If your company doesn’t produce a hockey stick graph for growth by the end of the first year, you’ve done something wrong. Don’t expect it to become one of the fastest-growing companies, just shut it down!
Seems drastic, no?
Sadly, that’s what many founders are led to believe.
The truth is, it can take several years to really figure things out. Some of the fastest-growing companies today began really slowly.
To debunk the myths around how long it takes to really see significant growth, I’ve invited Ooshma Garg, the CEO and Founder of Gobble.
Gobble is a weekly dinner-kit delivery service that helps busy people cook dinner in just 10 minutes with one pan. It is growing quickly, doing $100M in sales. But it didn’t happen overnight. It took 3+ years of twists and turns through the trough of sorrow.
This is one of my favorite episodes because Ooshma does a great job of talking openly about issues that many founders struggle with like:
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Poornima Vijayashanker: Thanks a lot for joining us today, Ooshma. It’s such an honor to have you on the show.
Ooshma Garg: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I’ve been a fan for a while.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Start by sharing a little bit about how you got interested in entrepreneurship.
Ooshma Garg: Sure. I think I’ve just been a tinkerer all my life—from selling Girl Scout cookies, to trading Beanie Babies, to starting student clubs. I was just always interested in starting things and experimenting, but only when I came out to California did I kind of channel that and see the world of web startups, and start interning, and really getting my feet wet in what is traditional entrepreneurship.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. You had a startup before you had Gobble, so walk us through what that was.
Ooshma Garg: Sure. I was at Stanford and I was starting this group called Stanford Women in Business.
They were all looking for jobs and recruiters were looking for students, but it was hard to really get in touch. Not many people were using LinkedIn maybe six, eight years ago. Especially on college campuses. So I started a company to help students network with their first jobs and big banks and consulting firms. I ran that out of my dorm room for the first two years.
That was my company before Gobble and actually helped inspire Gobble because I was running 100 miles a minute and not eating well, and really had to take a minute at a certain tipping point and care about my health. That starts with what you’re putting into your body and what you’re eating every day.
Poornima Vijayashanker: What did inspire you to start Gobble?
Ooshma Garg: I think it starts with the tradition of eating at home with your family.
Really what love means in my family, and especially what love means from my dad, is cooking dinner for us.
I have a sister and so me and my little sister and my mom really experienced love from my father through all of his traditional north Indian food.
Contrast that to coming to school, starting companies, interning, and you’re constantly eating Taco Bell and McDonald’s, something was missing and I really didn’t know what it was. It became a very big personal issue for me. I think that’s because food not only brings you nutrition, but it brings you nourishment and nourishment of the soul. What inspired me was set when I was a child.
Then upon becoming an adult and designing my own life, I needed to bring that element of family and love and connection and health back. I think in the modern world it’s hard to do that.
There comes Gobble.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK. Walk us through your inspirational, or moment of inspiration.
Ooshma Garg: Yeah. Well, really I was sitting on California Avenue in Palo Alto in my car at 2:00 am, and I had just come back from Taco Bell. I was just eating these bean burritos and looking outside of my window in the darkness and I saw actually Aaron Levie from Box sitting in his car and eating takeout. It was just this moment of like, “How did I get here and how is this all that I’m eating?” Even though I was playing with ideas and working with great people, I wasn’t happy. That was the tipping point and the next day I decided, “You know what? I’m going to post an ad and see if anyone would be willing to cook dinner for me and my friends for just eight dollars a plate.” Really it wasn’t…I think the “Aha” moment is when you actually realize you have a problem.
You take one baby step to solve it. You don’t necessarily decide you’re going to start a company.
You decide you’re just going to try to solve a problem.
Poornima Vijayashanker: What was that problem for you? What was the opportunity that you saw?
Ooshma Garg: Yeah. I just saw all of these…I just saw myself and lots of different very busy professionals eating really unhealthily and wanting this home-cooked food.
What was really cool is once we posted that Craigslist ad, we got 70 responses overnight, and we saw that there were lots of moms and dads and traditional…I guess in Indian culture we call them aunties and uncles.
