Part 3 - How A Perfect Match In Business Led To An Unbelievable Startup

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Welcome to this edition of the million dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Now how did you go from okay, I rated this thing and it's kind of emerged. At what point did you say this out loud to somebody else? This chef thing could be good.

So I made a friend at my work back then and I told her I think life is too short. This job kind of sucks. We need to go do something else. And I have that job.

Wait a minute, you're making a lot of money. You're your own boss. You go in there and this job kind of sucks. You're hard to please.

Yeah, I think I was sort of a first world problem, I'd admit. But I think at some. Yeah, I think in different points in life you need different things. And I really wanted to build a company and I wanted to build a very big company. So at that point that job really wasn't cutting edge. And this friend actually turned around and said, oh, I love this idea. There could be something really big that happens. She was my friend, also PR and then ended up being my co founder. Her name's Heinen.

Yeah. And so it's amazing how empowering it can be. I heard a long time ago that fortunately I heard it early in my career that most revolutions, you know, if you're going to build a business or a company, you're going to start a revolution, you know, it's one way of looking at it. And I heard early on, fortunately that most revolutions are run with very few people at the core. You know, it's not managing thousands and thousands of people every day and you have a, you know, it's kind of quiet at the core. It's like a nuclear reactor, you know, it's very quiet at the core and then it spreads out, you know, so it's really empower. Talk about how empowering it is to find that first E person and how it changes your everyday really. Because you wake up, you get an idea. Now you can mount the idea off of them and they can, you know, you, you know, it's can kind of create magic and keep the percolation going. Talk about how that changed things for you.

So before Heinen, it was just me and a bunch of my ideas and I didn't know if I could do it and I think there was a lot of self doubt and I also imagined myself just thinking, I think I Had assumed a lot more worst case scenarios and I think I just kind of didn't want to do it myself. So I just thought, ah, whatever. But the moment I found the first person or like I obviously spoke to a few other people, but Heinen and her energy, the moment I just saw him, she saw a world with me that didn't yet exist. And it's as though we were peeking into the future. We could just see what life would look like for people who have birthdays or hire Airbnbs and can just have this amazing service as easy as ordering Uber. And she shared that enthusiasm with me. It was everything. So I feel like that was, it was special. It turned me from a sad little person with the idea who wanted to escape to someone who was super bullish and ready to do it.

Say that again. Say that again. That needs to be said. A sad little person. Start with a sad little person.

It turned me from a sad little person with a little idea to someone who was confident, ready and very bullish to take on this, to take on the world actually.

Yeah, like Tom Petty. I don't know if you know Tom Petty, but he's gone now. But he had a long career in music and my brother worked for him for 40 years. And he said that when they got started, when they got this one drummer, Stan lynch, he said, once we got Stan standing behind me on all the performances on that drum kit, he said, I felt like we could go conquer the world. I felt like I had a jet engine at my back, you know, like nobody's going to mess with us. We got Stan back there on the drums and shout out to Stan lynch, by the way. And anyway, the, the, the one per. The energy is one way of telling if you've got the right person working with you in your core is do they bring energy? Do they create energy with you? Do they like, you know, charge you up, you know, with the. And that comes from not this, their personality or just. But like ideas and enthusiasm and you could, you know, they, they make you better because they're provoking you to greatness and they inspire you with ideas they have and how they see it. But if you don't have that person, probably need to get rid of them, you know, or you not count on them to be the core, you know, have them around. But that's probably the key indicator that this is a person who's going to be in the core, don't you think?

I completely agree. You can't. Couldn't have said it any better. I think With Heinen, we weren't two, we weren't one plus one is equal to two. It was exponential. I think I just felt we together were 10 and it was incredible. It is incredible.

Yeah. You look for that and it's not. I'll tell you where you look for that. You know, you like Berkshire Hathaway with Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger and you know, they had a decades long relationship like that to created magic there. And so that's one of the things where Charlie Munger used to say that a lot of people work hard, a lot of them have, you know, a great idea. But he said the missing thing is every, you know, the, the successful people also have good fortune. And I think a big part of the good fortune is stumbling across the right person to work with you. You know, I just think, you know, of all the advantages you could have, that's hard to replicate, you know. So as you, you went forward now, how did you go from that point to where you started to get. What was your battle plan? You started to line up chefs. You started. When did you have your first sale?

