What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet
businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How did they make decisions both at their companies and
in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? Today, I'm talking
to David Raby, the founder of Tovalla. David, welcome to the show, and thanks for joining me.
Thanks for having me, Cortland.
Tovalla is a very interesting business because it's essentially three companies and one. You
manufacture and sell a physical product, you prepare and sell food, and you also build the
software or the mobile apps really that power everything and glue it together. Can you explain
a little bit more about how all of this works?
Yeah, so the complexity of our business is really what makes the product so unique once
it gets in customers' hands. But essentially, we've got a hardware team that has built and
designed and manufactured a countertop steam oven. We've got a software team that has figured
out the software to power the device, the mobile apps that help you control it and figure
out what you want to cook, all the back ends that powers everything, and then obviously
the website and all that to sell the product. And then there's a culinary team that designs
all of the recipes for the meals that are designed to be cooked in the product. So they
do the R&D to come up with the dishes, and then they work with our production team in
our kitchens to actually make those meals at scale every week, and then ship them out
to people's doorsteps. So there's a lot of moving pieces that all have to work in harmony
so that the end product is as good as it is.
Yeah, I think it's not an understatement to call that complex. And it seems like it'd
be super challenging to run a business this complex. I mean, why did you decide to start
a business that's really three or four businesses all under one roof when you could have started
with something simple?
Yeah, I'm probably a little nuts. And I think a lot of people that I talked to in the early
days said as much that, you know, they're like, Oh, this is a really cool idea seems
incredibly hard and challenging. But as I looked at the landscape of food options, you
know, I was just trying to have something really delicious, healthy, and convenient
for dinner. I felt that every option required some sort of compromise. So you know, foods,
meal kits, for example, I still had to do all of the prep and all of the cooking and
then clean a bunch of dishes. And yes, the food was healthy, maybe it was tasty if I
did my job right, but not super convenience. And if I wanted to buy frozen food, cool,
not that fresh, clearly, and most likely not that healthy or tasty. If I go pick up from
outside, you know, I don't really know what's in my food. Anyway, on and on, as I looked
at all these options, I felt like it wasn't exactly what I was looking for. And the more
I thought about it, I realized, well, to build this perfect solution, if you will, we're
going to have to do everything from sourcing the ingredients to cooking them perfectly.
And the only way to ensure quality was to actually control every link in that chain
from the sourcing all the way really to the cleanup.
Yeah, that's fascinating. Because I mean, obviously, it's worked out pretty well in
the end, you guys have over 50 employees, I was watching some reviews on YouTube of
the Tuvala oven, and all of them were glowing, people really like it. But in the very beginning,
you know, when you're trying to start this business, and you're realizing like you have
to do all these different things, and people are telling you you're crazy, where do you
get the confidence to push forward and actually continue working on this? Like what told you
that this was such a good idea that it was going to work despite the naysayers and despite
the obvious challenges?
Yeah, I guess, you know, it's hard to remember what I was feeling when I first started. But
I'd say a couple things. I think first, to me, there was clearly a pain point and a huge
opportunity. And if you fast forward 10 years from now, 15 years from now, the kitchen is
going to look and operate fundamentally differently than it does today. And it's one of the few
areas in our lives that really hasn't changed that much. But there's no doubt in my mind
that automation is coming to the home and specifically to the kitchen. And so I knew
we were on trend. That was kind of the overarching reason. And secondarily, I'd say that I never
looked too far ahead. And I was fortunate to have a team that felt the same way. We
really just took it one challenge at a time. So we had this big vision and knew where we
wanted to end up. But it can be incredibly intimidating if you're constantly thinking
about what does this product actually look like at scale? How do we get there? That's
terrifying as opposed to what's just the next hurdle we have to clear and then the next
hurdle we have to clear, you know, just to survive. And if you do that enough and you
build enough momentum and you do that over the course of a year or two, eventually you'll
have a business.
So where did you learn that? Because that's not something that most people starting their
first business would know. Had you started businesses before? Had you done research into
businesses or were you just sort of, you know, luckily getting things right?
