Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

Bagel Dreams: From Idea to $600k Funding!

12 May 2026 · 1 min

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0:53

In this first-person narrative, the speaker explains how they raised approximately $600,000 to open a bagel shop. They offered promissory notes with about 10% interest to their email list, securing loans from friends and even strangers. To convince potential backers, they baked a few dozen bagels, delivered them along with cream cheese to prospects’ homes, and after tasting, many wrote checks ranging from $5,000 to $10,000. The account highlights a grassroots, personal-sales approach to fundraising for a small food‑service venture.

Chapters

So it needs a whole shop. And I'm like, all right, this is going to cost me about $600,000 to do that out here. Wow. And so I started raising money. I said I, I was offering promissory notes, uh, and so I put that out to my email list. And I had a number of— there were, there were, there were definitely friends who decided to lend me money. I said I'll pay you, I think it was 10% interest, um, if you loan me money. to do this. And I also got people who I didn't know at all who wrote to me. They're like, oh, we're interested. So I would show up, I would actually bake— I'd bake like a couple dozen bagels, and I'd go over, I'd show up at their house, and I'd throw down a bag of bagels and a tub of cream cheese. And they hadn't even had the bagels yet, they just had heard about me. They taste the bagels, they'd say, these are amazing, and they'd write me a check for $5,000 or $10,000.