The Cheezus Thread - A Startup Journey

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

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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?
 
Megahurtz400 said:
Followed on Instagram and downloaded the app but am on a diet so no cheese for me for a while :p
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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.

randomshenans said:
  • Alignment of all channels, consistent offering and value across all
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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.

randomshenans said:
  • 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.
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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.
 
Zirax said:
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.
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Thanks man, I'll add that to the backlog of something to look more into.

dirtychinchilla said:
Glad to hear it's going so well man. I enjoyed reading the updates
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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!
 
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?

I'm trying to think of someone I may know that
 
fatbatman said:
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?
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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 said:
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.
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I mean there's people who buy cheese to put on a sandwich and people who buy cheese as a delicacy, with crackers, grapes, apple, chutney etc.

My friend / work group for example, most of them early 30s, I don't really know anyone that eats cheese as a delicacy. I do eat cheese this way though!

I always assumed it was older people that eat fancy cheeses haha.
 
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:
q2JRIBg.png

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 :P

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!
 
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 :P sod it.

Kind frustrating really. Progress, but dealing with these things is highly annoying.
 
Martynt74 said:
On the plus side, i took a picture of some chocolate and orange cheese for you yesterday. It was delicious!
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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!
 
Bit of random feedback having just read thread.

Even having read through this, I don't really have a picture of what this app is and what it adds to my 'cheese eating experience'.

I looked up the app on the Play Store and the 'About this app' is extremely minimal.

"The vivino of cheese - helping you learn about cheese and it's pairings"

As someone who has no idea what Vivino is (guessing wine related but I don't really drink wine so no idea what Vivino is or does for wine), I still don't have much of an idea what this app is, what it does, how or why it's going to help me.

If I just stumble on this, i'm probably not going to install it because there isn't much there to help me 'get' the point of this app.

The screenshots give a hint but it's only a hint (plus they're blurry/squashed and have the status bar at the top with times and battery percentages etc. which looks lazy and implies to me the app may be lazily and poorly constructed)
 
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