In this episode of thinking on thinking, Kahran talks to Dina Holzapfel about building a food business with her life partner — and the intricacies of what you gain when you sell your business. Lessons learnt from a long journey of entrepreneurship, and much more.
You can find more about Dina on LinkedIn or on Instagram.
The amount of time that you spend together as business partners has this dilutive effect on the quality time that you can actually achieve together as a couple.
When you're starting something, the naivety is what gets you going. If you knew how hard it was, you probably wouldn't start.
Hi, I'm Divya. Hi, I'm Karyn. And this is… Thinking. I'm thinking.
I am Dina Holzapfel. I call myself German-American, but it's becoming kind of a term that's weird, because I was born in Germany, but I only lived there for seven years, and I left as soon as I could. I grew up in the US, but I don't have an American passport, so I have all this American kind of vibe in me, but I've also not been living in America for over 20 years now. I currently live in Switzerland after having lived in the Netherlands and studied in London. I recently sold our cookie business, even though I am an environmental engineer turned petroleum engineer, turned all sorts of other things — who worked on oil rigs in Iraq also, if I remember correctly, right? And now I'm starting a new adventure, while also becoming a psychologist and probably pursuing a PhD in a couple of years when I decide to have some kids.
So if you manage to spell my last name, you can find me on LinkedIn. I will unlikely respond to you within any reasonable time, because I basically stopped using it, but it is a fun kind of database of people to have on reference. I'm probably most active on Instagram, where I share only what I feel like. You can find me there under a handle called I am Sparkles the Unicorn, which is to be taken as seriously as it sounds.
And yeah, I'll share my new venture.
Should we decide to really go through with it very soon? So, maybe I'll use this as a good lead-in. So, Zumura, as your business partner, your everything you said before we started, why is he not here with us?
How did this happen? He wasn't in the mood. He didn't feel aligned to record a podcast. And yeah, when we were chatting beforehand, I think this is a perfect example of how,
when you're working with somebody, you're not always in the same line. And even if there's a good reason that you see to do something, whether it's fun or purpose or whatever, you can't always get the other person on board.
And sometimes you can still go ahead and have a fun time and sometimes the opportunity dies there. But that's definitely one of the big factors of closely working and building a company with somebody else. Yeah.
Yeah. And 'cause in your case, you're building a company with your life partner as well. So, it's like, it's a double intersection. Yeah.
And you guys have like really gone through some big decisions, right? Like my understanding is, did you shut down your company? Or did you sell your company? We sold you.
You sold your company. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. Are you excited about it? I'm so thrilled.
It was the best decision. Okay, good. So like were you in alignment on the decision? I think we weren't alignment on the fact that we didn't want to continue in the way
that we were operating. I think we kind of came to that conclusion after kind of workshop week that we did last summer. And then I had the idea that instead of just shutting down, we could sell the most valuable part of the company,
which was our cookie business. And then we made it happen, which was just magical. And so we just closed the deal last month. So did you package it up as a separate company? And then you sold that?
Or did you just sell the-- We basically packaged it as a brand. I see, I see. So the company itself is selling our ownership and we stopped doing everything we didn't want to do anymore.
And we sold the brand of a Smiqql Cookies. Got it. To another bakery in Zurich. Amazing. And did they get to have the salts with it?
They have non-exclusive access to the recipes to create the flaky salts that are sprinkled on top, along with exclusive access to all the recipes that we created for the cookies and all of our B2B customers and all the tangible and intangible assets
that went along with the business. And now it's completely out of our hands. I just placed an order for an event with them for the cookies. It's a beautiful moment.
And to know you will not be making them? No, it was somewhat of an accident that this cookie company even came into existence, let's say. The company that we sold it to is led by an amazing woman who has a vision of this vegan Scandinavian style bakery
that she wants to build up here in Switzerland. And she's been a fan of the cookies, basically since we started. And it was a perfect alignment of her adopting this additional product into her portfolio
and really being able to also bring it to a wider audience in a way that we weren't capable of in both our capacity and what we actually wanted to do. So it's the best outcome for absolutely everybody involved and all the cookie fans, I can now send to all the beautiful
new locations, they're being sold at in Zurich. Like it's really, really awesome. That's really awesome. Yeah. Maybe, I mean, I know this story,
but I think it's an interesting story. So maybe just expand a little bit more where you said it was an accident that the cookie business happened. Like what did you mean there?
