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Cardoona
Cardoona is an online platform that allows restaurants to compare prices on food suppliers and place orders directly through our site. This helps restaurants save money - by providing the cost, quality and service information on food suppliers - and time by allowing them to place orders online through a single platform, rather than having to call multiple suppliers.
Lessons Learned
Throughout this challenge, we have learned many things about our business, our customers, our team, and about what it takes to start a successful company. Thanks to the Challenge and our commitment to Lean disciplines, we have changed our product from solving a vitamin problem, to solving a morphine pain. We have moved from a watered-downed market to a new and vibrant opportunity. We have grown from two guys with a couple of good ideas, to a company that is starting to find our path as a profitable, repeatable and scalable business. Below are the top things we learned along the way:
Getting out of the building is absolutely necessary:
If we didn’t get out of the building and talk to potential customers, we would have spent months, if not years, of our lives building a solution to a problem that few customers are looking to solve, and which they hardly have time to use even if they wanted to. If we didn’t continue to get out of the building even after our first round of interviews, we would have got the problem right, but would have still built a product that didn’t truly solve it. No matter how big we get, no matter how many interviews we’ve done, we always need to talk to our customers!
Both qualitative and quantitative data are necessary to truly learn:
At the start of the Challenge, one of the Lean Startup coordinators told us that “quantitative information tells you ‘What’ and qualitative information tells you ‘Why’”. Having gotten out of the building to gain qualitative feedback, and having built several MVPs for quantitative feedback, we can now say that both are necessary. Though we may have pivoted from GastroHubs without quantitative feedback, we wouldn’t have known just how much bigger of a problem supplier relations is. We ended up getting 12x the amount of customer signups on our site after we pivoted, using the exact same marketing campaigns. 12x more customers is a huge “What” that we would have missed if we hadn’t built an MVP, in addition to customer interviews.
The customer development process works:
We made a decision at the start of the challenge to follow the Startup Owner’s Manual precisely. Our reasoning for this was that if we didn’t, then we couldn’t truly say whether the customer development process worked or not. We are happy to say that we made the right decision. Although we had been working on GastroHubs, our original idea, for several months, it was not until we took the full plunge into building a lean startup through customer development that we were able to accomplish what we have during this challenge. We accomplished infinitely more in the two months of this challenge, than we did in the previous four months when we were not truly lean.
Quit your day job:
When we began the Challenge, there were five of us on the team – two full-time and three part-time. It didn’t take us long before we recognized that in order to be a true lean startup, we needed to have the three part-time team members step back into an advisory role because the two full-time members were moving too fast for the others to keep up. Most of the time, when a task was delegated to a part-time team member, we would be moving in a completely different direction in which the task became unnecessary – sometimes even as early as the same day. If you are to be truly lean, it’s full-time or get left behind.
Regardless of whether Cardoona makes it into the final four companies, by following lean principles and growing as a company through the Lean Startup Challenge, we are now on the path to creating a great company – and we have the challenge to thank for that.
- Cardoona Team