Quote, unquote, almost very quickly when we met because we decided demand is always more difficult than supply. So aka, if someone needs to give you money, you need to get them to part with their money and that's going to be the hardest. So we just sort of went out there to all the peers, which mean you could afford this because we worked in that environment and, and we very quickly created sort of a PDF, wrote down a bunch of dishes because we knew we didn't have to have a fancy website. We actually didn't even have a chef. And at that point we sent this PDF of dishes to our colleagues and we said we would allow you, like we would love, if you book a private chef at cost and if you're interested, place an order and a couple of them did and then they paid for it. So actually that was our first sale. And then when we had this first sale, which was very quickly after both of us decided to work on this idea, we realized we had to go find a chef.

Yeah.

And so was that hard, honestly, finding the initial chef? No, because that was always going to be the easy part. There are always going to be people who want to earn money, but people parting with money is harder. So I think initially that bit was fine. I would say the hardest bit was after the initial test with peers, finding the first person we didn't know who would book the service. Like, how do you do that? That is crazy.

How do you do that now is that a referral? Now you do that from referrals. Because that's usually the best way to do.

Is the best way to do it. I think back then, either we weren't that sophisticated or because dinner parties, you.

Know, let me make a point, let me make a point there. And that is that entrepreneurs need to realize you're going to have to sell and you're going to have to understand the sell thing, read sales books, because realize you stay in business in sales. If you can get referrals, if you can't get referrals, you can't do a good enough job where people feel good enough about you. And then you ask for the referral, you're not going to have anybody else to go to the next time. And so as you where you ran into that was a lack of knowledge about the sales process and that how important referrals could be for you. You know, you can always cold call or run ads, but that's more expensive, less return than word of mouth. So go ahead and talk. How did you expand into that, your client base?

It's actually so interesting because now we know about referrals. I just think, oh, great, 60% of our business is word of mouth. But now that you asked me about their beginning point, it never even crossed our minds. And I think at that point we just saw right now we have a website. How do we make this live somewhere? And then we just waited and we kind of were like, okay, let's bump into some people, tell them about this idea. It really was very ad hoc. I remember, like Inquiry coming through this, like, platform and it was like quite random, but it might have been like, we really don't know the source. It just kind of was. We didn't even run Google Ads and that person actually said they wanted a chef and they parted with our money and we like fell off our chair. We were like, oh, my God, we've done it. We've found an unsuspecting stranger to come buy something from us. This is so cool. So I think it was very random, however, for his booking. Then the next day we woke up. The person all over Instagram, turns out, was an influencer and had eight other friends. So suddenly the next day, we saw eight people on like Instagram using this and talking about their amazing Bachelorette and the chef. And I obviously thought I was going to build a billion dollar company in like a year because it was so insane. And I thought every booking was going to be like that. I'll tell you that's not how things go. But yeah, that was the first booking, I think it happened and it was very cool. We realized they. That's what unlocked actually a second word of mouth for us. Cause we realized influencers will be really big. When people watch something on social media, they have the proof and they trust the person they will come inquire on. Why hangry? So after that we got a couple more bookings on the back of that, which was very cool.

Now how did you develop your network of chefs and how many did you have on board by the time you went on the Dragons? Whatever it is.

Dragon Sen. Dragon was right after Covid and it only aired after Covid lifted. So actually back then we didn't have that many. So currently we work with over a thousand. But before Dragon's Den it was, I'd say like 60, 50, 60 chefs. Maybe 30. 30, 40.

And so you have how many now?

We have close to a thousand chefs.

I mean you're like uber. I mean you're like Airbnb now. I mean, you know. Is that all in the uk?

Yes, currently all of the chefs are in the uk.

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I mean, I would imagine you're pretty much cover the UK now, is that right?

So we cover all across uk. That is right. I think so. Initially.

Who would, who would think there's that much demand for or well, wait a minute, we didn't say they're cooking English food, we said they're cooking.

Correct.

I was going to say who would say there's that much demand for English food?

But anyway, it's very funny you say that though because when we started, I am a immigrant Asian. My co founder is Chinese German. We didn't have any English food on the menu because we didn't know any. It was just Indian, Chinese, Thai, Japanese. Forgot about British entirely.

You're probably not going to bring in a private chef or shepherd's pie or fish and chips.

You will be surprised how people love to have some Sunday roasts. But yes, I think relatively speaking, people do like to book more sophisticated cuisines and not British.