So we founded the company about four years ago, just before Corona hit. So it wasn't a Corona story, but it became a Corona story. In my senses, you kind of founded it. You were first working on it full time, right?
And then we're not joined you or is that not fair? No, not so much. I think it was more that I turned 30 and I was up for a new adventure and we're at an opening to start a new adventure too.
And I suggested that we do an adventure together. And the original kind of origin story of the company was that I really love spicy food and we're at can't handle spicy food at all. And I was looking for a way to make my food spicy
and delicious while leaving his food in the way that he likes it. So I could put the same thing but have it my way. It started with a very intense flavored chili oil that I created.
And then from the chili oil, it became a flavored flaky salt. So the chili oil was just you? The chili oil was you playing around trying to find a solution to my personal problem.
Interesting. But even at that point, you had found packaging and vendors because you produced the chili oil, right? We never produced it for sale.
I produced it quite a bit and I gave it to all my friends and family and anybody who had kind of tagged along. I kind of, we kind of used it as an interesting kind of marketing exercise in the beginning.
It was around Christmas. I think we shipped out like over 100 bottles, like little bottles of chili oil to kind of assess like what people think. Then obviously we spent a while digging into
how do you even make a food product 'cause neither of us come from the food industry. And it was actually a little bit of a tricky product to create at scale. Then I had obviously a fan of flaky salt
and then I discovered this Australian flaky salt that totally blew my mind. And then one day I kind of combined the oil with the salt and I was just like, wow, now I have two on one. And then I created a range of other flavors
together with Merit, which were some were spicy and some were not spicy. And then we thought this was a cuter product to kind of start with because it was an easier product to produce.
It was more inclusive that it had, was not only for people who liked spicy food. And we came up with a really fun branding around this concept of, you know, adding a sprinkle of Smiqql to your food.
And then actually the cookies started because when we launched it was September 2020. So we were still like in deep corona territory. There were lockdowns. It was kind of tricky to actually get this product
in front of customers physically. So I started doing some markets that were running. And my logic was that nobody is going to a Saturday market looking for salt, but everybody's always up for an American style triple chocolate cookie.
It's not that easy to find an American style triple chocolate chip cookie in Switzerland. We had created these two different flavors of flavored flaky salt that were designed for sweets. So it was like, you know, try this cookie
with this flavored flaky salt that has orange cinnamon and cardamom in it. And try this other one that's a little spicy, that's flavored with lavender blossoms and not almond and lemon and chili.
And then what I just didn't expect was that people would come back week after week, after week for cookies. People would be able to consume such a higher amount of cookies than salt.
So I learned a lot about consumption and consumer life cycle. How many cookies do you think you peaked at per week? It's hard to say, but I think on average, like the first year I think I made about 7,000 cookies from my home kitchen, I estimated at the end
and that was horrible. So then we moved into a production facility and then we kind of decided, okay, if we're going in all properly, we're gonna do this with a little bit more purpose.
And we started, we worked with a local chocolate maker. The chocolate world is a whole deep world as well. Once you get into the theme to bar movement and ethics of cacao and all that. The only made one variety of cookie,
which was a vegan and gluten-free cookie. So we're like, we're just gonna have the most inclusive cookie that we could create. And then we made tens of thousands of cookies a year because we got all these, yeah, was for B2C and B2B.
It was a lot. Food production is a lot. And then a nice thing about launching a food product in Switzerland is that it's supposed to have a good understanding of what the value of food really is.
Like the average prices of food here are considerably higher than in neighboring European countries. So you can charge what product actually costs, especially as a small company, but your margins at the end of the day
are still absolutely terrible. Like what would you do, like would you say that, what would your average selling price be for a cookie? So at the end, 'cause we increased our prices year after year,
but at the end, we sold a cookie between five francs and six francs 50. So you can kind of translate that one to one to dollars. I see, okay. So it's definitely, I mean, it was a premium product,
for sure. Yeah, farmers market cookie. New York City farmers market cookie, for sure. And so one of the hypothesis as we had when starting the season was that it would be less lonely
for co-founders. But I feel like in your business, it was still kind of lonely, right? 'Cause you were doing a lot of the production by yourself, or was Merat also part of the production?
