Sometimes it’s not enough to just have one core competency… you have to find innovation at the edge of two industries, and in our case, it’s food and tech. A lot of food tech companies are just tech and I don’t think that they were able to make it that way without bringing the food expertise in-house.

Ambition is very singular, mission is shared. Ambition is not enough. Mission is the strength it takes to get through the trough of sorrow and all the way to product-market fit. Mission is what I shared with these 10x hires who stayed with our company through all the ups and downs.

There are a few companies in the space, Gobble being one of them, Daily Harvest is another one, that actually set up an innovative supply chain, and made proprietary IP in the food.

By putting in the upfront work and developing these proprietary SKUs, our secret sauce is the sauce actually.

Marketplaces have a good chance of working with assets, like clothes or toys or an extra bedroom. It’s a bit more difficult of a nut to crack with services.

We saw companies like Homejoy or Exec not necessarily be able to work out all the logistics and similarily with Gobble, though we had a lot of chef talent, in our case just the standardization of spice level or portions or delivery times wasn’t something we could make consistent with such a distributed pool of chefs. So we had to pivot from a marketplace model.

I shut down that personalized dinner service and we were doing maybe like one and a half to two million in ARR, but it wasn't going anywhere. The food wasn't different enough.

When we had tested and R&Ded these prep kits, where people cook it themselves and feel like a superhero, that was magical in our testing and our customer visits.

So within 30 days, we just ripped the band-aid off, shut down that business. It was the highest revenue making iteration that we had ever built.

With every iteration, we made more revenue ultimately, even though we shut it down. Then on August 3rd, we launched this thing. And I emailed Adora (YC Partner) this long email of, "Here are the screenshots, here's this." And I was using her to hold myself accountable. I was like, "It's launched."

That was the best decision of our lives.

Some people think that they have to win today or that they have to win tomorrow, but to me, winning and success is being the last person standing. It’s not being the best person today or tomorrow, it’s being the best person at the end of the day.

“When our Series C didn’t manifest, we could have done one of four things - shut down the company, recap the company, sell the business for some version of an asset sale, customer lists sale, or acquihire, or try to turn the company around and operate profitably” said Ooshma.

She decided to completely cut her marketing spend, from around $1M per month to $0, and see how many customers would stay with them.

She had projections for multiple scenarios of what might happen.

Guess what?

The switch to profitability worked!

They ended up maintaining 70% of their revenue by the end of the year, showcasing just how loyal their customers were.

As Ooshma describes it, “We were generating cash every month and we basically raised a Series C in millions of dollars in free cash ourselves without diluting the company one bit.”