Eat Treat (startup)

Eattreat was conceptualized as a startup with a vision to cater to the food lovers community in India by offering them varied food related options under a single website.

Problem

• •  There is no one-stop online food destination that caters to the ever-growing needs of the  modern-day consumer.

• • Already existing food websites are very brand centric.

• • There is not much focus on consumer needs and engagement.

• •   Lacks streamlined and topical content.

• • Archaic and neglected User Interface

Product

Eattreat startup was conceptualized with a vision to cater to the food lover’s community in India by offering them varied food related options under one website. The startup was conceptualized as a byproduct of the successful facebook group by the name of Eattreat whereby food related discussions were done and consequently the gap’s were identified in the food industry which could be catered through a website.

Vision

                                   “Our vision with Eat Treat is to make it the

                                    leading India food website.

                                   This is a one stop destination for an India

                                            centric culinary experience”.

My Role

• As a co-founder of the startup, I performed a thorough analysis of the Indian food industry finding gaps, users’ needs and verifying them. The Eattreat Facebook group became a customer needs understanding platform for me and it finally paved the way for me to experience the startup journey. 

• Created Business Plan and presented it to a large pool of Angel Investors, Venture Capitalists and Private Equity investors.

• Devised the vision, strategy and roadmap for the product.

• Created the BRDs / PRDs, wireframes, mockups, flowcharts since there was no product team before the funding.

• Developed the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and released it to select customers for product review.

• Managed the product design, development from idea conceptualization to product launch from 0 to 1.

• Developed product positioning and messaging along with go to market strategy post funding.

• Hired the product and development team from scratch.

• Drove the product branding and promotion via online, social networking sites (SMO), promotional mailers/sms and PR activities through offline media like newspaper, magazines etc.

• Performed business planning, marketing and managed various teams in order to deliver results for the investors, drive future growth and brand recognition.

• Spearheaded a diverse team of 15 employees, including designers, developers, photographers, video editors, digital marketing, sales representatives, and operations staff.

Achievement

• Successful in raising an investment of $350,000 from 15 angel investors.

• Achieved 78% revenue targets in the first year of operation.

Key takeaways

• The startup taught me that as a co-founder I cannot wear only the product manager hat whereas I had to wear multiple hats like marketing, operations, recruiting, editorial, sales etc.

• The startups experience involved a lot of trial and error. This process taught me how to balance the creation of a complete "perfect world" product while understanding what features are required for a successful MVP. Recognizing and learning from the mistakes proved to be a valuable lesson for my personal and professional growth.

• Lots of times decisions need to be made quickly with imperfect data in a startup so this helped me with being comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity and take decisions based on the situation, task at hand.

• It helped me to develop my leadership skills and I learned an important aspect of leadership and that is; you need to motivate and rally a team, even in challenging circumstances.

• It taught me to work with resource constraints since startups often have limited funding and small teams. It required me to be creative and prioritize tasks at various levels to make progress.

• The startup journey often involves pivots, failure, and rejection. So this helped me in building up determination and not taking failure personally.