1 Year Since We Launched (And Failed) Hot Pot Club 🍲

Sharing my 9 key learnings from this rollercoaster ride.

This time last year we delivered a Hot Pot Kit to our first customer in Kurwongah, near North Lakes. 

The start of a 6-month rollercoaster ride.

It's been hard for me to talk about it until recently. Breaking even our investment, but not being able to sustain it past 6 months felt like a failure. I took it personally as I had given it my all.

To the point where I stopped having hot pot for months, even though it's my favourite meal ever.

Reframing it as a practical learning experience made me feel better. Viewing it as the first step to our life's work made me feel it was worthwhile. And I'm grateful to have two friends who were willing to bet on me.

Some of the things I've learnt include:

• The need to learn about unit economics, cash flow and business finance. Then block out dedicated time to work on these aspects. For a high-touch business anyway. (It's been so much easier with our Shopify apps.) 

• Co-founders compatibility. It means more than whether you get along with each other. Or whether you share the same values. If you're at different stages of life with different interests, it's going to be a challenge.

• Complementary skill-set. It means more than technical skills. You have to consider their soft skills and personalities as well.

• The importance of operational efficiency. It's a good way to save costs, not just time.

• Founder-led growth isn't the only way to go-to-market. But it's much more fun and it makes marketing easier. (For me anyway.)

• I overestimated my energy levels; my physical and mental capacity. Juggling between working for and on the business. Research, suppliers, logistics, inventory management, finance, just to name a few. That's a lot of context switching.

Being a business that requires dry, chilled, frozen ingredients and storage made it worse.

• Having a domain expert on the team would definitely have made things easier.

• The value of an economic moat. The price increases happening with supplies and logistics as early as June last year, was a nail in the coffin for us.

(By October it was $5.5K USD just to ship 250 pots...and that's excluding increased product costs, taxes, and custom agent fees, wtf? Yes, we did shop around.)

• You can find market fit, but without most of the aspects above, especially knowing your numbers, it's going to be very hard to sustain and scale. (Unless you have VC funds, I guess.)

I'll share more of my learnings, stories, and memes from Hot Pot Club another time.

If you're still reading this, and have a dedicated side hustle - Ryan Phillips and I would love to connect!

We took our learnings from Hot Pot Club and have built two Shopify apps (onto the third one soon). Now we're looking for the right people to share our long-term vision with; to build a collection of brands together.

You can connect with me on LinkedIn here.