Ep 35 - the real 0 → 1 - with yogurt disruptor Kiki (Sour Milk founder)

But then yogurt, so okay, you are like living together great, like proximity to each other already really great.

So I can imagine you're just talking about it 24 seven and then at one point you need to bring homemade yogurt to the market.

It can't be that easy, right?

We actually, we couldn't bring homemade yogurt to the market because homemade yogurt is not legal to bring to the market.

So what we had to do was we had to actually think about how do we commercialize this product? And so we went in search of a co-manufacturer.

We knew that our strengths were going to lie in marketing and selling the product and not necessarily in building a factory.

And so we were searching for somebody else to make the yogurt.

We needed to make the recipe as good as possible.

And so that's what we spend a lot of time doing is perfecting it in our own kitchen.

but then brought it to a much bigger factory to scale it.

And so we were able and lucky enough to find our partner in that.

And all the while we started building in public and creating a bunch of demand.

So that way we knew we would have folks who wanted to buy our yogurt before we ever had it.

Love how you just quickly talk about this, but this is actually, I think, a pivotal moment for every founder where it's like, you don't really have the product yet, but you also don't really have the audience yet.

So it's basically chicken and egg, right? You can't really give your audience something yet, but you also can't really produce the product.

And in your case, an actual product, because you need the audience as well.

So this chicken and egg network effect, we would say in tech companies, how did you go about that? What was that phase like?

Yeah, it was, I mean, it's uncomfortable.

We get a lot of folks who are like, oh, it's so uncomfortable.

And like, what did you even talk about on social media? How did you even build when you had no product? But at the end of the day, it's like, okay, actually we're not trying to sell it every single moment.

I'm just trying to share the journey.

And that's what people want to know is like, you know, how are you going about this? How are you thinking about marketing? Like all of these types of things.

And that was what we were sharing.

And inadvertently then people learned about our yogurt because of course that starts to flow into it.

But I think that people overthink that as well.