Yeah, no, I had started a company before that was not super successful. It was a mobile
app. And it really started as a passion project. It did not start as a business but got a fair
amount of traction and I ended up trying to build it into something. And I certainly learned
a ton of lessons there. But I'd say probably where I learned this was at some point between
the age of five and 30, I've known my whole life that I wanted to start my own business.
My father's an entrepreneur. Really, this is the only thing I've ever wanted to do.
And so, you know, I've been reading books and talking to people that have started their
own companies and kind of trying to absorb as much about this as possible my entire life.
And I'm sure this is one of those things where I had confidence in myself, my team and our
business that it just drove us to just keep on executing. And we would, you know, knowing
that eventually we would get there.
Yeah, let's dive into that. Let's dive into the history of five year old David Ravi. Why
did you always want to start a business? Was it just a matter of emulating your father
or was there some sort of ideal or some sort of outcome that you've always envisioned for
yourself?
Wow, you're getting really deep on me. That's a funny thing. So my parents are both immigrants
and my dad would tell me growing up that he never had a choice when, you know, he was
in his mid to late 20s as to what to do with his life. There weren't all these opportunities
for immigrants. He'd gone to college, but, you know, he wasn't, he didn't really know
how to recruit for companies or corporate America. And really the only path for him
was to start a real estate company because he had a couple family members in that space.
And that it was a blessing and a curse that I had all of these options growing up. But
I guess having grown up in that environment and, you know, other family members having
done the same thing and started their own companies, it was really the only thing I
aspire to do. And, you know, I guess it was seeded by family more than anyone else. And,
you know, that was all I really imagined doing. And so when I was an undergrad and my first
jobs out of undergrad, in my mind, they were all training to start my own business. And
I was always keeping my eyes open. I kept this document, I think, from when I was 16
of business lessons that I wanted to implement one day when I had my own company. And by
the time we started Tuvala, it was like 30, 40 pages long of different ideas I'd kind
of gathered over time.
So I take it the mobile app company that you started before Tuvala was one of the ideas
in this idea notebook. What's the story there? And why did that company fail?
So let me I'll be a little more sharp. The ideas that I was tracking were more about
how to run and operate businesses and what to do with the company and much less about
the actual ideas. So things that I would implement when we started growing, how I would think
about hiring incentives, I would put in place management ideas, as I read books that I thought
had good lessons, I would drop them in there and a separate document with business ideas
that I wanted to start but that one was was much shorter to me. It's I've always been
more allured by just the idea of building and scaling a company.
Are there any ideas and that book that are particularly salient that you find yourself
going back to over and over again?
I haven't opened that document in a couple years. But I'm sure you know, I do actually
remember opening it at some point in the last couple years and realizing that a lot of those
ideas we have implemented here at Tuvala. And you know, none of these are revolutionary.
They're ideas that other companies have executed successfully. And I think from the beginning,
my co founder and I have been very disciplined and very focused on building a really strong
culture here and and being deliberate about those kinds of things instead of just letting
the culture evolve on its own, letting hiring evolve on its own, letting process evolve
on its own. Those are things we've tried to be very thoughtful about how we want to execute.
It's interesting because I think probably just the process of having that idea notebook,
the process of reading the books and the papers that you're reading and encountering those
good ideas changed sort of the landscape of business in your mind to the point where even
without having to open up that idea notebook and read about the specific, you know, bullet
points that you would write, you probably were influenced to do those things regardless.
I think that's right. I think I think a lot of those are just things I've learned and
are now ingrained in how I think and, you know, it's not it's not just business books.
I've read dozens of books on social psychology. I recently actually someone helped me realize
this but I've read a ton of books on sports and coaching and teamwork within sports and
I think there's a ton of lessons to be learned by successful coaches and how they manage
and build their teams that is really relevant to companies.
So let's get into this mobile app company. What's the story there? Why did you start
that business?
Sure. So the company was called Draftpedia. And my roommate and I were huge basketball
fans still are not to the same degree. And we'd often find ourselves talking about, you
know, where players went to college, when they got drafted, who they got traded for
all kind of the talk you would have while you're watching the game. And this was like
2011 2012. If you were to search for that information on your phone, the experience
was pretty clunky if you wanted to get your answers quickly.
