Okay, Nomster Fam. I have been on the fence about posting this post for a while because I do think it could be genuinely helpful to other people, but it also is one of the more vulnerable things I’ve done. Many of you wrote to me saying you’d like to read it though, so I’m going to put on my brave pants and do this for you.
In my Goodbye announcement, I wrote that I would do a blog post on “why I think I failed,” which prompted several emails telling me “you didn’t fail!” What I meant to say is that I don’t think that I personally failed, because Nomster Chef was such a positive thing for me. But, when you take a look at the dollars and cents of it all, the company failed (no wiggle room for interpretation there). Statistics were not on my side- did you know that 50% of small businesses fail within 5 years? In Silicon Valley, startup founders fail so often there’s even a conference they can attend to commiserate.
After much reflection, I think it came down to 4 main issues:
Product-Market Fit
The unpaid social media marketing landscape changed during the course of the company
I didn’t have enough $ for paid marketing
Not enough people on my team for a resource-intensive product
Product-Market Fit
I absolutely stand by my product- cooking with Nomster Chef illustrated recipes is very fun! Chef sets for kids is a great gift! I think we all can agree that anything we can do to get kids in the kitchen is awesome for health, learning, and bonding time with family. Whenever I would tell people about Nomster, they would react very enthusiastically. The idea of cooking with kids is very appealing.
But, as I learned, there was a gap between people loving the idea and people paying to have that experience for themselves.
I think there are two main reasons I never found what business-types call “product-market fit”:
People do not like to pay for media of any kind, regardless of how awesome it is.
For many people, cooking with kids on a regular basis is more aspirational than realistic.
#1. People do not like to pay for media of any kind, regardless of how awesome it is.
As many media creators have lamented before me, no one likes to pay for content they can get for free. Most people are willing to pay for only a handful of content subscriptions like Netflix or the New York Times. It is asking people a lot to sign up for another subscription, especially one where the amount of content is hilariously small compared to an everything-under-the-sun service like Netflix. I could have chosen to offer the content for free to get more subscribers and then figure out how to monetize later (a la Facebook etc.), but I was hoping to bring in much-needed cash flow from the beginning. So, I set up a subscription service to get access to illustrated recipes.
I probably could have done a better job describing the value proposition (i.e. why people would pay for a recipe when there are gazillions online for free). Everyone that ever used a Nomster illustrated recipe loved it, but for people who had never experienced it, it was hard to describe why it was different. I thought I could offset this unwillingness to pay for media by offering physical products as well, which I still think is a sound strategy, but I never really had enough web traffic to prove this out (more on that later).
#2. For many people, cooking with kids on a regular basis is more aspirational than realistic.
It is so. hard. to make time to cook with kids. Families have so many time constraints and asking them to cook with kids was asking them to shift habits. It is extra hard when you’re launching a new product that doesn’t neatly fit into a customer need. My solution was more abstract: families want less picky/more healthy eaters and more fun time together, but admittedly it’s a lot to ask of parents to figure out the logistics (picking a recipe, grocery shopping, finding time when someone’s not having a meltdown, etc.).
In the reference frame of a Silicon Valley platitude: Nomster Chef was a vitamin, not a painkiller. It did not, and could not, solve families’ biggest problems around food. (Which, I can tell you from interviewing a lot of parents and researching about this topic, are things like meal planning, making time to cook, picky eating, lack of quality family time in general). I learned in grad school that when you’re trying to sell a product that involves a habit shift from your customers, it’s an uphill battle. That was a design flaw inherent from the beginning, and I think it made people less likely to want to pay for Nomster Chef.
I maybe could have found a different market that the product would have fit into. I realized late in the game that a lot of people signing up for accounts were actually grandparents, not parents, but it was too late to shift my strategy. I did think about shifting my market from parents to customers who were more willing to pay for cooking-related content, like schools, for example. However, I knew from attending an EdTech grad school program and EdTech startup incubator, selling products into K-12 schools is not for the faint of heart either, especially when your subject matter doesn’t line up neatly with the core curriculum (math, reading, etc.).