So how fast did that expand around? How much of an issue was for that? What stumbles did you make as you expanded around the country and those long distance bookings?

I mean, what I'll say is like, oh, God. Getting chefs has been like a whole learning process in itself. And we went from thousand chefs is.

A lot to keep up with, you know, quality control and, you know, you got people going and coming all over the place.

Yep. So now things seem a lot more calmer because we've learned our lessons. But back when we started, I remember we used to, like, we had this hypothesis that if a chef is really good, they can do every single cuisine, because why not? It's just as easy as throwing some things together. Yeah. Like, it's not bad. And then we had a cooking. We had a booking where. Not a cooking, a booking where we sent a chef and that chef. And it was like the wor. We had the worst review ever. And turns out the chef does more healthy meal prep, nutritious food. And this customer wanted traditional Indian. And it went so horribly. And I just remember thinking, I really want to die. Like, I don't want to be on this phone call. Like, I am so scared, is the customer going to come through this phone call? And like, what. What is going to happen to me? And the funny thing is, I survived. I realized that not all chefs can do every single cuisine. And then off we went, tagging every single chef that we hired with the cuisines that they were really good at. And I think that was like, one failure. But we've had so many of these, like, failures while, like, getting chefs, for example. At some point, I thought every single chef should cook for me. And that's how I'll tell that a chef is really good. It sounds. It sounds sensible. However, I started doing this thing where I would have some random ingredients in my fridge. I'll tell them sort of, hey, like, why don't you put something together because you're a chef, like, it'll work. And it was a disaster. Like, sometimes chef didn't show up, and I was just left with all these ingredients in my fridge. And I was so unhappy. I just thought, God damn it, I just wanted a chef to trial. So my kitchen, like, some food was left over for me. And that's when I realized that Model doesn't make sense because I am again, trialing chefs based on some random ingredients. And I. And like, our process of screening wasn't that great. I just assumed if they come to my kitchen and cook, they're going to be amazing. But I forgot the initial screening. Like, are you a human being? Are you sensible?

Are you? Yeah.

And it was really scary because one check once turned up to my co founder's place and then demanded to be paid for the Uber. And my co founder said, no, that's not how it works. And then they went to her really weird, where they got really upset that the pots and pans weren't correct. And after that day, we just thought, right, okay, this is really weird. We need to actually have a very strong process where we check their cv, we actually speak to them about their experience, because the goal is to have professionally vetted chefs on this platform. And I think after making a bunch of that faux pas, we realized, cool. Now we do a video call, we go through their resume cv, we talk to them about their dishes, where have they cooked, what do they make? And after you speak to someone in depth, you really start to realize which are the ones that are not suited for the platform and which ones are good or they're going to do a great job. So our screening process is really tightened up and I think it took us about sort of two years to scale from like 20, 30 chefs to like thousand plus now. But we've gotten to a point where, like, the cycle is working, where we get chef applications rather than us going out to chefs, you know. But it's nice. Yeah, yeah.

And so have you found talk about your, your growth, your growth chart? How, how, how has that accelerated? What did you use the money for that you raised on? Are you a good investment? Were you a good investment for those two Dragons?

So we actually did not accept the money on Dragons Den because the rates aren't very commercial. You can actually go out there in the market and raise a better amount. So we did accept on tv, but then we decided that we weren't going to go ahead with it. We did raise around $3 million afterwards. So in two tranches. One was from Angels and then one was Combinator, which was. Which is like a startup, which is a startup accelerator in US in Silicon Valley. So we are definitely a great investment and we have half of that money still left. And what we have deployed that money on is building product. So making sure that the website is super easy to use. If you land on it, you can find all the Chefs near you. You can chat to chefs. You can actually customize the menu. You can say, hey, it's my birthday, like my 50th. I have 20 guests. Some of them are gluten free, whatever this looks like. So this platform is really beautiful and slick. That was the core of it. Marketing is a big piece. And I think, although we started a lot of referrals and it takes time to build word of mouth, where if someone tells their friend they might have a birthday in the next three to four months, it's not as immediate. It's like Airbnb, where people use it like maybe once or twice a year. So I think obviously marketing, like finding what are those core channels that will give us a steady stream of customers on the demand side. And then I think it's just people so, like hiring for customer service and operations internally.

