Looking Back, Looking Forward

The idea is the easy part. And "easy" is a word I don't like using. Remember when teachers told you math was easy? Or when authors of coding books tell you writing this or that script is easy? Right. Easy for them. Hard for you.

But ideas, sometimes they seem too good to be true. They come quickly, they come out of thin air they come at seemingly no cost, and they're all yours. They're glorious. Especially when they live in your head. Unfortunately, the speed with which ideas come, their Athena-like birth, and their biased insularity also make them temptations to foolishness.

Go ahead, take that idea and do something with it without talking to anyone else about it. See how that goes.  The idea graveyard makes the world's biggest cemeteries look like a studio apartment in Manhattan.

In January 2014, we had an idea. We called it Cookbook Calculator. But rather than spending a lot of time and money taking that idea straight to market, we did something else. We spent that time reading The Lean Startup, reading Running Lean, and reading Thinking, Fast and Slow. We took notes. We shared them with each other. We drew up ways how we could use the lessons from these books in our work.

We took advantage of UNC-Charlotte's Venture Launch program where we focused on identifying our customer before we even had a product. Every week teachers, classmates, and potential customers questioned our idea and our business model forcing us to better define our business and who our customers would be.

Next Queen City Forward, a Charlotte-based incubator, accepted us into their ImpactU program. They continued to put our feet to the fire. Here we pivoted and became Giusto, dropping the parts of Cookbook Calculator that users didn't respond to and keeping the part to which they did respond, in particular, a shareable food profile.

That summer Sophia Smith, a rising junior at Davidson College, joined the team and immediately made an impact. She set up our website and did a lot of great research, but more importantly, as a woman on the team she gave us greater credibility with her perspective, her insight, and her candor. 

In September, Davidson College asked us to cook for the student body. We prepared a meal in honor of our time cooking for acclaimed NYC Chef Michael White. That night Sophia introduced me to Becca Rinkevich, a Davidson senior. Adah Fitzgerald, a former science teacher at The Woodlawn School, also helped out that night and started her time at Giusto as head of testing. Shortly thereafter, we met Nauman Bukhari at an art opening and took him on as our first CFO. Charlie Toder, the manager of Davidson Beverage Company, has started a "best beers for big games" blog for us. And thanks to great work from Toronto's Phuse and Austin's CabForward, we now have a Minimal Viable Product; one that we've already learned a lot from, one that already has over 140 users.

For as proud as I am of the product, I am far more proud of our team and our advisors. It is a group of people who bring unique and insightful input to every meeting and conversation we have. They are all in. They take pride in their work. They work as hard as I do and, as a founder, what more can you ask for? They have not only helped bring an idea to fruition, but have given the idea credibility by backing it with their time, effort, and voices. 

While my motivation as founder is to see the idea through, it has become more than that. I want to see my team members succeed. I want Nomi's parents back in Pakistan to be proud that he's in America doing well. I want Adah's kids to go to good schools because she can pay for them to do so thanks to her work at Giusto. I want Charlie to publish an e-book of his articles at the end of 2015 so he can move up in the craft beer world.

2015 poses serious challenges. Can we correctly fix our user experience issues? Can we establish working partnerships with groups that can build up our user base? Can we turn that traction into investment, or, even better, profitability?

2015 also has a lot to look forward to. We hope to dive into A/B testing. To roll out new updates to Giusto that make it more user friendly in response to the testing we've done thus far. To do more testing. To launch blogs about specialty foods and caregiving. To offer an API to partner groups to drive user acquisition and revenue. And to finish reading The Founder's Dilemma. 

I look forward to these challenges. The Giusto Team looks forward to these challenges. It is an exciting time.

Happy holidays and all the best in 2015!

Randall Mardus
Founder, Giusto