Nomster was originally designed for preschool-age, but selling something to preschools is time consuming since there are few national chains and a lot of independent care providers. I also thought about creating in-person afterschool classes, which is an established market and wouldn’t require a habit shift, but it’s really hard to scale things like that beyond just me teaching 10 kids at a time.
I thought of probably a dozen other formats for Nomster Chef. Bottom line: I could have kept searching for a product-market fit and pivoting my strategy, but ultimately that required more time than I was able to give.
The Unpaid (“Organic”) Marketing Landscape Changed
A very hard lesson to learn was the old cliche “it takes money to make money.” Or to throw another adage into the mix, “If a tree falls in the wood and there’s no one there to hear it…”. I needed more money to advertise, and I just didn’t have it. I have so many thoughts on this topic: I’ll break it into marketing strategies I tried and a word on the funding situation. Here’s my overall big learning though, for those that want the cliff notes: if you’re considering starting a small business, you will exhaust your personal network very quickly. Unless you get very lucky, you need $ for marketing to make your company succeed.
Also, I should note that I was very much learning on the job when it came to marketing. In fact, I went to one of the country’s best communications schools for undergrad and never took a single marketing class because I thought trying to sell things to people was icky. I quickly learned that if I wanted to have my own business, I was going to have to get very good at this icky business very quickly (and frankly, I’m not sure I ever got that good at it!).
Organic Social Media Marketing on Instagram/facebook
Many years ago I worked for a preschool app startup that had no marketing plan, and predictably it failed even though our content was fun and educational. I wasn’t going into this completely blindly; I knew I would have to make some effort on this front. When I started Nomster Chef in 2016, I was reading a lot of bloggers (cough cough) that assured me that if I just knew the right things to do on social media, I would get followers, web traffic, and $, without having to pay for those things. So, I set out to make really cute and delicious recipes to post on the blog and on social media, and waited for the profit to roll in.
Ha.
Ha. Ha.
In those bloggers’ defenses, I do think that relying solely on unpaid advertising might still have been possible in 2016. Way back in the dark ages, Facebook/Instagram did make it possible for business accounts to gain traction by just posting great content. Over time though, the algorithm changed. Even though I had 2000+ followers on Instagram, I don’t think more than 200 people were seeing any given post.
Why? Short answer is that as soon as you sign up for a business account (which lets the business see more analytics, run ads on their account, etc.), Instagram wants you to pay for people to see your posts.
Longer answer is that there are ways to get a broader reach without paying, using a method which I call “feed the beast.” Instagram is notoriously secretive about things you can do to increase your posts’ reach, but I understand that the two biggies that increase your own exposure on Instagram are 1.) consistent posting and 2.) commenting on other accounts. Meaning- you have to post very regularly, and not just on the main grid: Stories, IGTV, Live, you have to be doing it all, all the time. You have to comment/DM on other people’s posts and stories, and be very diligent about responding to comments/DMs on your account.
If it sounds like it takes a lot of time to do those things, it does. My social media interns were awesome, but they only had so many hours they could devote towards these efforts. People I know that have large Insta/FB followings spend multiple hours every single day tending to their accounts. Another big change was when Instagram shifted away from showing posts to users in a strict chronological order. Instead, they try to predict which posts you find most relevant based on which posts you’ve liked in the past. So, followers who were not double-tapping every Nomster Chef post likely had our posts disappear from the feed, even if they were still interested in our content.
We did have temporary success by doing Facebook Live videos with my amazing kid chef volunteers Lucas and Joshua. I’m pretty sure this is because at the time (2017-2018) Facebook was trying to encourage more people to use Facebook Live, so it was prioritizing live videos in the feed. That meant that people were seeing the posts without me having to pay to boost them. Alas, Facebook changed the algorithm after a while, and our videos went back into obscurity.