I mean, interesting part about the way that we built the company was that Merat was living between Amsterdam and Zurich. So he spent the biggest chunk of his time here, but he was often also still in the Netherlands.
So sometimes, I did have to do a production by myself, and sometimes he had to do a market by himself too, if I wasn't around. So I think it's true, the assumption that building a company with a co-founder is less lonely than building it on your own.
Like my first entrepreneurial project I did on my own, and I found that was quite a lonely experience, definitely. I think it also gives you the partner in every way to move forward of like, just getting through the day,
getting through individual exercises, of also giving you some inspiration in between and also complementing each other. Like Merat was really great at all things branding, for example.
He had a really good eye for branding, and he taught himself all the tools he needed to do our entire packaging design, for example, which is something we didn't initially set out to do. We actually initially looked for a designer, and then the results that they delivered
were just so bad that Merat's like, "I can do this better." Then he talked about it, but he was really great at that. So how that happened sometimes. He was also really great on markets and sales. It's very charming.
Yeah, I think the types of companies that I kind of business models that I would even do alone are, I would definitely not do this type of an intensive business. Like people intensive, or production intensive?
I think if you're building a company that's very digital based, let's say you're selling like an online course or something, I think that's something that you can do alone, and you won't have the same kind of struggles
that you would feel as if you were building a physical product in the world alone. I think something where you're only sharing your own kind of pure wisdom and insight and knowledge is something you could do alone,
and I would go for it, but a physical product in the world, I think having somebody do it with you is-- 'Cause also you went to almost to another extreme, 'cause it's not just somebody, it's the person you live with.
So that's definitely a different category. The lines between running a business and our relationship really blurred, and I think that's one of the best things that we've gotten back since stopping operations,
is that we got back our relationship. I think that's something I also really started craving in the last year of running the business, that I really wanted our relationship back, and I didn't want to constantly simply thinking
and talking about the company all hours, because there's always something to do. And do you think that was just because of where the company was, or like you guys weren't at a place of setting,
these are personal boundaries versus work boundaries, because there was just the company needed so much attention and time? I'm not sure it's avoidable, to be honest. I think if you're maybe really disciplined,
you could find a way maybe, but I think just the amount of time that you spent together just has this dilutive effect on the quality time that you can actually achieve together as a couple. Interesting.
I don't know if you remember this, but my father and I worked together from 2015 to early 2017, and it was really interesting, 'cause he also was this way, right? Like that we would discuss work over breakfast,
we'd discuss work over dinner, we also drove to and from worked in the morning, so in the car, right? And I always blamed him for it a little bit, where I was like, well, this is just you know,
my father brings this real intensity to his work, and he is bringing this intensity sometimes too much, 'cause sometimes it'd be nice to discuss other things. I definitely constantly was, I was thinking about the Business 24/7.
It was very hard for me to separate that from our relationship, and it's also very hard to separate the emotions that you feel towards your business partner from the emotions you feel from your actual partner, you know?
Like, 'cause you're not always happy with your business partner. Yeah. And you know, you want to be happy with your partner, and sometimes it was hard to separate.
So I think this was, it was four years of us working together, I think we learned so much about each other, and we grew with each other individually, and I think we're both very grateful that we had that time together,
and now we're also very grateful that it's over. I think that's the point, you know? I'm sure your father feels the same, I'm sure it was a special piece of like his life that he got to work with his son so intensively,
and I think it's also special that you can carry that experience forward, and you know, you've got that kind of bonus time, but it did last for a... I think our case, it was unfortunately,
it had a little bit of a sad ending, because we ended up shutting down Vidya next, and I think we, you know, everyone kind of hoped that the company would have gone in a different direction than it did.
