A few months back around December of 2011, a couple of guys felt the rush of adrenalin when they bumped into what seemed like a really exciting idea. The result was the birth of Yo! Potato, a food delivery service that lets you order food from ANY restaurant you want and not bother about minimum order or any other limitation. For the first time, we felt we gave the “ease” for people stuck with Pizzas when their taste buds are craving for something from that small Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood.
We were true to the principles of Lean Startup by not wasting away any time in setting up anything other than what was just required to get started. We setup a landing page in a day with the help of Kickofflabs and announced our launch in the most humble way on social media. The first month was mostly the 2 of us taking and delivering orders. We did just 17 orders. We kept growing and we crossed 900 orders last month alone. Some of the top celebrities used our service and we felt loved by everyone. We have received over 15 franchise requests in less than 3 months since our launch. People loved our blogs and newsletters. We were living our dream. The response was overwhelming. We got featured in all the top news dailies.
Many of our customers valued our service so much so that they suggested we charge them so they can order for even a cup of coffee, guilt-free. We did that with 30 days free trial in July and the response has been more than good so far. And then something happened. We ran out of money. We hunted a few friends who pitched in some but they dried up as well. All the VCs we talk to have just one thing to say – “It’s too early for us to participate”. We couldn’t find many angels and the ones we met were not as aligned to our vision as we hoped.
Now, the reason I am writing this is to reach out to all of you and take possible connections to angels who might find Yo! Potato interesting enough to consider investing. Also, we are consider raising small amount of money from a bunch of interesting people like you. Though our fund requirement over 2 years is between 1-2 Cr, we can do with small chunks to keep us going from one milestone to another. Our current burn rate is around 2- 2.5L.
Pls do get in touch with me if you can contribute. My email is krishna@yopotato.com. Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Krishna Chidambaresh Co-founder, Yo! Potato https://www.yopotato.com https://www.facebook.com/yopotato