'Organic' Growth - Story of a small biz owner selling organic food online

Introduction

"Imagine starting a small business with a big dream: to make healthy, organic food accessible to everyone. This is the story of a woman - we spoke to while validating the idea for our product - who turned her passion into a successful small business online. Her journey is rich with insights and strategies that are invaluable for small business owners, particularly those navigating the online world. Let's delve into her story and uncover the lessons it holds."

The journey

The owner, passionate about healthy, organic food, started with a small physical store selling good quality organic cold-pressed groundnut oil that she got produced in a way that she could sell at a reasonable price to her customers while having a good business margin. In parallel she started building an online presence (website) and a community (Whatsapp, Insta, FB). The product quality, customer service, online community fed positively into each other so well that she was able to sustain her business mostly online (using Whatsapp to take and process orders) when she had to relocate her physical to a new place far away from where she started. She added multiple products eventually. There are many aspects that we can takeaway from in this story. Let’s look at it.

Takeaways for the rest of us

1. Assessing business feasibility - The entrepreneur's journey began with a clear vision and a practical approach to pricing and sourcing. She found vendors who aligned with her business model, and chose a location in South Bangalore that promised a receptive audience.
2. Incremental Growth Strategy - Instead of spreading thin her budget on multiple products, she focused on one product for quite some time to get the end-to-end business right. Through the course of her interactions she figured out other organic product her customers had an appetite for.
3. Importance of Online Presence - She had a website from the beginning that showcased her products. This made it easier for her customers to share with others. Being good with creating content for Instagram and Facebook, she made content around healthy organic food. This helped her get leads for her products.
4. Delighting customers - Most importantly, she made sure the product, pricing and packaging delighted the customers who in turn gave her repeat business.

Spotlight on opportunities for expansion

While small and successful, the business has opportunities that it can take advantage of.

1. Marketplace Presence - She evaluated one of the popular marketplaces earlier but found the commission to be high. But not being on any marketplace means not being at the place where customers are searching for a similar product. There are different marketplaces that can be explored. Also at a higher volume the earlier explored marketplace could also be viable no.
2. Automation for scaling the business - Managing the business by maintaining the product and pricing information in an excel sheet is time consuming thus limiting the business scale. Using a software that can help do this easily, efficiently can enable business expansion.
3. Analytics - Manual nature of her business process means there is also very little quantitative customer insights she can draw beyond her anecdotal, qualitative assessments. Such quantitative insights can compliment her qualitative understanding of customers to make better business and product decisions.

Do you have a story you want to share?

As we build ScalePeak, we are also passionate about creating a community of such enterprising small businesses who can learn and help each other. Do you have a story to share in this community? Would be happy to talk.