One thing that stood out to me, after years of working with my father, is that he saw him in a different way. Like there's a way that you see someone as your family member or your spouse or your parent,
but seeing their work persona is sometimes just kind of interesting, but of course with my father, it was very different, 'cause you know, he's 30 years, he'd been working, and he had to really develop sort of like
way he behaves at work, but I'm curious, did you feel that way? Like, did you feel like you saw your work persona that you weren't expecting at all? Yeah, I guess, I think, you know,
I think I saw a work persona in front of customers and clients and, you know, B2B partners that impressed me a lot, right? And I think I saw just kind of like a business partner also in ways that impressed me,
and somewhere I'm like, actually, this isn't the way that I would have wanted my business partner to behave. I think it went both ways, for sure. And for him, definitely too, for him, 100% the same.
I think we saw a lot of angles from each other in a way that we worked. We appreciated it, and so that we didn't appreciate. And I think the company would have a very different company if either of us had done this individually.
You know, the whole company really had the, it was really the result of both of our efforts that went into it. Well, what about doing it with someone else or bringing like a third person in?
Would you ever have considered that? I think bringing a third person in when two people are as close. Live together, that would be tricky. That would be tricky.
But I'm actually working on a new business idea now with someone else. Oh. With a friend of mine who I've known as well for 15 years. I'm not opposed to working with other people.
I think, you know, as I see, I see all the things. Does it, and it kind of almost feels like the way now having had your experience starting something solo and then starting something, wouldn't we, and now you almost look for a partner.
If I can put words in your mouth, it sounded like there were very few scenarios where you wouldn't want a partner in starting a business. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think I was investigating a concept
that I would do on my own and then we had this idea that came about that we both got extremely excited about and we both happened to be in a place also that we could explore this idea. You know, I had the freedom to do so.
So I see these types of things as signs from the universe to pursue, to be honest. Do you want to share anything about it? It's, you know, so I'm the queen of reinvention, right? So I'm going from environmental engineering
to petroleum engineering to venture capital to food entrepreneurship. And now we're exploring a new concept in the wellness space. Wow, that is amazing. So basically at the end of SMCCL,
we kind of, you know, drew our conclusions individually. And I came up with five criteria that a product has to have for which I would ever put in the effort that it takes to build and operate a company again. Incredible, I love this, tell us more.
Yeah. This criteria are number one, I don't produce anything myself, period. Okay. Number two, everything is outsourceable.
So I only add value to the aspects where I really uniquely have value to add. Okay. Number three, it's very easily scalable. Number four, once the product is opened
or like purchased, let's say, it's consumed in one go. So unlike our salts, for example, that are probably still lying around in your cupboard and you still charge very much. I'll get off some salts, yes.
Yeah, I'm sorry about that, you open it and you enjoy it and then it's gone. And if you want it again, you have to purchase it again. And number five, it's easily and naturally integratable into a ritual.
So think of that like something like coffee, you know, that's something that you're regularly consuming. Oh, interesting. So the flaky salt hits some of these. The cookies hit some of these, not all of them.
But yeah, I'm only interested in, 'cause it's, I think one thing that I grossly underestimated with Smickel was the amount of effort it really takes to operate a business, right? 'Cause you imagine concepts as much simpler
in the beginning than they tend to be. So these are my new criteria under which I evaluate if an idea is at all interesting to even think about. And then after that, you can evaluate the actual business potential of the product or, you know, the concept.
So this new wellness concept hits everything very nicely. And I'm not gonna say more than that. We basically opened up a fresh Instagram page, created a dozen images with all these beautiful AI tools that exist now.
Okay. Put it out there and started running an ad on one of these images where it said, "Coming soon to Zurich." Okay. This ad campaign has been performing better
than anything I've ever seen. So I think we hit quite an interesting spot. And yeah, so we're basically, that was another learning from Smickel that we, I think we did this to some extent
that we tried to kind of create a community and create a customer base before we're actually launching. But I don't think we realized how important large numbers are when it comes to this. You know, like you think that a couple hundred people
is a nice number, but actually you need thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. So I think this is a fun project idea we're exploring right now, but then we can actually completely do,
without putting down any real money. You can put a couple hundred bucks into advertising, but we don't have to put tens of thousands into opening up a retail location. That's awesome.
And we can already evaluate this potential. So yeah, that's what we're exploring right now. It's very fun. And if it continues going the way it's going, then it will happen this summer.