And so we thought, huh, maybe there's an opportunity here to build an app that's just kind of a
sports encyclopedia. And, you know, I also thought, huh, this will be really good experience.
I'll learn a lot. I've really only worked in food. This will be an interesting segue
into tech to kind of learn how that world operates. And we spent, I don't know, six
or seven months building up the app. And, you know, we did some of the work ourselves,
we hired a developer and a designer to do some of the work themselves, we outsource
some of the data scraping. And it was really good learning on, you know, every piece of
a business, even though it was very early stage. And we were doing this on the side,
we had we had other jobs at the time. And then we launched and you know, we did what
we thought was a large marketing campaign with almost no money. But we got a lot of
traction, you know, tens of thousands of downloads, a lot of press covered us. And at the time
I had actually gotten into business school and was planning to move to Chicago to get
my MBA, and decided to spend the summer leading up to business school, working on this company,
and thinking about raising money, thinking about, you know, ways we can monetize. And
so it ended up being amazing learning for me and like really good insight into the world
of tech, and definitely his influence what we're doing today, and I'm sure played some
factor in me ending up, you know, coming up with an idea that's as much technology as
it is food.
What advice would you have for other people who are in your situation who aren't technical
themselves, who don't know how to code, but are really excited about building a mobile
app or building a website? Because that's sort of a scary transition to make. I mean,
how did you navigate that?
Yeah, you know, I could have done it over again, I probably would have tried to teach
myself how to code. And what I did teach myself was like the very basics of scraping data,
which you know, it was cool, but ultimately, we had to rely on someone else to develop
the app. And that was, you know, it was really interesting learning for me, we hired the
wrong person initially, they really didn't do a good job. And it was a good lesson that
we're not in a good spot to really judge people for technical work, you know, not really knowing
anything. And we got really lucky with the next person we hired that they were able to
work really well with us. And we had learned kind of painful lessons on how to articulate
what we're looking for. And so very early on, with the current company that I have,
I did everything I could to find a technical co founder, because I knew how essential it
was. And it was something that was sorely lacking building Graph BDL.
It's funny how those painful lessons that you learned by starting a business and having
things go wrong and having things break in unexpected ways, carry over with you to your
future businesses. And you don't end up repeating those exact same mistakes, even though you
might have read about them, you know, in advance, there's really nothing like living through
it to make it really hit home. And yeah, specifically, I got, I was gonna say, my co founder and
I have had a lot of those shared lessons independently. And so I think it made things a lot easier
when we were first starting to work together, you know, we got along immediately and had
a lot of shared values, but also a lot of shared lessons. And so you know, it was to
your point, much easier for us to to know to avoid them, because we'd experienced them
firsthand.
So what did the end look like for draft media? Why did you stop working on it?
Yeah, so I decided to go to business school, I got into business school, moved to Chicago,
kept on working on it for a couple months while I was starting my MBA. And it actually
was a blessing in disguise, because it gave me an excuse to meet a lot of people in Chicago
that were in and around entrepreneurship here, in a way that would have been really difficult
if I didn't have this business. And then, you know, after like three months, I took
a step back and realized, hey, I went to business school to start a food company. That was what
my essays were about. That was my goal graduate and start my own company that was going to
be, you know, sustainable and something really big. And this was not that idea. This idea
had started as a small passion project. And because it had some legs, I decided to keep
working on it. But it wasn't what I had moved to Chicago to spend two years on. And so I
had a conversation with my co founder at the time, who was, you know, still at his other
job. And we decided to kill it. And it wasn't super painful. You know, I think it was clearly
the right decision. Maybe we waited a few months too long. But in a way, it was a relief.
It's like, okay, this was a nice chapter, a great learning lesson for us, but time to
move on to do the next thing.
Why food? You mentioned that you had worked with food. And that sort of the thing that
you came to business school for was to build a sustainable business involving food. Why
was that your area of focus?
