not surprised, got a refund, no harm but bit of time wasted. Now I'm about to try and hire someone else for it. That's my next job for today in between work meetings. This should make the app function so much better, so for $200 it's 100% worth it.

Stats for the week though have been good. I'm close to, or past targets I set for Q1 so maybe I should set them higher next time









I have so many follow up emails to do as well for various things; cheese producers, cracker importer, a dude that does cheese youtube stuff and a couple of others. I wish work wasn't as busy at the moment haha

 

[randomshenans]

You need to see potential for marketing as well. Your sig has no free marketing

I do not know what you could possibly mean...

 

[randomshenans]

I'm so getting that removed, it's going to give everyone full on AIDS

 

[randomshenans]

It will get removed cos you not allowed moving images LOL. Quickly..

lol changed... used your thing... see if I did it correctly!

 

[randomshenans]

I've finally signed up to Instagram so you can add another follower to your list.

haha just saw this pop up! Thanks!


Thanks for sharing it too. It's a weird mix I'm looking for; I'd love someone young and hungry to learn, but also someone who has basics behind account keeping/forecasting/etc as well as someone who can look at things like gov grants, r&d credits, financing, fundraising and ideally between here and the US to look for ways we can get some cash in from that side, while making sure our models make sense from the start.

And be willing to do it for equity! So you know... haha

 

[randomshenans]

Ah sorry, meeting hell afternoon and evening! You're a legend matey they're wicked!

Screw it I did you some.

Feel free to post questions here as well, unfortunately I'm a tax advisor so management financials aren't really my strong point, but R&D credits are right up my street and that brings with it knowledge of grants as well.

Yes!! Thanks man! It's a huge world that and I know that a lot of stuff is available but it takes someone who knows it and how best to do it to really make the most of it. It just sends me in circles!

 

[randomshenans]

Welcome to March - With a seriously solid February, I have so many things going on at work it's properly stretching me but hey, I'm making progress. I'm starting to get the hump with the dev working though and might have to sack it off and go with someone else. My tie to him was "well he knows the stack and built this already, so..." but I'm not getting the communication I need, so need to address this.

Having said that I put that job online through linkedin for free and then added that and a CMO job on our website and thought I'd come back and deal with them all at some point. That point was last night. With over 100 applicants on linkedin for the CFO I was thinking, "OK, you haven't read I'm not paying you all for this" so went through all of them last night (jesus that's work) and shortlisted 25 that were "good" on paper. I'm looking for someone who can literally setup the basics, as well as forecasting, build processes as they're needed, has experience in fundraising so that they know what we need to look like to be attractive, understand how to setup both US and UK entities (US funding often requires a US entity), how to access lines of credit, and how to work with R&D grants (there are a lot of things you can do to get gov. grants which we could massively use). There are some great people on that shortlist, on paper at least. I thought none of them would realise it was part time / equity based but emailed them and 10 got back to me so far saying they know and that's fine with them. Bonus. I should have done this sooner, but at the same time probably wouldn't have been in the right position to be attractive enough too. Anyway, I've scheduled calls with 4 people next Tuesday morning. I also have a candidate for the CMO role who looks really really good. Will arrange a time to speak to her, too.

To top off the week, we've just hit our Q1 target of 500 users! Which is wicked. I will see if I can get to 550 by the end of this month though!


Now this weekend I need to sort out next week's cheesy content, and plan calls to these businesses I need to follow up with.

Phew. Those 500 were hard. That next 500 will be a different hard, and hopefully we can find out how to make it easier as we go! I'm optimistic and excited I have to say.

I thought I could just outsource data entry, so hopped on to upwork and put a $200 budget on a job to input 100 images of all 320 (which is the list really), that are all different as well. This is important. I mean, I wouldn't do the job, it's mind numbing but hey, apparently people are keen! I engaged one dude who thought he could automate it, which I thought was cool. Good thinking. But then came back after doing about 300 images telling me he just couldn't do it. Not surprised, got a refund, no harm but bit of time wasted. Now I'm about to try and hire someone else for it. That's my next job for today in between work meetings. This should make the app function so much better, so for $200 it's 100% worth it.

This is currently happening too. I have had about 2000 pics added so far, about 30k to go lol but hey, it's all happening.

 

[randomshenans]

Tell me more. I have messaged you in Trust to explain a little bit more about the process.

Balls, didn't see this dude! Let me check my spam folder!

@randomshenans . There's a new cheese magazine. No idea what it's like but popped up on my twitter...

https://www.thecheesemagazine.com/

Nice one man thank you! I'll check it out!