And people who are willing to share their home cooking with you. The supply and the demand was there and that really spurred a very quick solution to this problem.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK. What did you do next after that? After you noticed there was interest on both sides of the market?
Ooshma Garg: Yeah. I think this is cool because Gobble started very nontraditionally.
It just started with pen, paper, my cell phone, and my car.
We set up interviews with these home chefs and I just scheduled one on a different day. My friends would come over to my office and we would just be eating for free. That’s exciting.
For two months we’re just getting chefs to come over. Actually, twice…it sounds like fun and games but twice we got food poisoning.
That was really bad. To just knock you and all your friends out, not good.
Poornima Vijayashanker: It’s like the trough of sorrow.
Ooshma Garg: Yes. That was not as ideal. From the early days, one out of six chefs we felt was very professional, on time, cooked great food, safely and all of that.
We kind of just signed them up for catering for us I guess. Pretty soon we collected this group of chefs. I had a calendar of who was cooking on what day. The chef would cook and bring it to me. Then I was actually the first delivery driver and I’d just drive it around to different offices in the Palo Alto area. It just started step-by-step like that. I think we did something like 2,000 meals in just the first month.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, wow.
Ooshma Garg: Which sounds like a lot.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Ooshma Garg: It comes out to something maybe like 40 or 50 a night, let’s say.
It was just really encouraging. The proof of concept was very quick and it just showed that there was a big need for this solution beyond just myself.
Poornima Vijayashanker: It’s great that you had this rudimentary prototype and that you were seeing some traction from that.
Ooshma Garg: Yes.
Going From Idea To Starting A Company
Poornima Vijayashanker: What was the next thing that you were thinking of? This wasn’t yet a startup for you, right?
Ooshma Garg: Right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: It was still like, “Oh, OK, I’m playing around with this idea.”
Ooshma Garg: Right. I really fell in love with the concept.
I fell in love with the fact that there were chefs making money and making a proud living off of this idea and that people were eating really well. I knew really quickly that this is what I wanted to do. I actually transitioned out of my previous startup over a period of three months and simultaneously raised Gobble’s seed round.
Only after two months of this proof of concept starting asking friends for introductions and then we raised $1.2 million in angel money to just hit the ground running, make an actual website, and turn this into a company.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. I remember you had a pretty interesting story around raising that seed money.
Ooshma Garg: Yeah.
Poornima Vijayashanker: You weren’t getting a whole lot of yeses in the beginning. Walk us through what that process was like.
Ooshma Garg: Absolutely. I had made kind of a target list of angel investors.
It’s funny looking back, I’m surprised at how bold I was. I think in the very beginning you don’t know what you’re getting into so you’re even more brazen.
I think that’s a great thing.
Airbnb was just starting at the time and we were building this home-cooked meal marketplace and I thought it was really on to something. One of the investors I targeted was Keith Rabois, who’s now partner at Khosla Ventures. He said “no” many times. Even though he said “no,” I kept getting intros from other friends and I kept insisting that we meet. I think it’s because he really had an expertise in consumer and in food and in marketplaces. There were a couple other investors we were pursuing at the time as well, but the cool thing is that after three or four touches, he finally agreed to meet and within 30 minutes we had our first check.
I think just like anything in life, that early practice, just being very persistent—also doing your homework, not just persistent for no reason—is what gets you through. That’s what’s going to get that same persistence, and doing your homework, and coming with something valuable to someone that’s mutually successful is what’s going to keep the startup growing at every step of the way.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. That’s great that you need to stay persistent and as a solo founder it’s actually a struggle, right? You don’t have that buddy, that partner to help you out. Why did you decide to go the path of being a solo founder? I know it’s not that common here in the Valley.
Ooshma Garg: Right. It’s funny. I don’t think I decided that way from the outset.