Yeah, so when I was 18 years old, I went on this health retreat with my dad. And it was
really just a father son bonding thing right before I was going to start college. And it's
this place in California called the ashram. And you hike for five days, you eat all vegetarian
food, you do yoga. And by the end of this week of exercise and yoga, and great food
and, you know, mental detox away from technology, you feel so incredible. And when I did it
at 18, it was the first time I was consciously thinking about the food I was eating, exercise
and how it was making me feel I was making me think and how positive those effects were
on me. And looking back, it completely changed my life. And it set me on this path of, you
know, obsession with healthy eating, not in a bad way, but I devoured tons of books on
it, I tried all these different diets, and slowly became a core part of who I am. And
I ended up spending most of my career after undergrad in the food industry. And it's probably
what I'm most passionate about. I was just in a meeting at the office, and I had made
a bowl of fruit for myself, left it in the conference room, came back, and they were
all joking that it was so obvious that that was for me, because that's just how I eat.
And like I said, it's become a core part of who I am. And that's why I wanted to start
a company in the food space to kind of try to take a lot of those lessons and, and help
a lot of people eat better in a much easier way than they are today. Because I think it
can make a huge difference in people's lives.
That's awesome. Because you have so many vectors pointing in the same direction, where it's
not only what you care the most about, you're the most excited about, but you also know
the most about it. And you're also want to influence and teach others the most about
this. And so yeah, why not food? Why would you start a business in any other area?
Right. Yeah, I'm very fortunate. I count my blessings every morning.
So what's the first step look like when you decide, okay, I'm no longer doing this basketball
app. I'm going to start a business where my heart lies in food. What do you do after that?
Yeah, you know, I think what I ended up doing was just like, I tried to come up with a bunch
of ideas. And I think I started experimenting and trying a lot of different products that
were out there. And looking a lot at a lot of different startups to see kind of where
was the new thing. You know, I had this idea for I had a couple vending machine ideas initially.
And so I did some research there to see what kind of automation was there inventing machines
and why I had inventing machines taken off in America, the way they have in Asia, and
then moved away from that. And the idea for Tuvalo came about when I was cooking for myself.
And like I said, I tried a lot of these other services out there. And I had recognized there
was a gap. And one day I was making food for the week, it was a Sunday. And I was using
like five different appliances at once. And you know, I had this one appliance that was
a steamer basket that had three different levels on it. And each level, you were supposed
to be able to cook something different. And as I was using that and these other appliances
on I was just thinking like, why is there not one product where I could put in all these
different ingredients that have different cooking requirements. So grains, vegetables,
proteins, different starches, and just push a button and have it just cook. And that was
the first moment of like, Oh, that would actually be really cool if that existed. And so like,
you know, I started to sketch out, you know, what would this actually look like, started
to talk to some people of like, am I crazy? Or would this actually be pretty cool? And
then the next step of could you actually build something like this? And slowly, the idea
kind of snowballed from there from just an appliance to okay, well, that doesn't solve
the whole problem of, well, you got to figure out what you want to eat, then you got to
buy the ingredients, then you got to prep them. And yes, the cooking is part of that,
it's not the only part of the process. And so I started to think, okay, maybe we build
the whole food side as well. And that was kind of the beginning.
Yeah, again, we're back to this massive complexity issue where you're trying to solve almost
every problem you can and then doing that you encounter other problems, and you decide
your business is going to solve those two. And what's interesting about that is a lot
of people's businesses die, because they're too complex, because they're too ambitious,
they're just hard to get off the ground. And so the founders will get discouraged and quit
before they ever find any level of success. Why didn't that happen to you at Tuvala?
Yeah, I guess we were fortunate. So we won a business plan competition at my business
school and some other fairly well known companies had won it in the past, Braintree, Grubhub,
Simple Mills, and it gave us some external validation for the idea. And at that point,
it was myself, some classmates in business school, and a couple interns and that was
really it. And all of my classmates went on to other jobs. And so there wasn't much of
a team there yet. And we had a prototype that didn't really work that well, it worked just
okay. But I think that was the first point of like, Oh, okay, I just won this competition.
