It's with a mixture of disappointment and resolve that today I’m announcing that I’m winding down Peckish. This decision wasn’t made lightly, but after a lengthy process of discussions with peers and advisors, it seems to be the most responsible and sensible course of action due to a number of factors over recent months.
Starting off on this journey with Peckish I had a clear yet ambitious vision: to change the way we find and order food online, connecting consumers and restaurants in a seamless, efficient, and personalised way. I'm immensely proud of the strides we've taken towards this vision and what we’ve been able to accomplish along the way. However, we've reached a point where the resources required to continue this journey, in both terms of capital and time, is not possible.
One of the challenges we faced was raising the necessary capital required to fuel our growth. Despite our efforts in recent months to raise the €1.5 million we needed to take Peckish to the next level, we fell short. Although we received positive feedback and encouragement from potential VCs and Angels along with further intro’s from both, ultimately, the combination of our GTM strategy, the amount of capital required over the next few years, and the nature of our two-sided marketplace model, presented too high a risk for the investors we engaged with at our early stage. We didn’t get to speak with everyone we hoped to, those we did connect with offered invaluable insights and guidance. We can't always get everything we want, but often we gain what we truly need.
On a personal level, as a solo founder, I naturally juggled multiple roles and responsibilities, from product development and marketing to fundraising and customer development. While I loved this part of it, you do come to realize the value of a co-founder. A partner could have provided complementary skills, shared the workload, and offered a fresh perspective on problems, which could have potentially led to different outcomes. The overall; experience has been invaluable in my personal and professional growth, but it became clear that my skills and energy could be utilized elsewhere in a more productive, and potentially more impactful way.
Finally, the realities of our financial situation played a significant role in this decision. I have been personally funding Peckish over the past few months, and this was not a sustainable course of action. I set a soft and hard targets and deadlines during our investment process but we didn’t hit the mark. It’s a crucial part of the game we’re in, knowing when to persevere, pivot or make the tough decision and wrap it up.
I am so utterly grateful for the lessons I’ve learned - a good few of them I list in detail below, the connections made, and the experiences I’ve had throughout this time. And although this chapter is ending, I’m looking forward to getting stuck into the next one.
“It takes grit”
We raised +€125,000 last year through crowdfunding. The process took a few months and cashflow was tight during the raise. The investment doesn’t come through till the campaign is over, so there were days when we got more investment in on that day then there was money in the account. During the raise we still had staff and wages to take care of. I went to one of our customers, who I had worked with as a waiter previously and asked for a job so I could cover the teams wages. I was working 80-90 hour weeks between waiting tables, running the business and working on the investment. One day during the raise I sat with Dan Kiely, one of Irelands top entrepreneurs, and we spoke for about an hour about business, investment, growth, etc - but I kept checking my watch because I knew I had to cycle across town to wait tables for €11/hr at 5pm. He asked me was there somewhere else I had to be and I told him the story...
The next week there was a European Business Angel Network event on in Cork where investors and startups from across Europe came to talk startups, hear pitches, talks and invest. Dan was a keynote speaker and was asked something along the lines of what it takes to run a business. He said “Grit” and went on to tell how he met me the previous week and how I kept looking at my watch in a meeting because I had to go work in a restaurant immediately afterwards to make sure everyone got paid on time.
Be a chancer
When I was doing early market research with restaurant owners and managers, I built surveys using notes from the book Running Lean - on how to have a mixed of quantitative and qualitative data - but wanted to get a second set of eyes to review the questions to make sure they could get the most accurate and honest answers. I took it to a lecturer in UCC who reviewed surveys for students who were doing their Final Year Projects. In addition to improving the quality of the questions he suggested me to just put a UCC logo on the front as business owners are more likely to help out a local college student then someone trying to sell to them. So I told most **of the business owners that I was studying Food Entrepreneurship and this was part of a project I was doing. This was well before even registering the business, just making sure there was a problem worth solving. When I updated the surveys a few years later in Dublin to get some fresh data on restaurants who weren’t aware of us, I wore my UCC jacket and said I was doing surveys with restaurants on how they were managing in a post COVID era. I remember one instance in a restaurant in Ranelagh, when I walked in the door the manager saw my coming in with an iPad an instantly said “Whatever your selling I’m not interested” and I responded “I’m not one of those guys don’t worry, just doing a survey for my masters” and we laughed about people constantly trying to sell to restaurants.
Be Obsessed
When you get the startup bug, your always reading, researching and thinking. Your brain is going 90. You can’t get to sleep because your thinking of how to solve problems, fix development bugs, how your going to market it, what your looking for in hires, etc. I was always writing notes or recording voice notes to myself at all hours. One of my best early purchases was a whiteboard sheet for €20 on Amazon. I could roll it out and stick it on my walls and constantly write thoughts, brainstorm or write tomorrows to do list.
Being obsessed about the problem is one thing but being obsessed about your customers is another. While I was working with our restaurant partners or targeting new customers, I’d have instagram push notifications setup so whenever they would post anything we’d see it, where it’s a new menu update, if they were running a competition, if they were hiring staff, if they were closed for a staff party, anything. Each time I’d go to meet one of our restaurants, I’d review the menu and check their socials to make sure I’d be walking in the door. If I met any staff, I’d take down their name. We always prided ourselves on standing behind the phrase “think of us as an extra member of the marketing team” when we were creating content and sharing it with them.
Outsourcing - know when to hold um, know when to fold um.
Avoid at all costs if possible. When you outsource a critical part of your internal business to someone, whether it’s a freelancer or a “company” via Fiverr, you loose control and full transparency. If your doing it for the first time then the budget can go over, the deadlines can be missed and if you have any edits to be made the turnaround time can be very frustrating. Figure out how to do it first, a lot of things you can learn in a relatively short amount of time. During COVID I went away to relearn web development by taking various courses and online resources to take more control of the codebase, I did courses on AWS to improve the architecture, courses on social media marketing, whatever I could to reduce to cost of paying someone else to do it.
Now I won’t say to never outsource work, it’s good for somethings like UX UI, animations or admin work - things you either can’t do or don’t have the time do to because operations are racking up. You have to be absolutely clear on what you need and expect. For an outsourced admin role we created last year, I created a full training guide with clear examples in text and video of how we expected the work to be carried out, I gave them access to a separate notion doc with a daily log book to fill out. I like to use the term “idiot proof” when creating proposals. When I did a recent proposal for a UI UX job I created a 40,000 word notion doc cover the 20+ pages I wanted updated with screenshots of each and everything I wanted with references and the designer said “That’s a cleanest brief I have ever seen in my life”.