Nice quiet friday at work, running a couple of coaching workshops and a sprint review and that's about my day. Been catching up on a few cheese entries (adding pics, info etc. to the back end) and now need to get back to the people I interviewed this week. I interviewed 4 CFOs and 1 CMO and I loved 2 candidates. I really liked 3 but 2 of them I think would be amazing. There was Roshni for CFO who has worked at some super interesting places but loves helping startups. We got on really well, I really liked her and she didn't look at me like a moron when I said we have like nothing worked out finance wise haha
Mina on the CMO side is really very good. I'd say early 50s and has done a lot of interesting stuff and has been a CMO for a while now! Has worked across so many sectors and loves entrepreneurial companies and food spaces so this was something she'd love to do. I've set her a challenge (she asked for one tbf to demonstrate her abilities, so sure, I set one!) so see what she comes back with. Now to email Roshni and see if she wants to take this to proceed with all this!

Kind getting a bit serious.... :O


Also smashed past our 500 mark on users and climbing. Next stop 5k! That's my big aim, hopefully this year!!

 

[randomshenans]

We're into Q2 and so here is a good point to look at the start of this year and what's happened so far.

First, let's look at the pure stats as a start, I had targets to aim for on growth for social channels, so this is where we got:

Instagram:
Start of 2021 - 620
End Q1 - 875
Target - 850

Comments:
Instagram is a great channel for engagement and I think pictures lend itself well to this, so cheese pics help. I spent a lot of time testing strategies on this. I would make trips to the shops to get pics etc. or find ones online and write something about them and schedule these for the week on a Sunday. It would take me about 2-3hrs to do and I'd post about 2-3 per day. I recently have been putting more time per post (c.1hr), which is very hard to scale and do in one day for the week. Why longer? Engagement and education. I want to bring something to our audience that they find valuable, so have been looking into origins of cheeses, histories etc etc. which takes TIME! Either way, I have been doing fewer of them but they have been very well received and engagement on them is way up.

Facebook:
Start of 2021 - 1775
End of Q1 - 6243
Target - 10,000

Comments:
Facebook is a bit sack to be honest. We have some OK engagement, but you're not looking at anything like the engagement on any other channel. I paid to promote ads to get the audience. Not buying the audience, promoted posts to get them in, but the way FB works makes it hard to get really good engagement fast. You have to build it and it's a numbers game, or they want you to pay to promote to your audience. Either way, it's OK and the business suite means I can post from one place and it covers Insta and FB at once.

Linkedin:
Start of 2021 - 12
End of Q1 - 280
Target - 250

Comments:
If you don't do LinkedIn for your company, I would 100% recommend it. The engagement I get on posts compared to my audience size is WAY above any other channel out there. Not only that, as people are there for business it's led to a number of potential business deals and relationships because of it. It's been great and I auto post from FB > LI using Zapier. Bonus. This one has been a real winner for me.

Twitter:
Start of 2021 - 49
End of Q1 - 270
Target - 250

Comments:
This for me takes a whole different approach to any other platform/ channel out there and you need a whole different strategy for it. I haven't been using a different one, but to make the most of it you need to and you need to put the time into that. For me though, I'm unsure if the trade off of extra time vs. the value is there. This is tbc but needs more testing.

Website:
Start of 2021 - 12 monthly visitors
End of Q1 - 301
Target - 350

Comments:
This channel needs the most work from me in the next sprint. I need to make it better as a site and pull the cannels together in terms of consistency and value across the different "products". The website should be the first thing people see, but at the moment it's a bit sack, and doesn't have the same info on as the app and really doesn't provide much value. I need to work on this with urgency and has my priority in this next quarter.


App Users:
Start of 2021 - 313
End of Q1 - 556
Target - 500



Comments:
This is the big one right? The one we wanted to hit really. On top of everything, we need these numbers to hit that 5-10k mark. We started on 313 and it was a slog but we hit the 500 and are now sitting on 583 as of today. I'm super pleased but we need more and faster! This rate of growth is OK (c.20% MoM growth this year so far) but that'll take years to hit that target. What I need is to make the app better and understand how people are using it and use some data to pull all our channels together in one cohesive offering of value. More on this in next steps.

Company News:
Outside of our channels, we have completed the onboarding of 2 new people as of last week; Roshni our new CFO and Mina our new CMO. Both have HUGE experience in their fields and operate at these levels for companies at present. I'm just trying to ramp up some proper onboarding and getting them all setup so we can be affective together now. This is my challenge but I'm working on this and alignment and next steps for us all. Excited to get Roshni sorting all our finance stuff out and Mina has already done a lot when it comes to input on the marketing side.
So we're now getting a bit more "Official" with 4 people. For those interested, it's done on a equity basis and both will get 10% company shares, vested over a 3 year period.