I tried to meet other folks who may want to start the company with me through my network. I think I got pretty far with a couple people, but either they weren’t willing to quit their day job or it just wasn’t the right timing for them, or they weren’t so passionate about the idea. We even did work sessions together for a few weeks or weekends. At the end of the day, I think I was just so excited by the idea and the proof of concept that I just wanted to hit the ground running. I felt that something was in the air in this space.
Ooshma Garg: True to form, so many food companies have just started up in the last few years. It’s crazy. I think that it was a combination of, not necessarily finding the right founder soulmate quickly, and then also just feeling that drive, that nothing should stop something that you feel so strongly about and passionate about. I definitely would have added someone if I could’ve and it’s actually really hard. There are some big lonely nights and tough moments.
I’m not sure if the company took longer or shorter as a sole founder. That’s just how it happened and we did it anyway.
I think that whether you get funding or not, whether you have a founder or not, whether you’re a coder or not, the best companies don’t let that stop them.
They just find a way and keep on chugging.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. What was your first year like? It must have been a little bit of a struggle between fundraising, and trying to get all of these meals out the door, and building the site without having the technical co-founder to help you.
Ooshma Garg: Right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: What was that first year like?
Ooshma Garg: Yeah. Looking back, it was…we just learned a lot of hard lessons by trial and error, and I think that’s the best way to learn. We raised the seed round and we were really, really excited by that. I had two engineers that were working with me and moonlighting. One of them’s actually one of the lead engineers at Uber now, which is exciting. They were moonlighting to learn Ruby on Rails at the time.
Ooshma Garg: They had day jobs where they were coding in a different language. One of them ended up joining full time and after a couple months quit. He was our lead engineer and couldn’t handle the pressure of the startup and the future was uncertain, and hadn’t been in this role before or in a startup before. I think it just wasn’t the right fit. I found out very suddenly and it was only a few weeks away from launch. The year was full of those kinds of unexpected curveballs. Then we had to still be amicable, find some consultants to work together to transition the code. I think the first year is about having a plan, but adapting a lot to just still make things happen when everything doesn’t go according to plan.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Or nothing goes according to plan.
Ooshma Garg: Or nothing goes according to plan.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. That was a tough first year, so definitely not a time to think you should be shutting down.
Ooshma Garg: Right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Where a lot of founders might be like, “Well, we didn’t really grow and on top of that all these signs are…I can’t get a technical co-founder, it’s really hard to raise, people that I hired are leaving.”
Ooshma Garg: Right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Just kind of plow through regardless.
Ooshma Garg: Plowing through, yeah. It’s kind of like when they say the phoenix emerges from the ashes. I feel like all these founders have moments where they’re like in the crucible and they’re just kind of like getting knocked around, or in the ring really. Then at some point you just look up and you made it somewhere.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. That was your first year. Walk us through what the second year was like. Was this a year where you were focused on customer acquisition?
Ooshma Garg: Yeah. Actually, the next couple years are all in the same theme.
Which is really around the journey to product market fit.
We iterated and made different versions of Gobble for quite some time. We started out as a marketplace where lots of chefs were posting menus and lots of families were ordering. We hit a short stint as an on-demand meal company and I think we were the first on-demand meal company but it would take 30 minutes to get from one area in the peninsula to the other.
We learned that on demand is really hard to do.
Maybe in some of these dense cities it’s going to work out, but for our purpose of serving busy families, it wasn’t the right model. Then we started a subscription service and we wanted to focus more on the engineering end. Understanding your tastes, what you want to eat, and deliver you the perfect meal for you every day. I think that is the first few years of any startup.
A lot of startups move up their launch date and then they say, “Oh, it was really founded three years afterwards.”
But they were moonlighting or experimenting or at a different company working through the kinks. Everyone really spends, I find, that 10,000 hours, or approximately three years, of becoming an expert in some field.
Typically, even Ben Silverman of Pinterest says it takes just about that time to find product market fit. For us I think it was about three, three-and-a-half years of totally different model of launches and shut downs all with the same mission of helping busy people have home-cooked food, but totally different manifested companies.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. I like what you said about the fact that people will say, “Oh yeah, we just launched this,” even though they’ve launched three times before.