What gen AI tools do you use? We use designs.ai to generate the images. Oh, okay. Do you use mid-journey yourself or have you used chat GPT for image generation? I'm trying to journey you a while ago.
Was that the one that you had to connect to your Discord? Correct. And I got very confused and it didn't work for me well. So-- Now you know chat GPT,
you can do image generation in the chat window. Indeed, I still haven't started paying for chat GPT, but I loved it. They released two days ago. Oh, beautiful.
I might start paying for it now. No, so the one they released two days ago, you don't know what to say. Delicious, I love it so much. Actually, I started a second masters now
in psychology and neuroscience. Oh, wow. Because I can't. And the first module is on techniques in neuroscience and it's like reading Chinese, you know?
I mean, I've been out of the academic world for 12 years now since my last masters, but it's also just so much jargon and so foreign from anything that I've subjected my mind to in 15 years.
So I make chat GPT my neuroscience tutor and it's brilliant. Like, I just plug every research paper in there. I'm like, explain this to me like I'm a 10 year old. And then we break down everything.
Oh, that's amazing. Like, it's such a new paradigm of being able to acquire knowledge. It's amazing. Yeah.
I did all of our contracts, all the RNDA's, all of our like the purchase agreement, everything I did with chat GPT. I didn't have a lawyer for anything. It's amazing.
No, it is amazing. And with something like that, like if you use the same chat window, it'll get a sense of what questions you have over time and it should get better about telling you
or at least highlighting the concepts that you'll find more confusing. And then sometimes you spot some things that aren't logical or you actually spot a real mistake that you know about and then you tell it about it
and then it corrects itself and it's good stuff. No, it's very cool. It's really good stuff. That's very cool. Have you used it for like evaluating your ads
or like evaluating your business concept? No. Do you think you could do that? Yeah, it'd be interesting. You could ask it like what kinds of people
it would think would be responding to this or if you felt like one of your ads was being really successful but you wanted to see if you could adapt it to appeal to a different demographic. So if you could see some demographic information,
maybe it was working really well for women 35 to 44 but you wanted to see if you could get it to work well for women 25 to 34, you could ask it to be like, "Hey, can you help me revise this ad in order to be more applicable for this demographic?"
I use it for several like content creation and I find it actually not that great yet there. Some kind of like marketing strategies. I haven't found that to be that great yet. More forgetting it to give you evaluation.
So if you ask it to give you evaluation, it can be better than creation. So like saying what are like 10 ways I could improve this versus saying generate it for me? The generated for me will be hit or miss.
Some of them will work, some of them won't work but like giving you the tools can be really more interesting. So I kind of mentioned in passing, right? My father and I worked together at the next and also kind of in passing, right?
But something I've talked about before on the podcast is I ended up running with the next and then shutting it down. So, you know, at the end of 2018, I shut down with the next and of course, you know,
if only we had predicted the pandemic a little better, perhaps things that have been really different 'cause I'd had a really different story in India during the pandemic. But it definitely took a little while
for I felt like we were at like a normal-ish place, right? 'Cause I think a big part was I didn't realize how much intangible values that my father was getting out of this company, right? It was this way that he was connecting with his sister.
It was this way that he was connecting with this friend of his that was also on the board. And after we ended up shutting it on the company, both of those relationships ended up changing quite a bit for him.
And I just hadn't thought about that, that like, you know, it would have these intangibles for someone for whom the money that maybe they were putting into the company wasn't as much.
So it was just interesting. It was like a whole thing that eventually, we kind of talked about, eventually, I just kind of had to work through by myself and realize that, you know, there's only so much
that you're responsible for other people's experiences, you know, and they would kind of find the ways to make things work if that's what they're looking for. So this is like a long interlude, or introduction maybe, where I was just kind of curious about like,
now that you have kind of taking this choice to not be working with your previous co-founder with your partner as much, do you feel like things have changed? Do you feel like things are different?