Next Steps:

• Alignment of all channels, consistent offering and value across all
• email marketing - currently no emails are sent to users of the app, not even a welcome one. This needs to be brought inline, and encourage us to push value this way and measure.
• Dev - kick up the bum and get the main points hammered out in the next 2 weeks he has off work. I need this to be done asap now or I'll be getting another person.
• Work on the company; getting us 3 main folk chatting, in a rhythm and all bases covered across product/marketing and finance
• Hunt for a hands on CTO...

Spend to date this Q:

• $500 on sponsoring cheese awards in May
• $100 on promotion on facebook
• $300 on server costs
• $150 on data entry costs (cheese pics still being uploaded at present!)

Total: $1050


Just wanted to check in and update where we're at. It's useful for me more than anything as now I can create some tickets and work on my actual next steps and making them happen. Target for this Q? I think we should aim for 1k users... why not?

 

[randomshenans]

Followed on Instagram and downloaded the app but am on a diet so no cheese for me for a while

Thanks man, same as me at the moment but still sneak some cheese in Appreciate it though. Hopefully some decent big changes coming to it in the next couple of weeks to the user journey in the app.

I've just posted a job for a CTO on LinkedIn which has led to an influx of friggin offshore companies messaging me directly, offering me their services. Thanks for reading the job properly you muppets. I really need someone to push the development as it's the slowest part at the moment... then I might hire a "Head of cheese" if I can. Someone from industry, who works in pairings and cheeses, and seasonality and all that sort of stuff who can help us get all our pairings better and promote good content to marketing when it's relevant.

• Alignment of all channels, consistent offering and value across all

Started this with a nice Miro board on what we currently put on our website/app/social channels and what the user journey should look like and how we can better align value on these. Once I've had a session on this and planned out a bit more on what each should contain (for example, should we have on the website the ability to search for cheeses? But maybe the pairings are just shown on the app and we have a "see pairings by downloading the cheezus app", and do we have the social posts that I spend a lot of time on now shown on the app, or site as blog posts? Also, how does email to users fit it?) I will then do a mockup prototype on Adobe XD and plan out how to make it work and build it.

• email marketing - currently no emails are sent to users of the app, not even a welcome one. This needs to be brought inline, and encourage us to push value this way and measure.

I've started building out email templates and user journeys in mailchimp. For example, you sign up on the app and you don't get an email. That's kinda sucky. So, now you will (when it's pushed out ) get this email: http://eepurl.com/hvSa7L

Will build out more user flows and try and tie them together with the above as well. I mean, this is technically marketing **** that Mina should be doing but onboarding and getting people up to speed is taking a bit of time, so I'm cracking on tbh.

Close to 600 users now. Need these changes to make it all better and then a solid push to pass that 1k mark.

 

[randomshenans]

Just something to add, have you used Amazon Turk for tagging these images
https://www.mturk.com

Training AI by getting the initial parsing of data on images appears to be one of the jobs it caters for.

Thanks man, I'll add that to the backlog of something to look more into.

Glad to hear it's going so well man. I enjoyed reading the updates

Cheers man, it's exciting at the moment as well. Really enjoying it.


Had a great team meeting on Saturday morning. First one, which was nice. Chatted in general and then on top of aligning our product space, Roshni is going to meet with us this week and look at revenue streams and how best to monetize things and how to prioritize those parts. Mina is pulling together data and looking at the website and all functionality at the moment. We'll put together a better site in the next few weeks hopefully.

We now have all our userbase into mailchimp as well and everytime a user signs up on the app it'll add them to mailchimp so we can welcome them by email and help push some of our cheesey content via email too and hopefully pull people back into the app eventually. On top of this we've now had our product analytics SDK added to the app from Amplitude. This should help us understand what people are doing in the app to help us improve it. i.e. are people even using search? It's got loads of cheese in there, but does anyone use it? No idea. Hopefully find out soon.

I interviewed someone this morning for the Lead Developer/ CTO role. He completely fits the motivation side of things, as in, why he would want the role and where he is in life (I'd say early 30s wanting to push to that next level), but tech stack wise he'd need to learn some of our stuff. However, he's got the management side and does all the stuff I'd expect him to do in his current job. Going to invite him back end of the week to meet Mina and Roshni and see what they think too. Would be great for him to run things that way. I'd still utilise Ahmad like we have been, but would just mean I didn't have to think about stacks/technology and roadmaps from that side and can concentrate on the business/ product side.

