Building Rocketfood: Behind The Scenes [Part 3]

Abhineet Kumar
Abhineet Kumar is the founder of rocketfood.co and is passionate about public speaking, entrepreneurship and community-building.

Zach Kahn, my friend and co-intern at iStrategyLabs while talking about his current internship at Harry’s summed it up aptly:

I’m learning tons about product development, supply chain operations, and distribution — it’s crazy how many small, moving parts go into making what appears to be a pretty simple, straightforward business and product. definitely starting to appreciate the complexity of hardware-based startups much more now.

I am sure the whiteboard pic below will give you a faint idea of what Zach meant:

That’s a whiteboard at the rocketfood HQ. The last time Anurag counted there were 87 items on that list. I’m sure more were added after that.

Its a list of things we have to take care of before we launch on this 15th which doesn’t include goals we have already met.

I very clearly remember that when we had finished building this to-do board, we both had sat down quietly for a moment amazed at the numerous things which go behind launching a foodtech startup. And, I am sure each one of you would have experienced the same while building yours. If you are yet to start up, brace yourself for one hell of a ride where you may forget to call your girlfriend but would make sure you call your vendors to check for how your order’s coming.

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Here’s the funny thing: when we thought about starting up rocketfood.co, we thought that it was going to be fairly easy as there were 4 things we needed to get right before our launch: kitchen + delivery (operations), marketing, technology and real estate. All of this sounds like its going to be a walk in the park but very soon we were catapulted into a phase where we started being bombarded with phone calls, meetings and multiple decisions to take and stakeholders to work along with.

A good thing which enabled us to stay efficient even when it seemed things would go out of hand was having our friends volunteer with some of our projects. So if both of us could not go to a meeting, we made sure that we didn’t slow down and someone whom we trusted could be present. Do make sure that at least one of the founders is present at important meetings though.

You can take your friend’s help and ask him to help you out with social media or to take up cold calling. But make sure these are people who understand your service/product and are passionate about helping build something from the scratch. Not every friend can be a good volunteer!

Till date, the last 45 days have involved a lot of learning and given us an idea of how the future is going to look like. We promise to keep sharing our startup anecdotes and experiences with you each week.

Till then, brace yourself for the launch, and when you launch, just let go!