Ooshma Garg: Yes.
Poornima Vijayashanker: I think that’s where a lot of the myth comes from of why people don’t launch and then grow quickly within a year.
Ooshma Garg: Right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Because they say, “Oh, well now we’ve technically launched,” and they’ve maybe got two or three years behind them.
Ooshma Garg: Right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So it seems like they launched and then a year later they were on this like hockey stick growth.
Ooshma Garg: Right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: I think that’s really valuable to know. What did you do to actually acquire your customers then?
Ooshma Garg: Yeah.
Poornima Vijayashanker: When you were doing all these different models?
Ooshma Garg: Right. With all the models that, I guess, didn’t work as well as the current one, we were fighting tooth and nail every day for customers.
I think most companies are half product team and really half marketing team.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Ooshma Garg: Like the head of data, the head of engineering, everybody is involved in marketing and growth in some way, shape or form. Whether they’re building the referral system, or optimizing the conversion flow, or directly running paid advertising, let’s say. With the first few models, marketplace models, subscription, et cetera, I was pounding the pavement. I was putting up Gobble signs in laundromats, in coffee shops, emailing, hospital mailing lists. Just anything I could my hands on.
Very not scalable initial strategies to get a core user base up and running. I think what the truth is is that getting a company to take off takes a really long time and that is against the myth that you see in the press.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Ooshma Garg: The product that takes off really does go from zero to hero. If you can last all that way and if you have the perseverance, hopefully you’ll one day where a product just is so good and so full of all of your insights and value to the customer that it really does take off in some kind of hockey stick fashion.
We never knew if we would get there, but our current 10-minute, one-pan dinner kit really just hit the nail on the head. It embodies the feeling for our busy families and parents that they want something fresh that they can control and that comes from these whole ingredients that they see. But they want it to be convenient, fast, not a sink full of dishes, and prepped for you.
That was the result of lots of experiments and insights and learnings, but when we launched that I didn’t have to fight tooth and nail. I didn’t have to market all the time. People were posting on social media, they loved the product, they were coming back, referrals, retention, word of mouth, they all move in the right direction. I had always heard Marc Andreessen talk about this product market fit moment. There were times when I thought I would have it but I was kidding myself.
After a very long time and many years, finally, we did get to see it. I’m really grateful for that and I think that that is when you see that really great growth. It’s not necessarily when the company starts.
Poornima Vijayashanker: What were some of the insights along the way? Were there a couple “Aha” moments that you had that led you to get to that kit?
Ooshma Garg: Yeah. Great question. I think that there are a couple. One is that the one practice is to constantly spend time with your customers.
We wouldn’t have known the insights towards developing this dinner kit if we hadn’t gone to people’s houses and watched them cook, watched their faces, watch their reactions to take out or cooking or what have you. One key observation was that we saw that people when they microwaved food, they didn’t smile, they weren’t happy. When it was in a plastic tray or whatever. I learned that to really have a breakout company, it’s not just good enough for someone to buy the product and consume it. They really have to feel super excited about it. They have to feel wow about it.
Which is hard. This was just getting the job done. It’s kind of like me eating that Taco Bell in my car at 2:00 am. It was getting the job done. The microwave experience and them not seeing the chef or how it was made, and not filling the house with that sort of nourishing aroma and practice of cooking, wasn’t there.
That’s what we tried to insert. The other piece that really made that happen was when we went to people’s houses, we would take our head of engineering, our head of data, our executive chef, and myself. I think that any great innovation will occur at the edge of two industries or more.
Or multiple skill sets. So if you’re an expert in one area, real magic innovation happens when a whole nother expert comes in and you guys do a lot of things together, and you meld those perspectives and discover things that no one thought of.
It was really our executive chef coming in and saying, “Hey, in a restaurant we have mise en place,” which is everything in place. All the prep cooks come and they prep everything and then the executive chef can walk in and whip up anything in 10 minutes. Let’s take a braised beef short rib with sweet pea risotto, that short rib has been marinating for days, or braising.
