Finding Product-Market Fit for Upscale, South Asian Cuisine in 2020

When we spoke in April last year, I told you I had left tech to join a restaurant, pivoted it online, and was now “finding our place in that (new) normal”. I was both new to the service industry, and to Toronto (and still am!). Three months later, you probably saw me on Business Insider packing meals (and still criticizing US immigration policies). Ironically, that was also our last service; unable to grow, struggling to sustain, we shutdown on July 7th, 2020.

Here’s what happened in those three months, and what we can all learn from it.

The first week online was encouraging. We sold way more than we expected. $1279.90, to be precise. Quick reminder: we accepted orders online throughout the week, but only cooked once a week. Almost all of the orders came from friends and family, who were happy to support once, but it had to feel ‘worth it’ for them to re-order, let alone spread the word. We got mixed feedback; the chicken tikka masala was good, the quantities were great, but there was too much rice, no bread, (naan? roti?) no salad, and the rajma (kidney beans) gave them gas. As expected, the next week we did a measly $401.25, and the feedback wasn’t much different.

We had essentially taken our ‘offline’ product offering, and put it online. We hadn’t tweaked the product, not given any thought to packaging, the pricing was still the same, the positioning was unclear, and we didn’t really understand who was ordering online, and why. The only thing we had gotten right, it seemed, was to offer a bundle that was easy to order and kept you going for a week.

I could see the current model wasn’t going to work, but what all do we change?

In the two months I spent at the takeout joint downtown before we shut it down, I learned one thing: whatever we were selling was selling, but we didn’t have product-market fit.

On one hand, our products were underpriced for the quality they packed, squeezing margins to a minimum (and no VC $$$ to pay the bills). We struggled to raise prices because, as bad as it sounds, customers don’t…