Also, I think that back in the day (oh 2015, so long ago), Instagram was still a relatively new service and not completely mainstream. A lot of these blogger-types that had success were rewarded for having the first-mover advantage. They built their large followings when Instagram first started and when it was easier to do so. For those of us later in the game, it’s harder. I have seen this same pattern on many new mediums- the few successful independent kids’ app companies in the iTunes Store today were very fast to put an app out when the store was launched in 2008.
Pinterest is thought of by marketing-folks as more of a visual search engine than a social network, for good reason. And it can be very powerful for people who know how to use it well. But again, it is not a place that is exactly lacking in recipe content, and it was hard to stand out. I did actually get contacted by Pinterest’s salespeople because they had identified Nomster as a business account that could get good results on Pinterest, but they were interested in helping me set up promoted (paid) pins. When I said that maybe I could try to scrape together $500/month for a campaign, I never heard from them again (ha!).
Influencers
One thing my Nomster interns helped with was influencer outreach. We learned very quickly that even if they have a relatively small amount of followers (10k+), most influencers treat their influencing like a job (which, I don’t knock them for, it is definitely work). The going rate I’ve seen: brands pay $100 for every 10,000 followers someone has for one main grid post on Instagram. Stories, cross promotion on Facebook/Twitter, etc., cost more. We just couldn’t pay for posts.
I did work with some very generous influencers who were willing to promote Nomster (or my cookbook) in exchange for free product or just because they supported me or my mission. (Thanks to you awesome folks!). I learned the hard way though, that Influencer posts are more akin to traditional PR hits than you might think.
Sure, it is theoretically possible that people will “swipe up” or “tap that link in our bio,” but many people are using Instagram as a more passive experience. When I think about the products I personally have purchased because I’ve seen them featured by an influencer, I usually heard about them 3 years ago, then kept hearing about them over and over before I purchased. For every product I’ve purchased immediately, there are 20 products that I’ve saved to a Pinterest board for future reference and never purchased. I’m guessing that this is true for other folks too. In this way, I actually think Instagram is much more like old-school media than people think, where you have to see something 7 times before you’ll consider purchasing. For Nomster, even when we got great Influencer love, the ROI in terms of subsequent sales was not there.
We also tried things like partnering with brands and influencers to do product giveaways. You know the kind: posts that say “follow these 17 brands, tag friends in the comments for more entries, etc.”. Even when we were partnered with accounts that had big followings, we would see a temporary spike of several hundred followers at first, but after a few months our follower count would slowly creep back down to where it was before. And there was never a bump in sales that came from the giveaways.
Organic Web Traffic (optimizing SEO)
I will not pretend to be an expert on SEO (“search engine optimization”). I did my best to “optimize” nomsterchef.com to be SEO-friendly after learning more about SEO best practices. Very quickly though, I realized that this was a fool’s errand based on the keywords that would possibly apply to Nomster. Think of some Google searches that might lead you to Nomster- “cooking with kids,” “recipes for kids,” “picky eating,” etc.. The major media outlets like Food Network or Parents Magazine have those search results covered, and then some.
The highest search ranking I had was “chef knife for kids,” and apparently not many people search for that. The blog posts that generated traffic were related to random recipes- like our Vanilla Bean Mashed Potato recipe because I suppose that is a weird enough thing that not many others have written about. Or, predictably every Easter, we would get a small traffic bump on our Easter-themed recipes. Since my business was centered around a very broad topic, it was hard to overcome this issue.
(Side-note as a counter example: one of my great-uncles runs www.backyardwildbirds.com. Bird feeders is a specific-enough topic that he doesn’t have to do any paid advertising to have a successful e-commerce business).
Newsletter
If any marketing expert has made it this far in my novel, you will likely be dying to say “Ashley, you dummy, your newsletter is what you should have been focusing on, not social media.” And I agree! Having people’s emails is one way to control your own marketing because it is not dependent on any social network or search engine algorithm.
