From software engineering to starting a bakery | Ben Lai

I'd love to now jump into the start of Home Croissantry and how that initially started.

My understanding is that it started as a food blog.

Is that how it initially got off the ground? Yeah.

What was the motivations of starting to post online? I just wanted to make some money, honestly, on the side of my corporate job.

Because food is something I always loved, I kind of wanted to explore that bit more.

There were...

I was trying to decide if I should do like sourdough or pastries.

But at that point in time, there are quite a lot of sourdough places popping up.

And so I just wanted to do something a little different and then kind of document my journey off of it and then hopefully get some sponsorships or some paid ads and, you know, make a bit more cash on the side.

And what did that first iteration of the website look like? Were you posting

recipes? Were you posting little videos? How were you thinking about it in those early stages? I posted just blogging, just

recipes and also like blogging about exactly what struggles I had Um, how the making, how the, how the process of it was like, I didn't get very far.

I did one post.

And then how did that evolve into the more actually making the pastries and selling them? I ended up having way too much, uh, spare just laying around.

And,

uh, back then I lived around McCoy park.

So there's heaps of cafes, um, just inside McCoy shopping center.

So I just tried to sell it to, to anyone who wanted to buy it.

Yeah.

Did

you just walk into a cafe with a bunch of

pastries? I had a basket.

I had a basket with all the pastries in it.

And then I walked into the shopping center and went to every single cafe and tried to sell it.

What were the reactions like