The current situational changes are the main reason why a lot more of the population is willing to switch from monotonous jobs to building their own business, as the situation has been a real eye opener as to how no job is ever secure. I saw families collapse, economies go down and all of this struggle around in all our lives got me thinking real deep. Sooner I saw with the experience of a dear one that how petty our lives are to the capitalists are … and I said to myself that I do not want to work anymore like this and wanted to try my luck starting a business. I am Shruti , 22 years old and an entrepreneur.
No, no, no I am not going to narrate to you an autobiography of my struggles but I feel like sharing the very practical stages I had to go through in order to put my thoughts to actions.
Now, It is very important for you to know what business has a wider scope, and I was into a process of identifying the same, definitely the earlier sentence seems like a very crucial stage, but I got through this one real quick. The reason being my mom. Yes her! So amidst all my thinking process wherein I earned a few pounds stress eating, I heard my mom yell at me “ I know food is one of our basic needs but you’re always eating and you know that’s not!”
You heard her right, yes It’s the Food business I thought of!… because during all this time I realized there is one thing that can never go out of business yes “Food” because we never stop eating! And on the bright side we have exceptional cooks at our home, My grams who has it all under control for the festive delicacies, my young sister who is a budding patisserie and of course me their Guinea pig.
Initially we started out on a small scale, promoting our Sweets business on instagram, whatsapp etc. received quite a good feedback, had friends and family tell us how they feel about the food, what would they love and there was one huge order we received for an Art Festival for making Dora cakes and that was when we finally realized that our business has been working steadily and It took me long but I realized how important investing in a website is. I started things the small way but we could have been a faster growing business with a website. We got our food licensing done, we launched a website and I wanted to create a food delivery system to make it seem like a good one and to help us grow on a larger scale.
So I got in touch with some tech guys for the same learned for myself how the food delivery apps work, what kind of panel’s do they have that is how I learned about the Admin panel, Driver panel and Back-end panel , I learned how these apps work and what else is needed to get into the business. Soon more orders started coming up and we hired some more staff in order to keep up to the orders and I think we are going pretty strong until now. The apps carried out all kinds of information like customer transactions, bar code generation, sales reporting, driver data, order tracking and much more so all of our data was basically inside the app. It helped us know the exact volume , forecast some during festive times, to keep track of client’s birthday’s and anniversary( which is exactly why companies take the effort’s to remember your birthdays and anniversaries by the way- It’s a good gesture but that’s some customer relationship building)
With time I also realized we needed to make some changes to the apps and luckily in the beginning we went with an open source delivery app, this is for guys who have no idea about how the technicalities are .. so basically an open source app is easy and can be modified with some coding in the backend whereas SAAS systems cannot be . Hence, if sometime later like us you feel the need to make changes to the app that will be a kind of head ache gong with a SAAS system. So we modified the app as per our needs, and the business now is growing at a stable pace.
I am quite astonished as to how much I learned since starting the business. We went for social media marketing, ran campaign, saw the feedback and planned our strategies accordingly. I have never seen anything better than social media for marketing, which reminds me of certain companies using the mail tactics to send you notifications and really making you want to click on the mail with soo many attention catching subject lines. I am not much of a pro in it so I needed some support externally and I’ve got much of my friends and family to promote via the app the pictures of their orders and share their reviews, of course mouth publicity is another amazing tool. I’ve never skipped attending weddings since then. So I promote our business in places like that because the “ I remember I met a girl at the wedding , she’s into the sweets business, maybe I’ll share you the website, you can contact them and build a food software for yourself ” works fantastic , because somewhere subconsciously people register that kind of data in their brains.
I’ve never heard anyone talk about these little things and which are important for you to know just along the way to guide you when you are into a new business and totally clueless as to how to make it function, and the use of technology to your benefit . Now depending on the situation probably your circumstances are different to start a business, but don’t lose hope. Stay put in, be consistent and take small steps to get to it and I’m sure a little patience reaps a good successful business.
With this I’ve started my journey on the discovery of new food techniques and food technology , stay tuned for further posts to discover something new with me on my way.