Plus, if you’ve read all of part 2, then you’ll realize that I don’t think it’s a good idea to prioritize showing off for the TS people. Only your customers matter.

In our case, that meant working on our backend to make it more reliable and add the features our sellers needed. Looking back, I’m glad we did that instead of trying to add more front-end sizzle.

One question I have is – was techstars really looking for rapid iterations of improvement during your application? Unless they had specific questions / issues that they want to see being addressed, what was the urgency in making all the last minute improvements? And if so, why did you choose to make them on the backend where it simply wouldn’t have been as visible?

Thanks!

Just wanted to thank you for sharing your experiences in both of these posts. As someone who is involved in starting a seed stage program in Providence, RI, I found your insights very helpful in thinking how to best interface with the teams that apply. Good luck with DoLeaf!

tjs

I’m going to stop trying to defend the market size for DoLeaf vs the artisan food producers. We haven’t done a lot of research into our own market, and know absolutely nothing about market size for food production.

We’re running on a hunch and the eat-your-own-dogfood approach. We’ve bought plants online, and know many others who have as well. We’re certain the market’s there and big enough for us.

However, I still think it was a good idea for us to apply. We did the application together, so it strengthened solidarity and helped us craft our company more. We sucked air as we dropped $600 and missed three days of class to fly to Boston (from LA and MI) for TS4AD, but we learned a lot and met a lot of great people (who have been helpful to us now that we’re back). Shawn had a lot of great comments when we meet with him one-on-one but, ultimately, like you mentioned earlier, we didn’t really take this into our product—it just changed our vision too much. I think this might have hurt our application. But I think it helped because he told us that our product was economically unsustainable—which it was, we just didn’t realize it—so that was another positive thing. And also, I met one of my founders for the first time face-to-face.

I think overall, Techstars was a good idea. I say this with many apprehensions, mostly because of the financial and opportunity costs—but we still reaped a lot of benefits. However, I still have _no_ idea what we did wrong; we’re still waiting on our follow-up email.

Great post. It’s nice hearing things from another perspective.

I’d like to continue the discussion about market size that pwb commented on in the last post.

My guess is that the marketplace for a foodzie or foodoro is definitely 2, probably closer 3 orders of magnitude bigger.

Think about it like this: do you know anyone who wouldn’t love a gift of delicious, expensive food? I don’t. Everyone I know loves food–they eat it at least 3 times a day–and they love delicious, artisan food even more. If they got Foodoro once a week–they’d be a happy person. Once a day–even happier. I got my dad some chutneys from Foodoro and he loved it.

Now, I do happen to know a fair amount of people that love gardens and plants(my sister, mom and dad, two of my roommates immediately jump to mind). I can definitely see a good market there. But less than 5% of people I know would love a gift of a plant or seed or gardening/nursery related item. And of those people, I can’t think of one who would love something like this everyday, never mind every week.

So that’s where I get the at least 2, probably closer to 3 orders of magnitude difference in market size.

I see it could be a great niche market, but I see it as a market for a lifestyle business.

Sorry if this sounds negative. I just can’t even remotely see how the market sizes could compare. If you could explain it to me–that’d be great. I was studying to be an actuary before I started programming full time and I take my ability to estimate market sizes and distributions and probabilities very seriously.