Cecilia Laseter had thought about starting a charcuterie board company for a long time and decided the perfect time to launch was during the Covid-19 pandemic.
People “want a special treat,” she said. “We wanted to create something that’s an experience for folks that can be delivered to their door.”
Laseter, founder and CEO at Peck Boards, shared her thoughts during an Austin Startup Week session Thursday afternoon focusing on launching during Covid.
Joining her were Kate Herling, founder and CEO of Tandem; Clark Nowlin, founder and CEO of Golden Ratio; and Albert Swantner, a board member at Naturally Austin and co-founder and CTO at Mobile Tech RX. Swantner moderated the panel.
Herling said she had planned to launch Tandem, a water enhancer, a year ago. Delays pushed her back, and then the pandemic began. Though the “stars weren’t exactly aligned … if I kept delaying it, I was never going to launch,” Herling said.
Nowlin launched Golden Ratio, a gold-colored coffee that the company says “tastes like tea, kicks like coffee,” in June.
Although the pandemic made fundraising more challenging, Nowlin said people still are drinking coffee as they work from home and are less likely to want to go to the store to buy it.
At some point, he decided “this actually might be the perfect time to launch,” he said. “We decided to march forward.”
Nowlin is focused on connecting with customers — if only virtually or by phone. He said he’s been “hopping on the phone with our top 80 or so customers” to maintain relationships.
Laseter said many of Peck Boards’ customers buy her product as a gift for someone else, who then in turn buy a board as a gift. “The community is naturally building itself,” she said.
Launching a product in the food/drink industry is a challenge because people can’t buy it before they try it, Herling said. Like Nowlin, Herling said she tries to offset that by offering refunds.
She’s selling online on her website and on Amazon, “which I actually didn’t think we were going to do. But people are on there to buy. We decided to do that group while also building our community.”
Nowlin noted that “direct to consumer is more expensive.” His startup costs went up at a time venture capital firms were more leery. He plowed through his own money first — always intending to bootstrap the company in the beginning.
“All investor money is is gasoline,” he said. “I had already built the car.”
Nowlin said he has a product that’s caught buzz, and he’s striving to “put the fun in fundraising.”
Swantner noted that Laseter and Herling are new moms as well as entrepreneurs who launched in a pandemic.
Nowlin joked that trying to raise $1 million is “easier than having a child. I often say I feel like a single father right now. I have a 99-day-year-old baby that’s always five seconds from throwing up. Everybody wants a picture, but no one wants to change the diaper.”
His advice to anyone hoping to launch now is to do something to make yourself stand out and “if you want to catch fish, fish where the fish are.”