That’s all called the prep work. We do all of that just like they do in restaurants for families and homes. It was learning about those different practices in personalization via like Spotify or Netflix. Then mise en place and prep work via the restaurants.
Just subscription commerce and the business model of shipping and how that makes an economic sense. It was putting all of those different things together from the different execs that made the right model.
Poornima Vijayashanker: That’s great.
Ooshma Garg: An innovation.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. There’s a lot going on here and you’ve got an executive team, you’re meeting with customers, did that one million dollars really get you to discovering all these insights? Or did you have to go out and raise additional capital?
Ooshma Garg: Right. We had to be so scrappy and it’s really hard because you see all these flashy companies in the news and they have coffee bars and big company retreats and things. We kept our burn very low, in the very low tens of thousands a month until we finally found product market fit. Another myth to crack is that companies don’t just have seed series A, series B, series C. They all have intermittent rounds.
Those rounds are just terms to help investors and people understand kind of the stage where a company is.
Almost everybody I talk to behind closed doors will share that they had money coming in at all different moments.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Ooshma Garg: We had a couple follow on rounds and bridge rounds, you can call them. That just means in between.
After our seed fundraising to keep us going.
But they were still very small individual or two-people follow-up checks.
There was a time when we were really close to dying.
We only had I think something like $8,000 in the bank and it was less than a full payroll. It was November and December and those are holiday seasons so our graph wasn’t going to go up. I couldn’t raise money from anyone and I couldn’t get anymore follow on money from existing investors. We actually are very unconventional and we joined Y Combinator three years into the company after a seed round and after hiring people.
I remember you weren’t too keen on going to YC.
Ooshma Garg: Yeah, I wasn’t. Because it’s nontraditional and it’s kind of a blow to your ego. It’s like I’m not just starting the company. Typically people used Demo Day to raise their first round. The organization of YC has really expanded and they’re helping all kinds of companies at all kinds of stages now.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Ooshma Garg: That’s really awesome and exciting. At the time, it was still something where I had to swallow my pride and say, “Look. Am I just going to let the company die because of ego here?”
Poornima Vijayashanker: That’s a good lesson to learn.
Ooshma Garg: It’s a great lesson to learn. I think great companies are full of those moments where you have to just do whatever it takes. It doesn’t matter how you look. it matters if you believe in what you’re doing. If you think it’s valuable and you’re just going to do whatever it takes. We did and thank goodness because it gave us that extra burst of energy, the network, and then the capital frankly to just keep going another day.
That fueled another round at Demo Day, which fueled me being able to hire our executive chef, and then meet the customers, and then develop the dinner kits, which then fueled our series A.
It’s those kinds of moments that really define if you’re in it for the long haul and if you’re going to make it work or not.
Poornima Vijayashanker: That’s great. That’s great that you were starting to see these signs and that YC helped a lot. I imagine there was a lot of competition by the time you decided to go raise your series A, right?
Ooshma Garg: Right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: There were a lot of companies in the food space.
Ooshma Garg: Right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Walk us through how you were starting to kind of do hand to hand combat with that.
Ooshma Garg: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Those are the exact right words. I love this book called Blue Ocean Strategy and I see these crowded spaces as this blood red ocean where we’re all just swimming a paddling really hard and spiting each other. There’s not a lot of room and you have to just swim out to fresh water if you can and break out as a company. There were tons of food companies and some are still around, some have pulled back, many have died.
There were ones who like Good Eggs who make a food marketplace, or there’s companies that do on-demand food delivery, there’s many that do subscription boxes like we do now. I think what we are differentiated in that we’re the only ones that help you make a fresh meal quickly.
And meet those specific needs of a modern busy professional. In the back end, we have these really large-scale kitchens with hundreds of people peeling carrots, chopping onions, marinating meats, making sauces, that then go into our boxes.
Whereas all other subscription food companies put a tomato, a lemon, and an onion in a box.