We are the size now that. Have you. Have you got the United States expansion on your horizon?

It indeed is on the horizon. Yeah, yeah.

You know, you're the size now that you can approach the Airbnb people or the vacation rental people, and there's only like a million of those kind of companies around the world and tie in with them. It seems like it'd be a domino effect once you, you know, start getting that those associations going. You don't have to just add chefs now or add bookings. You can add, you know, rental agencies and. Absolutely, that's a great idea. I'd like to get a percentage of the profits from that.

I love it. You know, like, owning equity is the dream. I love that you asked. I will keep you in blue.

You know, the thing is, with your great training and writing code for AI, you can just write a program and AI will teach itself how to improve your program and do the expansion. You'll be self learning.

Self learning? Only if I finish that course back in university. But that's okay. Things are easier now.

Well, you could hire somebody to write code for you now.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, they're. They're like chefs. They're a dime a dozen. You know, in fact, I read a article this week in New York, I mean, in the Wall Street Journal that computer scientists graduates are having trouble finding jobs. So, you know, there you go.

That is wild. Yeah. Cool.

It is. It is wild. You know, so you think of all the jobs that. That there'd be be plentiful out there, but so it just shows you can't predict. You have to think on your feet. And so anyway, I'm not going to keep you any any longer. We'll. We'll save some stuff for your next once you get into the United States and expand to all the continents.

Absolutely. US Is definitely next on our agenda.

Well, do. Do you think you'd ever have the guts to expand into India?

I love the way this question is phrased.

Yeah.

Someone just asked me this today, and honestly, I kind of had to, like, take a little bit of a second and I looked at them and I just said, first us. And the reason is, like, you know how Larry, I spoke about invisible rules and, like, just like, kind of go. I just think India is this wild market and, like, there are no rules and. Yeah. And I think I grew up in it. It's an awesome country, but it scares me a little bit. And I feel like we will have an easier time expanding in US And I feel like I don't know how. Well, companies do really like going into that world, and you really have to understand that market well. So in future, yes, it is a big opportunity, but I think there are other demographics where people will be easier to. Yeah. Make customers off.

My recommendation for you is you keep getting bigger and bigger and let your management team expand. And then once you have someone on board who's proven. Who develops this insane desire to take your company into India, you say, go get it.

I love it. That's so true. Yeah, I like it. Mary. Yes.

Yeah, send somebody else, you know.

Okay. I like that. Yes. I think that is a great strategy. Yeah.

Yeah. So anyway, I. I'm proud of you. I'm excited about what you're doing, and I'm looking forward to expanding to the United States. And so I can book one of these private chefs.

Yes. It's going to be awesome. Very cost effective and delicious, and you're not going to gain, like your friend back there in Florida did by hiring a chef for a month. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me.

Yes. And I'm going to. I always let my guests have the final word, and we like to. We like to have a little bit of a extra benefit for the people who stayed with us all the way through. So what would you say? Pass on to the people that, you know, are impressed by what you've done, are inspired by it, and would like to do something similar.

What I'd love to say is you really get one life. And you should just think, if today was your last day, would you be content that you went out there and tried and, like, took the shots?

Yeah.

And if you can say yes, that's great. But if it's a no. You should just go out there and try to do the stuff that really scares you because there is an equal probability of it succeeding than it is of failing. And people dwell a lot on the failures. But you. But there's so much success to be had if you just, like, take that leap and you believe it can happen. So go out there and do it if you feel you need to.

And I would say what I, I would add, from what I'm seeing with your story, is that you did it not passively. You did it actively. Even when you didn't have an idea. All you had was this desire, this churning inside, like, this job, I've got to do more. But you didn't wait for it to come to you like you waited for your first clients. You. Otherwise you'd have never had the idea. You know, you had a paddle at 100 ideas. Then you took another step that I'd like to point out that you, you found a rating system. You didn't, you know, know how to rate it or something, but you saw a rating system that'll work close enough, and that allowed you to evaluate what you had and, you know, to get a factual reason for, for moving forward. And so take charge, you know, be, be aggressive. Come up, come up with some ideas. You know, if you want to do something, do something and go with what you've got. You know, follow your instincts, but keep moving forward. And it's just amazing what you've been able to do. And a thousand chefs, you're on your way. I look forward to seeing you in the United States. This has been so much city. Goodbye.

Thanks so much, Larry. Bye Bye.

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