We got some press, I got a little money. Now there's some pressure on me to actually go
and do this. And if I don't, I'm gonna let a bunch of people down. And you know, there's
pretty high expectations of companies that win this competition to actually go build
really successful businesses. So I'd say that was number one. And then number two, once
Brian joined, and then Peter, our first engineer joined, we just took it in steps. It was like,
Okay, let's figure out the right tool to use, right? Maybe it's an oven, maybe it's a pressure
cooker, maybe it's a panini press, who knows? But like, what is the tool we're going to
use to automate cooking? And how can we show people that you can scan a QR code, because
that's the mechanism we decided on, scan a QR code, put in raw ingredients, and they'll
come out really well. And and just doing that alone, yes, it's complex, but very, very simple
relative to building a whole business where those are shipping across the country and
menu changes and everything that exists today. And so we were able to demonstrate that. And
that was enough to get a bunch of investors excited, get us into Y Combinator, and get
the flywheel moving a little bit. And then from there, you know, we took the next step
of Okay, we built this one prototype, some people liked it, we think it's really cool.
Let's go build another 20, put them in a bunch of homes, and see what people say, and just
get feedback. And, you know, we didn't have a chef on staff, our team was five people,
we were making the meals ourselves in our kitchen, we essentially set up a production
line for the ovens, so we could build all these prototypes, we turned our garage into
this production center in a way of like, we put the ovens in homes, bring them back, fix
them up, put them back in homes, we deliver the meals, we'd interview people. So extremely
scrappy, really in an effort just to learn, get feedback and make sure we were making
something people wanted, before we even thought about scaling anything like what we have today.
There's a lot of subtle stuff in there that I think would be easy for someone who hasn't
started a business to just sort of gloss over and not really appreciate. And I think one
of the big things here is that you weren't afraid to take really small bites off of this
very large vision you had, like you knew you wanted to build this appliance that would
help automate kitchens into the future, but you weren't afraid to start with really tiny
prototypes. And to see how far you could get with just that prototype, you didn't really
need to build the entire business, you know, immediately. And I think that's a big difference
between businesses like yours that might be extremely complex. And yet you survive in
the early days and other businesses that might even be simpler than yours, but the founders
get overwhelmed because they try to do too much too fast.
Yeah, I think just thinking about your value prop. And you know, what is what is the minimum
viable version of that is actually really important and really difficult. And even what
we ended up shifting into homes was our version of an MVP. And for us, it was pretty clearly
defined, we knew our ovens A had to work, B, they had to work consistently, and C the
food had to taste really good. Nothing else mattered. And now the business has so many
more bells and whistles, and there's so much more you can do with it. But at day zero,
we knew that if those three things were true, and we could execute on that, we would have
enough momentum to keep building. And if any of those were false, our business would fail.
And so it is one of the reasons why we were able to build not that many people very short
amount of time, because we had this very clearly articulated MVP. And it was a clear sprint
to get there. And everybody was given a ton of autonomy, and a ton of ownership over large
portions of this company to just go and execute and build it.
One of the challenges that a lot of people struggle with a lot of people hear this advice
to build a minimum viable product to not try to do too much too fast. But it's emotionally
very difficult to do that. You're putting your name on this business, you're building
something that's far less ambitious and less, you know, impressive, not as high of quality
as you would like to have. And so people resist that feeling and they don't launch early enough.
How did you resist that feeling? And how did you feel about this very first version of
Tuvalo that people were putting inside their homes?
We were very conscious of it. So I think Brian and I were both intellectually honest enough
to say, we want to get to market as quick as possible. We know what the MVP of the product
looks like. We know we're gonna have to make hard decisions on things we want in the product,
but are just going to take too much time, too much money. And we had a lot of those
hard conversations of like, hey, we know this part of the product is not great. Fine, like
we have to ship it. And we have to get feedback. And we just learned very quickly and iterated.
And you know, I think we had to do a lot of, not a lot, but we had to do some coaching
of our team, because we have a lot of people here that are perfectionists, and they want
to build amazing, perfect things, which is great. Like we end up building it. In a way,
you have to train them out of that mindset and help them understand that perfect is what
you want to ultimately strive for. But if you strive for too much perfect in a startup,
you'll die before you ever ship anything. And it's a difficult thing to learn.
So I don't know very much about hardware businesses. In fact, you might be the first person I've
had on the podcast who's actually shipping a physical good rather than doing pure software.
