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Why Could Food by People Not Make Money on a Cookie Order?

Bernard Huang says the unit economics at Food by People, his marketplace for home-baked goods, never worked. A ten percent fee on a $24 order for a dozen cookies was about $4.80. He calculated that the company would need on the order of 200 of those orders a month just to make $1,000, and a buyer often did not return. Big catering orders were a different shape. The middle of the book is where he says they got hurt. He did not fully see the model while he was inside it. What he sees now is that a small cut of a small basket could not carry the company, no matter how many home bakers listed cookies.

Transcript

How +3 failures led to a $150k/month SaaS, with Bernard Huang of Clearscope ·

The Failory Podcast

More from this episode

  1. Who Is Bernard Huang, Cofounder of Clearscope?Bernard Huang is the cofounder of Clearscope. On The Failory Podcast he introduces himself through the failures, not the product.
  2. How Did Bernard Huang Make $120,000 Playing Online Poker?Bernard Huang started playing in college, in the years after Chris Moneymaker won the 2004 World Series of Poker from a small PokerStars satellite.
  3. How Did Bernard Huang Buy a Foreclosed Dickey's Barbecue Pit?Friends asked Bernard Huang, then at the University of Texas in Austin, to take over a foreclosed Dickey's Barbecue Pit.
  4. Why Did Bernard Huang's Dickey's Franchise Fail?Bernard Huang says poker had warped his picture of money. He thought buying a franchise was like financing a McDonald's and that the cash would start arriving.
  5. Why Did You Stop Playing PokerWhen and why did you decide to stop playing it? Weren't you making great amounts of money?
  6. What Were the Beginnings of MosecMosec was a phone-based CRM focused on call tracking and notifications. Bernard co-founded it in 2011.
  7. What Made You Become a FounderWere there any clicks that made you realize you wanted to run a business on your own?
  8. How Many Times Did Bernard Huang's Mosec Change Its Product?Bernard Huang says Mosec changed its idea about every other week. The team came into Betaspring with an education startup.
  9. Why Did Bernard Huang Shut Mosec Down If Customers Liked It?Bernard Huang says Mosec was not killed by angry customers. People told the team they loved the product.
  10. What Led Bernard to Become Founder at Food by PeopleBernard shares about the beginnings of Food By People, a marketplace for home-baked goods that leveraged the Cottage Food laws passed by the US government.
  11. How Did Food by People End Up Raising Only $87?Food by People raised $87, and Bernard Huang is clear that it was not millions. Maciej Ceglowski, founder of Pinboard, was satirizing venture capital.
  12. Getting Hired by a Y-Combinator StartupAfter his startup, Food by People, was closed, Bernard moved to San Francisco and he joined 42 Floors, a Y-Combinator backed startup, as a growth hacker.
  13. Why Bernard Leave 42floors42Floors was acquired by Knotel in July 2018. He left the startup in Feb 2015 to co-found Mushi along to his Food by People co-founder.
  14. What Was Game Runners and Why It FailedGame Runners was a League of Legends coaching service helping players learn the best new strategies fastest.
  15. How Did Bernard Huang's Mushi Labs Get Its First SEO Clients?Mushi Labs began when Game Runners, Bernard Huang's previous project, was running out of cash and a company emailed asking for search help.
  16. What Is ClearscopeWhen running Mushi Labs, Bernard and his co-founder began working on a SEO & content tool called Clearscope. Here he shares what is it about.
  17. Why Does Bernard Huang Say the SEO Industry Is Full of Misinformation?Bernard Huang, cofounder of Clearscope, says SEO collects bad information because Google has never plainly explained how ranking works.
  18. What Would Bernard Huang Tell Himself After Mosec and Food by People?Bernard Huang would tell his 2013 self, the one just past Mosec and Food by People, to take better care of himself.

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