Crave Cookie

We are a unique business that was experience success during the economic downturn. By using software engineering skills, we were able to distinguish ourselves at a local level and carve out a niche. It's more work than a digital-only product but success is success.

https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/166-sam-eaton-of-crave-cookie

We made over $110k in February! Crave has been seeing growth every month, except for a large dip last November when we were moving to a larger kitchen. I expect that we would have passed 85k this month had the virus not cause a quarantine.

Ready For The Quarantine

We were a delivery-only business from day one. We never relied on a physical location, so naturally we had everything in place once the quarantine hit.

Using Our Own Software for Deliveries

We've never used a 3rd party delivery service like Doordash. Our volume is high enough that it would be very difficult to manage the Doordash drivers coming into our warehouse for a single order. Instead, we are able to send our own drivers out with several orders so the cost is shared across a handful of customers, meaning the customer doesn't have to pay such a high delivery fee like with Doordash.

Our software for managing deliveries is completely custom and we've been improving over time.

We've been steadily growing month over month, but this week has been NUTS!

Lesson Learned? People want to gift our cookies on Valentine's Day.

Now that we know that Valentine's day is so busy, next year we'll launch a dedicated campaign and try to make it more convenient for people to gift our cookies.

We also had a limited flavor available for 3 days this week: Red Velvet White Chocolate.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B8fyN5mg38w/

We discovered a bug, too. Growing pains... Having so many orders open in our admin dashboard actually exposed a huge bottleneck in our code where we were fetching each order from the database individually instead of fetching them all in the same query. Our dashboard was taking 13+ seconds to load and even brought down the site a couple of time. We fixed it and now it loads under a second.

Our previous milestone was breaking $40k, which occurred in the same month. We added new flavor at the beginning of the year so that we had 2 flavors on our menu. This fundamentally changed our offering since we ONLY offered Chocolate Chip before. We also expanded to a few more zip codes.

We partnered with a local coffee shop this week and started delivering cookies to them but have not yet sent an invoice. That should help our next month's numbers.

(NOTE: cash orders make up about 10-15% of our revenue so it won't be reflected in our Stripe graph)

Our revenue has been steadily growing every month. The biggest difference this month was adding a second permanent flavor, the Churro Cookie. It adds a little more variety so customers have more reason to buy multiple boxes. Also, many simply like it better than our chocolate chip cookie (myself included).

The growing revenue is allowing is to expand to more zip codes and serve more customers. Our drivers average 3-4 deliveries an hour.

We'd experiment with limited-time seasonal cookies but we officially launched our second "long-term" flavor—the Churro Cookie. We had done trials with it a couple times and our customer relentlessly asked us to bring it back.

Several customers took to Instagram to let their subscribers know that the "best cookie they've ever had" was now available.

Our post on Instagram announcing this flavor was our most liked post to date. https://www.instagram.com/p/B63yebogqY6/

The little town we started in was just for testing the waters. It was very successful and there was a lot of hype, so we were confident that moving to a denser location would increase sales. We shut down for the month of march so we could moved all our baking equipment and file for licensing in the new city.

We joined some Facebook groups in town and started following people on Instagram who lived nearby. Sure enough some orders started to come in. My sister would bake the cookies, put them in a insulated bag and start delivering to their house. We had 21 orders in the first week.

In one week I put together all the branding, a simple website, and with checkout form connected to Stripe. I also built a simple admin dashboard page that showed order information.

All orders sent a notification to a Slack channel which we used for notifications.

My sister makes the best cookies I've ever had. She was talking to me about her possibly going into business with another family member. Me being a software engineer and wannabe IndieHacker said "NO! We can sell these online!". I bought a domain, signed up for Stripe, and got to work on an MVP.