It’s very much delivering the right groceries for any given recipe but not helping you with the cooking.
I think we’re differentiated not because I looked at the competition and wanted to differentiate, but because I saw this problem and I saw nothing else solving the problem, and I came up with this bespoke solution to solve it. It’s really hard to put the blinders on and not think about what the competition is doing, but it think that’s the way that you come with real innovation. That you become hopefully the creative leader in your space. I think that persistence is necessary, but in a competitive space preserving that creative DNA is absolutely critical to differentiation and breaking out. People will come after you and I think that now that we’re in the scaling stage, the worry is about copycats executing and doing what you created better than you. Bringing in house all the expertise to continue executing with excellence, not just creating and coming up with ideas is where we’re working now.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Now as you start to scale and people become more aware, obviously you’re going to have competition, but the other piece you’re going to have, probably even early on, is that criticism.
Ooshma Garg: Absolutely.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right? You’re not doing this right or that right. You’re not servicing this model versus that.
Ooshma Garg: Sure.
Poornima Vijayashanker: And it could come from anywhere.
Ooshma Garg: Yeah.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right? It could come from behind this couch right now. How have you dealt with that or was there a recent experience that you’ve had to deal with it?
Ooshma Garg: Right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Ooshma Garg: Absolutely. It’s no fun at all. We’ve certainly had our moments where the press has said, “Is Gobble still alive?” And just sort of joked about our journey and the time it’s taken to grow. Especially because we didn’t change the name.
Sometimes companies change the name and have different ideas, but we’ve just stuck it through and I liked the name and I liked the mission and we kept it moving. I think an early lesson that I learned was to compete with myself and not with others.
I think I’m my own harshest critic anyway. It’s not nice when it comes from the outside, but all founders and CEOs, and I think people, need to continue the practice of not basking in all the compliments and also not just curling up in a ball at all the criticism. And really developing the ability to listen very closely to your inner voice and your compass and say, “Hey, did I do something wrong? Or did I do my best here?” That is what should really determine how you feel about yourself and your emotions.
Poornima Vijayashanker: As you were getting this criticism, you were probably also getting a lot of rejection, especially with fundraising.
Ooshma Garg: Yeah.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right?
Ooshma Garg: It’s so glorious all this startup stuff. It’s so exciting. Rejection everywhere.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. How did you deal…I think you went back to the investors that rejected you, right?
Ooshma Garg: Right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: For series A?
Ooshma Garg: Right. Absolutely. It’s so important to know that if you really love your idea, you’re going to talk to the same people over and over. Silicon Valley is very small. It might not be the right time for someone to invest and you’re going to be really upset about it because you need the money and you feel like they should invest. But I’ve found that we’ve pitched the same investors like three, four, five times and seed different series A attempts and then maybe even for future fundraising attempts. It’s so important to be gracious and courteous when someone says no.
Because you just never know. That might be the person who really saves you or wants to work with you down the line.
Poornima Vijayashanker: It’s totally OK to go back even after they’ve rejected you.
Ooshma Garg: Absolutely, absolutely. I think that ego so often gets in the way of success.
Being able to deal with rejection and just not take it personally, stay in touch with people that say it might not be the right time right now. That’s important. Like I said, it just maintains your options for the future.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Well, thank you so much Ooshma. This has been a lot of fun, I’ve learned a lot and I know our viewers have as well. Any final words of wisdom for our audience out there?
Ooshma Garg: Yeah. I think it’s just important to take that first step.
People get very daunted and they think starting a company is this big deal, but we need more entrepreneurs, we need more creativity. I think if you can just pare it down to what would the first step be to explore this idea, then that would be my advice to folks. Meanwhile, I’d want them to eat well, so we made this code Femgineer 17. Femgineer 1-7. And everyone who is in your followers can get a free box of Gobble which is a whole week and three free dinners and that’s our best deal.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Great. Well, we’ll be sure to share the code with all of you so that you can make sure you get well fed this week.
Ooshma Garg: Awesome. Thanks for having me.
FemgineerTV is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
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