
Ooshma Garg, founder of Gobble (YC W14) – Startup School video and AMA - craigcannon
http://themacro.com/articles/2016/10/ooshma-garg-at-startup-school/
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ooshma
Ooshma here. Let me know if you have any questions about Gobble!

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ooshma
Thanks everyone for the insightful questions! Hope the answers here and the
Startup School talk are helpful to our community. This was fun! Singing off
now -- I'm hungry and it's time to cook up a 10-minute Gobble dinner.

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new299
I'd love to see more videos by people who have failed dissecting their
failure. My guess is that we listen to successes way too much. That if you
look at the failures, you'll find that they share many of the same traits as
the successes and that the random element is significant.

I also think that the funding environment is quite biased. What's successful
is a function to some degree of what is fundable. When VCs start funding based
on "what was successful in the past" you create a feedback loop which likely
doesn't create the best possible businesses.

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anthnguyen94
Hey Ooshma! I was at Startup School 2016 and absolutely loved your talk! I was
just curious about how you built your initial product- you mentioned not being
able to find a dev who wanted to play the long game. What did you end up
trying and eventually doing?

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ooshma
Gobble is my second company. With my first company, I bootstrapped and never
raised outside capital. I got introduced to a consultant by a friend and I
paid him to build our first product part-time and help manage an engineering
team in India and I contributed front end and simple back end code myself. The
initial MVP (minimum viable product) of a company is typically very scrappy
and taped together. If you know how to write software, you do it yourself. If
not, you can do it in a very scrappy way and do not feel ashamed to do so.
Ideally, ad especially with consumer applications, the initial focus is just
proving your concept and seeing if it will get any traction or make any money,
before investing heavily in a fuller or more perfect product.

With Gobble, I discuss the answer elsewhere in this thread. Two engineers were
moonlighting with me to learn RoR and see what it was like to work at a
startup. We built a very simple website to display meals and collect sales for
a few months. That basic site, along with PDF mockups I designed of our future
product, was enough to raise seed money. I hired one of the engineers full
time after I raised the funding. Then, I started meeting everyone I could in
my extended network and recruiting the rest of the team.

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sflores4
Hi Ooshma! -- you mentioned in your talk that you + team did things that
didn't scale to delight existing users and acquire new ones. Kevin Hale
brought this up during his Startup School lecture, writing Christmas cards to
all of their users, but referenced a user writing to him the following year
asking when he would receive this year's xmas card.

When deciding what "non-scalable thing" you were going to do, did you ever
wonder: will this come back and bite me in the butt when I can no longer do
this with a large user-base because of either time or monetary restraints?

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ooshma
PS: I know some excellent mechanical hand-writing services and I'll email
Kevin a few options ;)

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sflores4
Haha! about to be so many Kevin Holiday cards this season.

Thanks for your answer, super helpful as my team and I create new ways of
connecting with our users.

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annerajb
Wanted to say that thanks for the talk on Startup Conference.

I still have the mental picture of the table with the wine bottles. On what
timeframe did you accumulate those bottles? Wiggles of false hope?

(Sorry I don't have a better question )

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ooshma
F(wine consumption) = ∫ f(growth)

i.e. when growth is flat in the trough of sorrow, wine consumption goes up
linearly week/week... that said, even when you start growing, you develop new
problems and can gathering bottles even faster ;)

~~~
craigcannon
lol

[http://observer.com/2012/04/bottoms-up-the-ballmer-peak-
is-r...](http://observer.com/2012/04/bottoms-up-the-ballmer-peak-is-real-
study-says/)

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arodceo
Hi Ooshma,

Curious as to how you found and got your first batch of users that loved you
and were paying for the product.

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ooshma
I did things that didn't scale. #ycfirstprinciples

I put our promo cards at coffee shops and laundromats, emailed meetup groups,
went door to door, bought people coffee to demo our product at Starbucks,
walked around farmer's markets and gave people coupons and samples, and
literally pounded the pavement.

Then, you follow up with them personally. Do they want to order again? Why or
why not? What _would_ make them order again? Are they willing to let you visit
them in person? What patterns are you noticing in the early feedback?

High level: first you develop a small core user base, then you learn
everything about them and communicate with them constantly to find what is
secretly working and not working. I would go to people's houses and talk to
them and watch them eat dinner multiple times per week. That led me to our
10-minute dinner kits. The AirBNB founders went door-to-door to people's
houses and helped them take the right photos to market their homes. This grit
is the difference between the want-rapreneurs and the entrepreneurs.

~~~
stormy
As testament to doing things that didn't scale, Ooshma turned up to my
apartment in Palo Alto a couple of years ago (mid-2013) to fix a botched
order. Ultimately, the switch to dinner kits wasn't for my family, but I
always remember that occasion as a great example of the principle.

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moeamaya
Well done Ooshma!!

Two-parter, what's your favorite dish at Gobble and will you be updating the
Gobble branding to match the beautiful illustration work from your slides??

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masudhossain
Love it when YC alumni's do AMAs!

What was your growth rate for the first 3 months of launching Gobble and how
did you acquire your first batch of users?

Also, "I just searched my email for "sit this one out", "going to pass",
"won't get there", "not the right fit", and "not going to get to the finish
line", and I think we're at 200+."

Is that "200+" denials for VC/angel funding??