One of the few bright spots in my unpaid marketing efforts was my newsletter. I had fairly good conversion (i.e. out of the # of people on the list, what % opened the email, clicked on links, and bought stuff when there was stuff for sale). The trouble was that I did not have that many people on my mailing list.
I tried doing things that experts suggested, namely having “lead magnets” on my site. The idea is that you would have good content for free on your website, and people just had to sign up for your newsletter in exchange for viewing the content. I had those annoying pop-ups on my site asking you to input your email, which lead people to content around getting kids to eat healthy foods and how to cook with kids.
I also tried optimizing blog SEO and promoting blog content on social media to get more people to the site, in the hopes they would sign up for the newsletter. I think in the end though, it was a numbers game that I lost. There just were not enough people coming to my website.
Which is a good segue into…
Funding
The trouble with all of my marketing efforts is that I did not have enough people at the top of my marketing funnel to trickle down to a profitable business. How could I have gotten those people? Paying for traffic via Google Search and paid social media posts.
Generally speaking, I would get about 1,000 unique visitors to the site every month, which is not nothing, but not enough. On the months that I would spring for a small amount (~$2/day) of Google Search Ads, that would increase to about 2,000 unique visitors a month. Even if I did everything right, it’s generally accepted that only about 2% of visitors to a site buy something, and I just didn’t have enough visitors to make the math make sense. (Note: this conversion rate varies by industry, cost of your product, and lots of other things, but 2% was a # that kept coming up in my research). I did small-scale experiments with Facebook advertising, but I think I didn’t understand how to use it well enough to see much impact.
Trying to use unpaid marketing to bring people to my website didn’t work. Talking to friends of mine who know things (i.e. that are a part of startups or work in marketing), I’ve heard that it takes somewhere in the range of $5-10K a month for a direct-to-consumer e-commerce company to have a legit marketing strategy. That’s just for the amount that you pay Facebook, Google, and the rest to promote your content. That does not include the salary of a marketing expert that knows how to use that budget effectively, or the salary of the person creating the actual content you use in your marketing. As that sort of budget was not in the cards for me, it seems clear to me now that unless I got seriously lucky, Nomster was probably never going to succeed.
Why didn’t you go get some $?
The obvious solution to this problem was to go get more money. I received $10,000 from an EdTech Startup incubator, which was basically enough to cover startup costs. I raised almost $14,000 from a Kickstarter, which helped me to build out the content on the Nomster Chef website. Each of the 3 years in business my husband and I contributed about $10,000 of our money to cover general operating costs. I recognize that I am very lucky to have even that amount to try to start a business, as for many people that is not in the cards. But to have the kind of marketing budget that I really needed to have, I would have needed $60-120K of additional funding per year. Clearly there was a large gap between those numbers.
There were 4 alternate funding sources I considered: Venture Funding, Loans, Media, Partnerships.
Venture funding
Since I started the company as a project at Stanford and continued it in an EdTech incubator, the first idea I had was to pursue venture funding. (Sidenote: someone said to me once, “You went to Stanford, aren’t you just like super connected to VCs” which was not my experience at all being in the Education school as opposed to the Business or Engineering schools where everyone thinks they’re the next Zuckerberg. I digress.)
I had more than a few hesitations about this path. First, I myself was not really sure if this was an investable business, meaning, if someone gave me an investment, could I return their investment in several multiples of profit? Second, the VC funding world got a lot more cautious around the time I was starting Nomster. Whereas they used to pay $1 million for an app that just said “Yo” to your friends, even early-stage angel investors in 2017 were looking for much more of a proof of concept than I had. Third, once you have investors, you suddenly have a lot more people that can control your company and that put pressure on you to make revenue quickly, which was intimidating.
