Starting any business is scary. Starting any restaurant business is very scary. It’s expensive to set up, there’s legislative hoops to jump through, location and menu are critical (and it’s tough to do market research before making the leap) and quality standards have to be maintained. Finally, consumers are fickle so even if it’s initially successful you can’t rest on your laurels. Surely you can only start by jumping in head first at the deep end?
机 jī opportunity
To the contrary, my colleagues Ryan and Colin (thanks guys) told me about Boston-based Clover Food Labs, a startup that has cunningly overcome these challenges. Instead of committing to a site and launching a concept blind Ayr Muir has taken a more creative approach. First, he took a job in Burger King solely to learn. Once ready to go it alone, he decided to keep location flexible and costs low by opening a food van. Muir tries different locations and menus with the goal of homing in on the right restaurant format. Everything that Clover Food Labs does is in Beta (hence Labs) – it has taken some clever design to be so flexible. For example, the truck itself is a giant whiteboard enabling Muir to edit menus instantly (see the image below). In addition, Clover is completely open with the public – publicizing the bad stuff (see Muir’s Great Sandwich Disaster post here) in addition to the good stuff. The open experiment approach seems to be working, I read that the van sells out often and mistakes seem to be less frequent – maybe Muir’s homing in on his restaurant format – it will be interesting to see if he can give up on the flexibility his van yields…
How About…
- Starting small to learn? And staying in Beta forever?
- Questioning every sacred cow?
- Being totally transparent (even the bad stuff) to shorten the feedback loop and create a real dialogue with your consumers?
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here’s a photo Colin took of the stall itself – with menu in progress…