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aashidham0
Hey Ooshma! I saw you talk live :) We met several years ago when you were
working out the enterprise version of Gobble & I was an undergrad at Stanford,
but never kept in touch. Let me know if coffee in Palo Alto sometime works for
you, would be great to catch up.

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ooshma
So glad you got see Startup School live. All the talks this year were mind-
blowing. Re coffee, email me at ooshma@gobble.com.

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12silval
Hi Ooshma :)

Our products is being used by few people, but we still haven't found those
users that really love our product. We feel that we should make a major pivot
on our product. But it seems like a big rick. Any recomendaciones on making
the transition a bit smoother.

Thanks!

~~~
ooshma
What's your mission? And what's your product?

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roger_vg
We are constantly talking with users but it's hard to filter their feedback. I
guess you experienced this situation before you found product/market fit. How
did you filter your user's comments? Based on your mission?

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ooshma
Great question.

The way to filter feedback is based on your target demographic. Identify
exactly who are the super users of your product (hopefully they're a small
part of a very large segment of our population) and then listen to only them
for the feedback.

Other tips: (1) Make sure to get their feedback in multiple ways, we still do
surveys every week, phone calls, and home visits. On a survey, someone might
say they shop at Whole Foods. At home, you'll see all the Costco stuff in
their pantry ;) (2) Set benchmarks for when feedback becomes meaningful. When
over 5% of our community says something, we start prioritizing it. When less
than 10% of our community uses a new feature or offering on our website, we
consider letting it go.

To get to product/market fit, meeting the customers is everything. They will
help you both better describe who is your exact target market (the
professional mom who says she shops at Whole Foods but still likes deals from
Costco) and help you refine your product for that market.

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chriswoodford
Hi Ooshma! Long time follower, first time question asker.

When you're preparing to pitch to potential investors, what do you do to get
yourself in "the zone"?

p.s. If your answer involves listening to music, I'd love to hear about your
playlist!

~~~
ooshma
I have "lucky shirts" and "lucky dresses". I wear the same set of outfits to
first meetings, second meetings, and final meetings. That way, I don't have to
think about it and the superstition gives you extra confidence. Sometimes
investors throw in more meetings, and I honestly don't know what to wear.

In the bigger fundraising meetings, you have to control a room of 15+ people.
I only think about my psychology, the rest is just details. I meditate for
longer than usual the morning before these meetings.

The Pre-Pitch Playlist is an extremely guilty mix of pump up pop and hip hop
music... think Work from Home (Fifth Harmony) and All The Way up (Fat Joe).
The Diligence Playlist is a set of concertos and symphonies featuring Ludovico
Einaudi, Rachmaninoff, Edouard Lalo.

And Chris - Thank you for engineering brilliance, your sense of humor, and for
grinding it out with me at Gobble for so long and sitting right next to me
through all our ups and downs.

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startwhat
How many times did you get rejected at each stage by investors

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ooshma
Haha. Brutal question. I don't even know if I can count...

Big secret: There are no real stages. We didn't just have a seed, Series A,
Series B, etc. And, that's the story for most companies. There are oftentimes
intermittent rounds, that you can call bridge rounds or just financings. We
had three times where people put in more money, sometimes a little, sometimes
a huge amount, that aren't technically called anything. These intermittent
financing are especially common in the early days.

I just searched my email for "sit this one out", "going to pass", "won't get
there", "not the right fit", and "not going to get to the finish line", and I
think we're at 200+.

Maintain good relationships with all investors, especially those that reject
you.

Treat every funding like your last. Be thrifty and try to make revenue, and
ultimately profit, as soon as possible. It will at worst extend your runway
and at very best help you avoid the need to fundraise anymore at all. The goal
is not to raise money, the goal is to build a standalone bad ass business.

That said, when fundraising, keep going and remember: it only takes one yes.

~~~
startwhat
Interesting. How did you find them initially. Gobble is great!

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iwant
Would like to know how and when Gobble has seen the traction.

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ooshma
We saw varying levels of traction throughout the years with different product
iterations. In the talk, I discuss why we made the specific product decisions
at different points in time. We target busy families, and we saw the least
traction with a la carte and on demand, more traction with subscription
prepared meals, and the absolute definition of product-market fit traction
ever since we launched our weekly subscription of freshly prepped 10-minute
dinner kits in August 2014.

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roger_vg
How long were you working without a team? How did you recruited your first
hires?

~~~
ooshma
I told people about my idea at various events and I actually first started out
with three volunteers. It was the summertime, so we had one student who
interned with me and helped me with marketing/business. The other two folks
were engineers at big tech companies who wanted to moonlight with me to (1)
have an excuse to learn RoR and (2) see what it's like to work at a startup.

It was just the four of us until I raised the seed round. I was the only one
working on Gobble full time, and the investors (to my surprise) were not
deterred by this fact.

I started hiring more senior people full time after our seed financing. The
best hires, and I cannot emphasize this enough, came by referral. It's a 10X
difference. I recruited them by paying a salary to cover their expenses, but
mostly like every founder, by sharing the mission and selling the dream.

Recruiting goes back to the entire message of my Startup School talk. I looked
for people who aligned with Gobble's mission and they feel more purpose
working at Gobble than at any other company.

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asimuvPR
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