Some GREAT stuff going around though, which is keeping my hyped. New release just pushed out, more new updates will be coming this week with some UI changes too for the app!

 

[randomshenans]

I am sure you've answered this before and obviously do not want to be negative, but is there really that much of a user base / audience for this idea?

For people who like and buy cheese?

The total market size for cheese is sitting around $75b for 2020 and expected to have a CAGR of about 6.8% which would see it hit about $105b by 2026. While that's the whole industry, the number of people who enjoy cheese to a point where you'd download an app about it is a lot higher than you think. Not to mention the rise in general cheese events in 2020 as well, obviously virtual, but a whole new market of online cheese tasting things as well. So yea, there are a few people.

 

[randomshenans]

Ha I know what you mean, but having lived the cheesy life this last couple of years in this space, it's way bigger than I thought and the demographic is changing too. (getting younger) as I'd had typically said it was older (35-55) with more disposable income etc. but it appears to be shifting lower in the age range.

Updates today:

Now that we have our audience in Mailchimp and automatically being added when a new user signs up, I wanted to address the lack of Welcome email that users got, so created a user journey in mailchimp and auto email when someone signs up:


I've also started putting together some blog stuff to be able to put on the site.
https://cheezus.co/spring-cheese-showcase-bucheron/

I think a good strategy for this is to have blogs with similar info to our current social post theme (interesting info about the cheeses, where they come from etc) and then have links at the bottom to "download the Cheezus app to find what pairs with this cheese and other cheeses like it" to steer people to the site. I think having the search on the site link to our cheese DB in the background would be useful, which could pull some information together, and any blog post content that shared similar tags to the cheese. I think that's my strategy anyway. Will need to be made to look nice and formatted all sexy like, but I might have to get someone else to do that bit

Only got a couple of weeks to make it happen so lets see how far I get!

Other things I've done is create a couple of JIRA projects, one is simply an idea dump. Not as qualified as a backlog, but just a brainstorm space, unformatted and dumped. Also a sales / lead project to help us when we talk to people add stuff into there to track.

Now the UI stuff for the app is being worked on. I think it's around the My Cheeses and the Tracking of cheese where I want the user journey to be different, so lets see how long this takes and get it all out and updated!

 

[randomshenans]

Hopefully some good news from our new potential CTO. He's got verbal confirmation that he can do this while working his other job, too. Just waiting for written confirmation and I'll set up a meeting with him and the rest of the team.

Remote developer sent stuff through on Sat morning, but I was busy Sat so I had to test it yesterday. Some things don't work as intended, like a dropdown box renders above the field and you cant see it for the most part. When you do select a cheese from the dropdown, the UI doesn't change to that cheese like it should. Also in the my cheese section it should show a pic of the cheese you corrected it to, and when click take you to that cheese. Now it takes you to the cheese it thought it was, which is no good. FFS. He's now ****** off back to the army and was like, can you pay me for this lot of work. I said you haven't delivered it. You delivered some, but it's not finished. It's not my problem he decided to do it the weekend before he goes back to the army. Now I have a partially complete features, but nothing I can release. I doubt he's committed the ******* code either.
I need this **** doing by the 7th May, which isn't looking likely and he's ****** off saying I should pay him and can't understand why I'm annoyed at his lack of communication and ****.

I mean... he's a cheap resource, but at what other ******* cost!? Arghhh I'm so glad to get Dan onboard. He's going to need to upskill to learn Ionic framework, but should enforce stuff like continuous integration, proper commits, documentation and things that are needed. He can manage the JIRA too sod it.

Kind frustrating really. Progress, but dealing with these things is highly annoying.

 

[randomshenans]

On the plus side, i took a picture of some chocolate and orange cheese for you yesterday. It was delicious!

haha so it was YOU! I saw that come in the back end as, funnily enough, a new cheese! I was like WTF is this?! Was it nice?

Another plus side, the app is genuinely learning...
https://www.instagram.com/p/COF5oCQoX1H/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

That was one take. It got all three cheeses no bother. Morbier I'm not surprised, it's pretty unique, but comte and cheddar can be a bit of a toughie as so many others look similar. I was pleased it's improved anyway!

 

[randomshenans]

Is this the email that actually goes out to people? If so, honestly dude I think it could do with a bit of spicing up!

There is more and I did the basics and it's now over to Mina who can tart it up and work on that stuff. I just got her started that's her job so you know haha

 

[randomshenans]

@randomshenans Just to say i got the Q1 updates email through so that's working nicely.

Nice one! I'm just trying to pull things together a bit more. I need to do some more work on the site homepage and make it so much better. I'll try and sort that out this weekend a bit.