Do you feel like there's still kind of questions that you were kind of wondering about? I think we both feel very free. I think we both feel very happy and very free that we let go of something that,
I mean, honestly, it's hard to say it wasn't giving us joy because the truth is we had so many amazing people around us, amazing group of customers cheering us on, but it was just too hard for too little money. We were just not profitable enough
and putting in too much money. I mean, we personally invested so much into this company. Got to a point where we just could clearly see that if we continue like this, we're not going to achieve the life goals that we have as well.
Like we can't raise a family operating a company like this. That's not, I mean, we made our first profit last year, but we didn't pay ourselves a proper salary the whole time, you know? So I think it was like the perfect ending
that we could create. I think we would feel very differently about this if we had just kind of stopped and not sold the cookie business. I think selling that part of the company
was just, we created the perfect end to the story to wrap it all up for us and open up this new chapter. See, this is a moment where I'd really love to ask Murah if he also feels that the selling the company was as pivotal. Maybe I can ask you to speculate.
Do you think for, do you think so? 100%. Murah was ready to just stop. Also, he maybe wasn't looking as much to sell the company. He was ready to just stop.
I'm not sure this was even like something that was, I think it was just an idea that we spontaneously had and they were like, I think we could pull it off. I think it's a very lucky that we were able to sell the company at all.
I mean, I tried to sell it to the next, I couldn't do it. So, and we had some obvious people to buy us and it just couldn't, I couldn't pull it off. So yeah, no, it's very hard to sell a company successfully, especially one where you were,
where you know, a small, very niche space, like you had a brand, but you didn't necessarily, right? You had brand, you had IP in your recipes, you had IP in the salts that you created, but there wasn't really that much tangible
that you could point to because your relationships are your relationships, right? So it's hard for you to say that the customers are gonna keep coming because they knew you. So yeah, the fact that we're able to pull that off
isn't very commendable, it's really impressive, frankly. So I think that, because we were able to end it with that, we ended it with joy and we ended it feeling proud of this time that we spent together doing this. But I totally understand how your father felt with this
and like the connection that operating this company gave him to various people, just the time commitment and whatever that gave him. I think in our case, it's just a little different because we were really both at the point
that we just didn't want to continue living this way. And we were able to wrap it all up in the most beautiful way. And I mean, one consequence of it now is that we are spending a lot more time apart
because obviously he saw this apartment in Amsterdam and I have my place here in Zurich, but I actually think this is wonderful for us because I think we became a little codependent on each other in these years of working so intensively together.
And I think this is really great for us to both have this time to grow individually now and also pursue business ideas individually without someone else's influence. I think that's something that while operating the business,
we probably both were wondering about, like if we didn't have the other person's influence in their opinion of which and how to direct the company, would it be different? I mean, for example, I think that some of the decisions
that I made kept us a lot smaller than maybe maybe could have been, you know? I think one of the big lessons that I learned was that saying yes to every opportunity is not the way forward.
And people tell you this, this is common business advice, but I think this is a lesson you have to learn yourself of what that really means. It's really hard to say no to a customer when you're small, it's so hard.
One of the things that we really leaned into, for example, were these markets, right? We did these markets every week. I think that altogether these markets, it's a very risky activity.
You're highly dependent on whether on holidays, on school holidays, on just the most random factors of whether people show up or not and whether it's a successful day for you or not. And having that commitment for so long
and have done that every week just robbed us of a lot of energy that we could have put into another strategy to grow the business. And also created this community around us of other small businesses
that weren't thinking in this larger scale that gives you the results that we were looking to achieve. So I think, you know, if Murat had made that type of a decision, it's like a different decision that I had in the beginning of starting and committing to these markets,
we could have been in a different place, you know? And I think this is now a fun period for us both to take our individual learnings and put those into our new projects individually and kind of build the business that we want to live.
I think we both have the same end goals, but the way that we like to operate along the way is a little bit different. And I think now we get to lean into that and take our learnings.
So in your new business, are you shaping a different role for yourself than the role that you had at Smickel? Like do you feel like you're picking up different responsibilities or you're choosing to have different areas of focus then? I mean, the business that we're planning on now
really nicely leans into the kind of boring business category, you know? Can you say, what does that mean? It means that it's semi-automatable. It has a very simple operation on which you can add on fun, extra things,
but you could totally operate this whole thing very simply while being on an island halfway across the world. So this is the type of business that I'm currently interested in operating. Instead of standing in a production kitchen at 2 a.m., having baked the 1,000 to a hundred cookie of the thing.
