An Awfully Good start up story
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Stories about chocolate always go down well. Peter Day interviewed a Singapore lawyer-turned-business-woman whose idea to open a chocolate cake shop has found success. Her mission was to find “a simple dark chocolate cake that I can just eat whenever I want to and not feel sick.” - which seems perfectly reasonable to me, but she couldn’t find the right product, so decided to make it herself.
Her business model sounds an ideal example of a product-led business - she can’t remember whether she and her friends did any market research, but instead,they focussed on R&D: “We mucked around in the kitchen every weekend for a year until we produced this thing…our methods were trial and error. Nothing scientific…We just tried different techniques, we tried different ingredients and we produced what we thought was a pretty yummy chocolate cake.” She opened as a true niche business, with a shop in a back street called Awfully Chocolate, selling one product only, but within 3 months had as many orders as she could possibly cope with. This was in the late-90’s around the time of the dot com boom, and she took warning from business failures around her then and says that she was cautious. It was 6 years before she opened her second store, but she how has 17 franchises across Asia, and has opened a new restaurant called Everything with Fries. Although I do hope that ‘everything’ doesn’t include chocolate cake….....
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