This is part three of a four-part story about building my own business and then closing it. This part covers the lifecycle after MVP.
Product management doesn't end with the MVP. The product always has to evolve, and the PM has to stay attentive to three things at once: customers, the business, and the market.
Attentive to the business: find where you're bleeding, then stop it
After a few events I noticed I was losing potential income every single time. Why? People registered and then simply ghosted. So I didn't earn what I'd expected — and worse, other customers couldn't join, because registration had been full for weeks.
The first thing I changed was the registration process. I introduced a cancellation policy and started taking credit cards as a deposit.
This needed an unorthodox solution, because it had never been done in the restaurant business before. I wasn't a restaurant, but that was the closest comparable. Once it was in place, ghosting was eliminated entirely — even though customers still paid in cash at the start of the event.
Attentive to customers: payment
As more requests came in for card payment, I made it an option, and it quickly became the default. Customers could in theory leave their wallets at home, having already paid, and just relax.
Attentive to customers: education
During these evenings attendees would come over to the pit-master's post — mine — and start asking how to smoke one cut or another. As that grew, I realised there was a market for a practical, hands-on workshop for beginners. So I launched one, which added a second product to the portfolio.
Attentive to the market: bring a professional technique home
Around 2014 to 2015, while researching the professional culinary world, I came across a technique common in high-end restaurants but almost unknown in home kitchens: sous-vide.
I taught myself, brought a couple of immersion circulators back from the US, and started experimenting. Once I felt I had a real handle on it, I introduced it to my Facebook group, to Carnivore Nights, and to my workshops.
It took time and a great deal of explaining. But another trend for Israeli home cooks was on its way to becoming what it is today.
A third revenue stream, and an operations lesson
Somewhere in there I joined the monthly Paleo market, where people could buy my smoked meat to eat on the spot or take home. New revenue stream, new channel, new brand awareness.
It also meant an entirely new operation, because now waiting time was everything.
At the first market my queue hit a forty-five minute wait. Insane. I had arrived completely unprepared in terms of staff — just me and two eighteen-year-olds — for the number of people there.
So I grew the team and added equipment to cut the wait down. The most effective addition was my own trailer-based smoker, manufactured to my design. It created a genuine wow factor: people came over to talk to me and then joined the queue, and it held ten times the meat I could previously sell at a market. Eventually I had seven people working for me, from sous-chefs to bus-boy, and the queue moved. Revenue went up sharply.
It was a hit.