And, this last reason is one I’m not particularly proud of, but it’s true: it seemed like an uphill battle since I’m a woman. Something like only 7% of female-founded companies that try to raise VC $ get investment from VCs, who are overwhelmingly male. (That statistic is several years old now but I’m guessing it has not changed much.) It is notoriously even more difficult when you’re pitching a product that is primarily aimed at women and children, which describes Nomster Chef. I know that it’s not impossible, in fact I had an excellent example in my own life: one of my female grad school classmates has successfully raised several rounds of VC funding (her meditation trainer product just launched!). But, I was hearing a voice inside my head saying that trying to get VC funding is a really difficult process for everyone (guys included) and it was going to be even more difficult for me, so why bother? (And yes, I should take this opportunity to acknowledge that besides being female, I do not come from any other underrepresented backgrounds and I know it is even harder for other folks). Yes, I know I should Lean In, but also, I didn’t want to be a martyr.
Loans
I could have taken out a small business loan, but I was not comfortable risking my future family’s financial stability on my business. When I watch episodes of Shark Tank and see entrepreneurs say they’ve drained their 401(k), it gives me heart palpitations. I just am not comfortable with that level of risk. You do you.
Media
Another path I tried was pitching Nomster Chef as a preschool TV series, because if I was successful, then the media networks would foot the bill to produce the concept. I previously worked in preschool TV so I had some contacts and got some pitch meetings as a result. As you can imagine, it’s a pretty competitive process, and so it didn’t work out. But I tried!
Partnerships
And a final path I pursued was being more of a business-to-business services company where I would create kids cooking content for other corporations. I had a few interesting meetings that, had a deal gone through, would have been a life-changing moment. Alas, none of them happened. I did sign one licensing deal with another startup that went out of business just as their product was preparing for a big-box-store launch. So close, but no cigar.
(P.S. Jeff Bezos, Nate Nomster would look really cute on displays at Whole Foods, just saying).
Team
It is a well-known fact that Venture Capitalists almost never back “solopreneurs” because the odds are already stacked against those companies. I was the only full-time employee at Nomster Chef. I worked with amazing contractors and interns, and literally could not have taken Nomster as far as I did without them. But, I think I could have gone further and faster with full-time partners.
The first thing the mentors at my EdTech incubator wanted me to do was find a co-founder. It’s not as easy as it sounds though! You have to find someone that believes in the company mission, has a complementary set of skills to yourself, that you get along with, and who is willing and able to work for free for a long while. For a lot of prospective startup founders, they do a lot of very intense dating to find their people. I unfortunately never found my princess or prince charming. I for sure would try to do this differently when I pursue my next brilliant company idea.
Being a solopreneur was especially challenging in a content-creation business, which by nature requires a lot of hours. Each recipe took about 1-2 days to concept and cook, 3-4 days to illustrate, plus more time to receive and address feedback from consultants and recipe testing families. Trying to make the illustrated recipes while also managing social media content while also running a business was challenging and slow to do by myself.
In Conclusion
Wow, this was many more words than I thought it would be. You deserve a gold star if you made it all the way to the end. I hope it was helpful, or that you learned something! Frankly, I still think I would have made some of these same mistakes even if I had read this blog post at the beginning because I was a very over-optimistic first-time entrepreneur. Sometimes the only way to learn is to fail. I think this post has proved to me how much I did learn in 3 years of trying to make Nomster Chef a successful business.
I am so very grateful I had the opportunity to try. Thanks for being a part of my journey.
Xoxo,
Ashley
P.S. I would love to learn if this echoes your own experience, or if you disagree with any of my conclusions, or any other feedback. I’m ashley @ nomsterchef.com- please be nice!
P.P.S. I am looking for my next career adventures, you can find me at www.ashleymoulton.com
Postscript 3/31/20
Days after I posted this, most of the schools in the US were shut down due to Covid-19 and Nomster Chef began seeing unprecedented site traffic. So, for the time being, I’m sharing Nomster content from the archives to help families who are looking for something fun to do with kids at home. I’ll probably need to write a whole new post to update what I’ve learned from this time, but for now, Nate Nomster rides again!
