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      How Co-Founders Of Yuppiechef Bootstrapped And Built A Differentiated Business

      It takes patience to see your vision through and achieve organic growth. Co-founders of Yuppiechef discuss how they bootstrapped their business and grew steadily to build a business that has cornered the market.

      Nadine von Moltke-Todd by Nadine von Moltke-Todd
      Nov 28, 2018
      in Lessons Learnt
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      Vital Stats

      • Entrepreneurs: Andrew Smith and Shane Dryden
      • Designation: Co-founders, Yuppiechef
      • Visit:www.yuppiechef.com

      Yuppiechef was not the first eCommerce site that Andrew Smith and Shane Dryden started. At the time, they were doing marketing and development for clients, and they saw online retail as a way of putting their skills to use on something that they could fully own.

      “We started small,” says Andrew. “We sold bug zapping tennis rackets, country flags and rat traps. Kitchen tools was our ‘next big idea’, although to be honest, none of them were really intended to be big ideas — we just wanted to make enough money to stop selling our time by the hour to other clients.”

      The co-founders had zero start-up capital, so they did all the technical work of setting up the site themselves, and only bought stock after a customer bought from them. “This worked, but very slowly. We only made 11 sales in the first four months, and ten of them were to friends and family.”

      yuppiechef-packagingThe reality is that most businesses are bootstrapped, and they take a lot longer to build momentum and pay the bills than you’d expect. “It was five years before Yuppiechef could support our families, and in all that time we still did work for other clients. Our advice would be to spend as little as possible on the launch, and rather make sure that you give yourself as much runway as possible to keep going much longer than you initially estimate,” says Andrew.

      “We kept thinking there would be a silver bullet that would catapult us into the next level — an article in a newspaper, or a new range of products, or a clever marketing technology. The reality is that nothing individually made a big impact, but collectively it must have all worked, because every year there was steady growth. It takes patience to see your vision through and achieve organic growth.”

      Andrew and Shane knew that customer loyalty towards their brand would achieve organic growth, which was why they focused on adding a special touch to each order from Yuppiechef’s inception.

      “We worked from my lounge and answered every phone call, packed every box and added handwritten notes to every customer who bought from us. This didn’t cost anything, except our time, which feels very free when you’re trying to get a business off the ground.”

      The patience, slow and steady growth and special touches paid off. Yuppiechef has cornered a growing market that is focused on South Africa’s food and cooking culture.

      “We kept thinking there would be a silver bullet that would catapult us into the next level… The reality is that nothing individually made a big impact, but collectively it must have all worked, because every year there was steady growth.”

      Since its inception, Yuppiechef has been all about the personal touch — a simple but powerful differentiator while the business was being bootstrapped.

      Nadine von Moltke-Todd

      Nadine von Moltke-Todd

      Nadine von Moltke-Todd is the Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Media South Africa. She has interviewed over 400 entrepreneurs, senior executives, investors and subject matter experts over the course of a decade. She was the managing editor of the award-winning Entrepreneur magazine from 2010 until 2019, its final print issue. Nadine’s expertise lies in curating insightful and unique business content and distilling it into actionable insights that business readers can implement in their own organisations.

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