How common is it in the hardware industry for people to get too ambitious and to build
something that's way too big? Because I imagine it might be even easier to avoid that when
you can actually see the limits of what you're building. And it's very obvious how expensive
it's going to be to manufacture. Were there sort of constraints that were just naturally
that crapped up? Or was it really just discipline that kept you from doing too much too fast?
So the interesting thing is I actually think in hardware, it's more common to over-engineer,
over-design and avoid MVP, only because it's much harder to iterate. So once you build
your product and ship it, it's really hard to make significant changes to it without
spending a ton of money. And so there is this fear and this risk that what you end up building
is not going to work. It's not going to be wanted. And you're going to be a year away
from being able to iterate on it and put something new out in the market.
And so I think you actually see a lot of other hardware companies do the opposite of trying
to build the perfect product, spending way too much money, releasing, realizing that
they made a bunch of mistakes, because it's impossible to know how people are going to
react and what they're going to do with their product until it's out in the market. And
in that situation, a lot of hardware companies find themselves in trouble.
And so I think it is this hard balance of recognizing, okay, we're going to ship. And
it's going to be a long time until we can make significant changes to the hardware product.
So we have to be comfortable with it. But we also don't want to wait 2, 3, 4 years to
release a product and get all the feedback that's going to help us eventually build what
we hope is the perfect product.
And what were some of those things that you learned from customers by actually putting
out this minimum viable Tavala oven in their homes?
The most obvious one ended up fortunately being a software change. But we put out the
product and the core of our business is these meals. So we design these meals, we ship them
to your doorstep, the menu changes every week, it's under a minute to prep them, you put
it in the oven, scan a code and the oven cooks it automatically. And that's our core business
that worked great at day one. But you can also cook your own food in the oven. It's
not only for meals, we have some chefs that buy the product just to cook their own food.
But we did not invest a lot into that. So on the app, when we launched, there were eight
very basic recipes, you could cook a piece of salmon, you could cook some broccoli. And
that was it. And immediately we started getting feedback from customers saying, Hey, I want
to be able to do a lot more with the oven. You know, there's only eight recipes on here.
There's no community online. There's no steam oven recipes I can find. There's only two
buttons on the oven itself. All I can do is toast and reheat. I just want more. And we
ended up spending, I'd say six months redoing the app entirely, and adding a whole new set
of responsibilities to our culinary team. And now when you open the app, there's dozens
of recipes from breakfast to kids meals, our chefs are putting out new recipes on the app
every two weeks. And usage of people cooking their own meals has almost doubled. And we
just didn't know, you know, we assumed at some point, we'll build something like that. But
it was so glaring from our customers that hey, why don't you guys do this to get real
value out of a product we're putting on our countertops, we need to be able to use it
outside of your meals. And so we listened and then we just we went and built it.
You know, another interesting part of your story is and talking to people who want to
start businesses, one of the things that paralyzes them the most is the existence of competition.
People will be very excited to work on an idea. And they'll look onto the market and
say, well, you know, some so and so is kind of doing something similar. So I guess I can't
really work on this. But obviously, there's lots, there's many thousands of kitchen appliances
and alternative ways to order food or cook food or buy food. Why weren't you worried
about the competition? Why were you so confident you can make this work despite the fact that
you'd be one of hundreds operating in this space?
Yeah, I think if you looked at the space, there were a lot of companies operating in
different parts of what we were doing. But there there was almost no one and really still
isn't today that that was doing all three that was building appliances, building software
and manufacturing and designing food recipes. So number one, we actually did think what
we were doing was pretty unique. That being said, since we've launched, you know, there
have been a lot of companies dancing around what we're doing. And fundamentally, what
I tell our team is it doesn't actually matter. The market opportunity is enormous. You know,
the trends are in our favor, the kitchen is changing, more and more parts of it are going
to become automated. And we're we believe we are incredible operators and executors.
And as long as we do our job, we're going to be successful, irrespective of what other
companies do. And I think that's the right mentality to have. I, you know, I tell this
all the time to folks, but ideas are a dime a dozen. I think being able to execute, bring
them to life, operate efficiently and continue to innovate is what separates the successful
companies from the unsuccessful companies. I don't tend to think it's competitors.