Yeah, I can imagine. Time for a different life. I think the role that I see myself doing is probably similar to what I saw myself doing at the beginning of when we found it, Smickel.
And then we just ended up doing absolutely everything because it was necessary to operate this type of business. And now I've understood that this type of business is not something I'm gonna do again. So it's fun, but it's over.
What was the role that you had originally imagined for yourself at Smickel that you're trying to do now? I think the role that I immediately imagined was like, it was, I mean, I was the CEO of the company. And the role that I imagined was scaling the business
above and beyond to bring Smickel flaky salts and our other products into supermarkets across the world. And also scaling a direct to consumer business with their online shop in a way that would be profitable. And I think what we very much struggled with the most was scale
of operating in Switzerland and the difficulties of expanding a food product in Europe that pretends that it's one market, but it's not because you have to sign up with every local food authority where you want to really operate in.
And that means basically like, even if I just want to have a storage facility in Germany, then I have to sign up with the local food authorities and I'm storing food products in that Wunderstland of Germany. And for that, I need to then found a subsidiary.
And then you get into all the VAT consequences of all of this too, and it's absurd to think about without having a scale of selling tens of thousands of products per month, you just can't. And then trying to operate kind of in like a more remote manner
from your home country, you're so subjected to these random fluctuations in shipping prices where the shipping is higher than the product value itself. It's impossible to break that down. And then you're also in this, you know,
across currency situation with customs and all sorts of... So it's just this, it's very inconvenient for everybody and nothing is left over at the end of the day from a business perspective. So, you know, that's why at some point we're just like,
okay, we're going to focus all our attention in the market that's working the best, which was Switzerland. But Switzerland is a very tiny market. You have 8 million people here which are scattered amongst all these like valleys and towns.
There's not a single city over half a million people, you know? They're only like a handful of cities over 100,000 people. So this is a really small scale. And for food products, you just need a larger scale to operate on.
Well, and if that's the kind of business you want to build and run, then that's the business you want to build and run, right? You don't want to be building a small scale business. You want to be scaling a big business.
So that makes a lot of sense. It was just all a lot more complex than we had, that I had envisioned for sure. 'Cause I was definitely the one who told me about that, I can pull it all off.
So it's interesting that you're, if you're kind of feeling like scaling a business as the challenge that you're really excited about, are you also excited about like that zero to one challenge? Like the kind of challenges of getting a business started
and then, you know, getting from one to 10 and 10 to 100? Or those are like, you'll deal with those, but what you really want to do is... I think that's always been the funnest part for me. This like initiation and beginning part, yeah.
Oh, interesting. I think the operating part is a different beast than this excitement that you have at the beginning of a business, for sure. Interesting.
And then you feel like also kind of when the business is getting bigger and then at the moment, you're really scaling the business. That would also be really exciting too. We're figuring out which markets get into...
Yeah, if the business is successful enough to be worth my time, I think that's my conclusion. You know, I think that like, you're not a charity case unless you're operating a charity. Yeah, but if you're, I don't know,
even like say 10 million in revenue or something, like... Yeah, I think the business needs to support the life and the lifestyle that you want to live and support the goals that you want to have in your life. And only if it really can hit that,
is it worth the effort that you're continuously putting in? I think there's so many other fun things to do in life. And I have a long list of other things that I would like to do. So, you know, you can wrap it up as well
and be like, this was great and this, you know, it happened. But like, we can also move on. I think I learned a lot about the premise of, like, some ideas are super exciting, but understanding, like, it's cute that they're exciting, right?
But is it really worth putting my time into? And I think that's my most critical learning that I'm taking forward from this venture. One of the models that we talk about is this novelty versus reassurance
that depending on where people are, they're looking for different aspects of things. And it kind of sounds like you were building products that were squarely in that novelty place with aspects of reassurance,
but a little bit too much novelty for where you want to be now as you're thinking about kind of the next move. The music is by Akshay Ramu Hali of BTRPT music. Editing is by Beatnik.