Bridging Horizons: 'Carnivore Nights' Intersects with Entrepreneurial Ventures, Innovation, and Product Leadership — Part III

In this is a 4-part story I will take though my journey from creating & opening my own business to closing it, an entire product / business lifecycle, and all from an Entrepreneur & PM Point-of-View (PoV).

Each part will address a different set of milestones in the product's lifecycle, and contain a link to the previous part, for the readers who’ve missed the previous part and want to catch up.

In this part will cover the product lifecycle once it has achieved its MVP.

Link to Part II

Part III — Beyond the MVP

Product Management doesn’t end with the MVP.

The product always needs to evolve, and the PM has to be attentive to the customers as well as to the business and to the market.

Attentive to the business — identify points of hemorrhaging and stop the bleeding:

After a few events I noticed that in each and every event I was losing potential income; why? Because people would register and just ghost…so I didn’t get the full income I expected, and other potential customers could not join, because the registration was full weeks ahead…

So the first thing I revised was the registration process - I introduced a “Cancellation Policy” and started collecting credit cards as a deposit / security payment.

This required an unorthodox, out-of-the-box, train of thought & solution as it was never done in the restaurant-business before; while I was not a restaurant per-se, it was the closest type of business to mine.

Once I did that, all ghosting was eliminated even though the customers kept on paying in cash at the beginning of the event.

Attentive to customers — payment:

As more and more requests came in to allow payments using credit cards, I finally decided to introduce a credit-card payment option that soon became the default. Customers could, theoretically, leave their wallets at home - as they’ve already paid for the event - and just relax & enjoy themselves.

Attentive to customers — education:

During the course of these evenings attendees would come up to the pit-master’s post (my post) and started asking question about how to smoke one cut or the other; as this trend grew I realized that there’s a market for a practical, hands-on, workshop for beginners - so I launched one, adding another Product to my business portfolio.

Attentive to the market — introduce a new way of cooking for the home-cook:

As I continued to research the professional culinary world, around 2014-2015, I stumbled upon a cooking technique that was common in high-end restaurants, but not for home cooking — Sous-Vide.

I educated myself on it, brought a couple of sous-vide heaters (a.k.a. “Runners”) from the US, and started experimenting with it.

Once I felt I got the hang of it in a good enough manner, I introduced it to my FB group, my ‘Carnivore Nights’, and my workshops.

It took a bit of time & a lot of explaining to do, but another trend for Israeli home-cooks was on its way to what it is today.

 

In between I joined the Paleo monthly market, where people could buy my smoked meat to eat on the spot or at home, thus expanding my revenue stream once more and brand awareness in an entirely new & different channel — it resulted in having to deal with a whole new operation, as (waiting) time was of the essence.

During the first market I had a waiting time of 45 minutes (!!) – this was insane, as I came completely unprepared it rems of staff (only me + 2 more 18 year-olds) for the amount of people there.

Slowly I grew the team, and added more need equipment to reduce dramatically the waiting time. The most mind-blowing equipment that I introduced was my very own trailer-based smoker, manufactured according to my design — it created a ‘WOW’ factor that caused people to come and talk with me and then stand in line, and could host a 10x amount of meats that I would sell during the market. Eventually I had 7 team members working for me, from sue-chefs to bus-boy, and the queue just flew, increasing the revenue stream dramatically.

It was a hit!