Was there a point, a specific point you can remember, where it became obvious to you that
this was something that really was going to work and that people really wanted what you
were creating?
I'd say there were there were a lot of different points. The very first one was the first time
we made a meal in a steam oven at the scan of a barcode was a skin on chicken breast
with ratatouille. And the beauty of a steam oven is that it keeps your food really moist,
but you can still broil. So you can still get a nice charge, not just that your food
turns out mushy. And with this skin on chicken breast, it got the chicken super juicy, but
the skin on top was still like really crispy. And I remember the first time we all took
a bite of that, our eyes popped out of our heads were like, Oh my God, this is amazing.
If I can get this shipped to my doorstep and scan a code and eat this three or four or
five times a week, that's going to be a game changer. And that was at the very, very early
days of, you know, just our small team plus this firm that we work with the product manufacturing,
they were helping us build these early prototypes. It was like a group of seven or eight of us
that tried the product and it was amazing. And then I'd say along the way, it's been
other things like that, you know, moving forward, it's mainly been from our customers. But when
we see quotes from customers saying we've changed their lives, they've lost so much
way, they want us to succeed so badly, like all of these things that are pretty eye opening,
give us a lot of confidence that what we're building is ultimately going to be really
successful.
That's fascinating to hear about how you're actually manufacturing these ovens early early
on. And I want to dive into like the logistics behind how you actually make a company like
this possible, because it's hard enough to build a mobile app, that's pure software,
that's pure code, all you need is a computer, building an actual appliance that you need
to ship across the country and put in someone's house and have a, you know, make sure it doesn't
blow up or injure anyone and actually works every time seems an order of magnitude more
difficult. What was it like to actually learn how to do that? And what are some of the first
steps you took to actually create the first of all of it?
Yeah, so I have to give credit where credit is due and my co founder and Peter, our first
engineer did the work on this. I you know, I helped as much as I could. But I'm not an
engineer, I don't know how to build things, if you will, not at all in the way that they
do, I know how to build other things. But again, I think high level, what we understood
was our value prop is this full service. It's not this, you know, amazing piece of hardware
we're building. It's not the world's best mobile app. It's not the best recipe we've
ever designed. It's the fact that all of these things work in harmony. And so what that lens
that that gave us it at day zero was, okay, we're not here to reinvent the oven, we're
not going to redesign an oven from the ground up, we're not going to build the world's most
beautiful oven, we're not going to put a touchscreen in our oven, we need an oven that cooks food
really well, does it consistently and will survive. And pretty early on, we realized
that steam ovens is a great differentiator, it makes the food come out more moist and
more juicy. And so what we did was, we went to a bunch of different manufacturers and
tried to find someone that was making the steam oven that we could work with, instead
of doing it from the ground up. And that was a strategy we employed at the very beginning.
And what that enabled us to do was get to market much quicker, much cheaper and with
a lot lower risk, because the group we ended up working with had released product in the
market already, and it was proven that it works. And so I think being clear eyed about
your value prop and understanding how expensive it is to build custom tooling, how much time
it takes, how much risk there is to build stuff from the ground up instead of working
with existing product is really important. The only other thing I will say is that Brian
and I both tend to believe that most hardware, if it isn't already, it will be commoditized
in the world that we live in today. And so innovating on hardware, we never thought was
a great business idea. And so this model kind of fit neatly with our overall macro view
of hardware development.
Another interesting thing is that you were in business school while you were working
on this, and you had this strong history of really being interested in running a business
and reading about running a business and having family members who had run their own businesses.
Were there any other companies whose footsteps you sort of found yourself following that
inspired a lot of the things that you did with Tabala? Or were you sort of charting
new territory the entire way?
I would say we're always looking to learn. I don't think there was one specific company
we were emulating. There were models. So Keurig is the closest model, I would say, at a high
level for what we've done. There are pretty big differences in terms of the fact that
we're working with fresh, raw, perishable products, as opposed to coffee. But the idea
of building a machine, making coffee to go along with it, in our case, food. At the time,
when Keurig first started, there wasn't a software layer. These weren't connected products,
but now their products are a little more connected. I'd say ours are probably also the amount
of complexity around the connectivity and the reasons to connect. But Keurig has always
been an interesting model for us to think about.
