HelloFresh ran 650 experiments to find product-market fit, discovering their core customers were older, settled women rather than young urbanites. They did field sales in Pittsburgh and used those learnings to expand across 17 countries.
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But, you know, to kind of go back to HelloFresh though, because that's of course, you know, something that many of us have heard of and probably also used, you know, what would you say some of the biggest kind of learnings, you know, from your journey at HelloFresh that you've kind of taken with you to Bridebook were?
Yeah, so there's 2 great, great sort of stories really from it, which are really useful. One is just like perseverance. I'm sure everyone on this call Running your own company is pretty brutal and exhausting. HelloFresh was incredibly challenging. We were doing a $70 a week subscription that hadn't been launched before and were posting you raw food, which is a very like hard challenge. Just didn't really exist. There was FreshDirect in New York, but nothing really else. That was grocery delivery. This wasn't being shipped to you. So trying to find product market fit, trying to find the customer base was exhausting. Something I led on, very focused on marketing. And that perseverance of, in our first year, we did 650 partnerships with HelloFresh. We tested every single possibility you could ever imagine saying, right, is it here? Is it there? And 95% failed. So anyone sane would give up. But I think probably people on this call and something I hope I'm pretty strong at is just that perseverance of finishing something exhausting like that and being like, brilliant. I'm the most stubborn person on the planet. I know what 5% works now and everyone else will have given up on the journey. And knowing that, was the crux of what allowed HelloFresh to really scale. We had launched in Manhattan, and this is the sort of the second part of what I was going to mention is good recording, and everyone will be doing this, but like recording as much data as you possibly can and the really sort of more sort of spurious data points early on, just record as much as you possibly can. We've enormously taken that into private. So even with HelloFresh, just give you a taste. We were giving out, I'm sure loads of you've been given HelloFresh gift cards. Those were in batches of 500 and we were giving them out on the street and we'd be recording, you know, what was the weather like? What was the time of day? What was the position in Manhattan? Then it'd be going into magazines. We were measuring, is it landscape? Is it portrait? Has it got a vegetarian meal or a carnivorous meal, a meat dish on it? Was it a dollar discount or a percentage discount or a free meal discount? All of that. And at that early stage, you're like, this just is immaterial. Like, how am I supposed to judge it in such a small sample size? Once you get up to that larger scale, that taught us really quickly, or quite quickly, we're in the wrong city. We're in Manhattan. The best audience for us is or was at this earlier stage, you know, a much broader company. But like the early stage is like, we need to find 41-year-olds, generally female audience with a settled lifestyle. And that taught us from being in magazines and knowing the right audiences, you wanna be in a car-centric city 'cause that means going grocery shopping's a real threat. If you're a bit older, you have a more settled life. If you've got kids, It's really settled. If you've got a dog, it's settled as well. And actually, some of you would have known one of our competitors at the time called Blue Apron. And we're there feeling really threatened, like, shit, they were doing— sorry, sorry— they were doing like great brand marketing and cooking with cactus, I remember, and doing celebrity chef partnerships. And we were there sort of not zooming in on that audience and not that Manhattanite audience. And actually had found, I think through our data, this is now 8, 9 years ago, that repeat customer, the base that was gonna build HelloFresh is in Pittsburgh. I remember going and doing field sales in Pittsburgh in the freezing cold, going off to all sorts of, you know, strange parts of— I mean, I wouldn't call them strange parts, but bits I didn't think I'd ever go to. We went all over the place. And discovered that's where like that like amazing retained customer was. But all of that then taught us like, right, it's go time. This works. Let's get into the Midwest. Let's get to the West Coast. Let's get all over America. And now HelloFresh is in 17 countries around the world. It's most recently North Japan. And yeah.
