This is a four-part story about building my own business and then closing it — an entire product and business lifecycle, told from an entrepreneur's and product manager's point of view. Each part covers a different set of milestones. This one covers ideation.
From itch to ideation
It's often said that every good product exists to solve someone's problem, or scratch someone's itch. This story is no different.
Around 2010 I had a good job. We lived in the house we'd built in a new community up north. My third son had just been born. Everything was fine — nothing to complain about. And yet something was missing, and I couldn't put my finger on what.
After months of coming home in the evenings and spending time with my wife and kids, the feeling hadn't shifted. So I looked around at my social surroundings, and there it was. Because we lived in a new community neighbourhood, I noticed that the women had their own monthly night: they gathered at someone's house with refreshments and simply had an evening out to unwind and bond.
I knew immediately what was missing. My own men's group, near home, with minimum fuss. And what do you need for a men's night? Meat and alcohol.
So the concept of Carnivore Nights was born.
It grew on its own
I reached out to the men in the neighbourhood and scheduled the first gathering. Eleven showed up. We enjoyed it, so we scheduled another for the following month, and around twenty came. Gathering by gathering the momentum built, until we were at forty to fifty participants.
It was entirely non-profit, social, and exclusive to men in our small community.
We started with charcoal grills only. Then I brought a meat smoker back from a business trip to the US. In Israel in 2010 this was a barely-known gadget, and the audience loved it. I had stumbled onto something intuitively, while merely trying to scratch my own itch.
Word spread to nearby communities and I started fielding phone calls from enthusiastic strangers. At first I turned everyone down. Then, after talking it through with my wife and closest friends, the ideation happened: I decided to open the first home food-entertainment business of its kind for Carnivore Nights.
This had never been done. I was opening a blue ocean.
The blueprint
Since I was in uncharted territory, I had to write the blueprint myself. I did it by asking questions.
What do I actually want? To make people enjoy themselves and unwind before the weekend. To get them to loosen up and have as much fun as I'd had with my own group. And to educate them about the different cuts of an animal.
What will make people read my ads? A name that captures the essence of the event. I landed on a Hebrew wordplay — Meat & Eat — with a wink in it.
How do I make this high value-for-money, so I earn a reputation, returning customers, and word-of-mouth brand awareness? Everything below, delivering an experience they'd never had.
- Expand the total addressable market: open to every adult, not only men, not only from our community
- Informal seating on garden furniture
- High-end meat only — beef, lamb, poultry. No salads. No side dishes
- Eat with your hands, for the primal experience
- BYOB, aside from cold water, my own spiced tea, and one of my wife's desserts
- Capped at forty participants
- Starts at 21:00, with no end time — it ends when it ends, usually three or four hours
- Paleo-friendly: I made every rub, sauce and glaze from scratch, with no processed sugar, nitrites, or artificial ingredients
- Public education about what's now called nose-to-tail. Every evening included at least ten different cuts and courses from various animals, because there is far more to an animal than the holy trinity of ribeye, sirloin and tenderloin
With the blueprint and the ideation done, it was time for discovery.