Your Fork, a startup schilling diverse, home-cooked meals, has pivoted to focus on delivery of exotic sweets and treats.
Previously picked by StartupSmart as one of the top startups to watch this year, Your Fork is one of several local startups seeking to tap into the market of talented home cooks and the rise of peer-to-peer platform businesses.
Shaking up home delivery food offerings isn’t just a startup fixation in Australia. Earlier this month, a US startup Spoonrocket raised over $10 million from some major venture capital firms such as General Catalyst.
But delivering dinner, especially ones sourced from multiple premises, is a complex logistical feat. For tech focused entrepreneurs, scalability emerges as an issue early on.
Your Fork cofounder Roshan Mahanama told StartupSmart this was exactly why they decided to focus on a more manageable part of their business.
The move obliterates the urgency of delivering the food while it’s warm, thus opening up the market for each home cook’s output considerably.
“The issue we had was our customers were limited by our geographic reach of our distribution channel. So to expand we’d have to expand the distribution radius, which would be a long slow process,” Mahanama says.
The small Your Fork team still think it’s possible to run their original idea as the core business, but have decided to focus on what they can grow quickly for now.
“We forced ourselves into a period of about three months of media silence so we could check what the growth was like, without it being skewed by PR. Over the three months we saw a modest growth, but not enough to meet the benchmarks we had set for ourselves – so it was time to pivot,” Mahanama says.
The move will enable them to scale nationally, beyond their initial test sites in Sydney’s inner west. Mahanama adds baked goods are also much easier to manage and handle than full blown dinner plans that include a wider variety of ingredients.
Rose is the current head of growth at Rampersand Ventures. She was formerly a reporter at StartupSmart.