And then other companies that do pieces of what we're doing. So there's tons of companies
delivering meals across the country. There's lessons to be learned there. There's tons
of companies building connected appliances, a lot of lessons to be learned there. Brian
likes to joke that when we face a problem, he will go dive into the research to try to
find the solution. And I will go dive into our network to find three people that have
faced that problem to go talk to them and figure out how they solved it. And I think
the marriage of those two approaches has been really successful for us.
It's such a useful habit to have, because I think the standard way of solving problems
is to assume that no one's ever encountered it before, and to just try to puzzle through
it yourself. And I think knowing that others have solved these problems before you, and
that you just need to find the material and really learn from their mistakes and their
successes is a tremendous advantage.
Another thing I would like to talk about is the funding story behind Tuvala, because you
seem to have had all these different funding events that helped you get the company to
the next level, whether it was a business plan competition or getting into Y Combinator.
Let's start at the very beginning. What did you do with the money that you won from the
business plan competition? And how much money did you win?
We won $70,000, and I didn't do much with it at first. I think I paid some lawyers to
do some documents for us, and I think filed for some initial IP, and then kept the money.
And then once Brian joined and Peter joined shortly thereafter, we started using the money
on prototype development, and that was money well spent. And we were able to do a lot with
that first 70K. And I don't think we were getting paid then. We were paying some people
a little bit of money, but it allowed us to last through the end of 2015, at which point
we had gotten into Y Combinator and raised our first pre-seed round of funding to kind
of last us six or seven months after that.
Was there ever a point where you considered just using that money and not raising money
from any other investors? Or from the beginning, did you think that you're always going to
raise money from investors?
Yeah, unfortunately, we never really saw a path to bootstrap this or not raise money
from institutions simply because it's such a capital intensive business. You know, needing
to design a hardware product, manufacture it, ship it across the country, pay for that
inventory, essentially do the same thing on the food side is just very capital intensive.
And so there really was no path to doing this business in our minds aside from having to
raise money.
What's it like trying to raise money from investors with this grand vision of what the
future is going to look like when all you have at that point in time is a tiny prototype
and a small team?
I would rewind even a little bit. I started trying to raise money right after I finished
business school. And at the time, all I had was a team of one prototype that barely worked
and the validation of having won this competition. And under those circumstances, it was incredibly
difficult. The business was too complex, the vision was too ambitious, and most investors,
they wanted to wait for more signal, they wanted to wait for other investors, they wanted
to wait for me to build a team before taking a leap.
And that being said, you know, I want to give credit where credit is due, there were investors
that committed at that stage. And one of which is is one of the largest institutions that
has ended up investing in us in subsequent rounds of funding. But once Brian joined,
and then Peter joined and Alex and Adam, and we started to round a team together, and then
we got into Y Combinator, all of a sudden, there was some early momentum behind what
we were doing that gave early investors a lot more confidence that, okay, cool, they
now have a team that can kind of be scrappy, build things, they got into Y Combinator,
they have a prototype that actually works and makes food that's not half bad. And that
was enough for us to raise our first round of funding.
You know, I think one of the many unique things about your business is not only that you're
doing you know, these physical appliances, but you're also located in the Midwest, which
is not exactly known for being a tech hub. What kind of effect did that have on your
life as a founder in these early days?
Well, it was cold. The first three or four months that I was working with the guys, I
would say big picture. And you know, to clarify, we actually we did a stint in California for
Y Combinator and then chose to move back to Chicago after that. And the reasons were really
threefold. Number one, there's amazing universities here. There is Northwestern University of
Chicago, University of Illinois, DePaul, Columbia College, SAIC, University of Indiana is not
far away. And we were building and we still are building a very bold, ambitious B2C company.
And so our thought was we're really going to be unique in this hub in the Midwest. And
it should give us a leg up as we're recruiting, you know, the most talented people that have
come out of these universities and have decided to make the Midwest their home. And I think
that has borne out 100%. We've recruited what we think is an incredible dynamite team that
has also stuck with us. We've been fortunate to keep the vast majority of our team from
from the day we started. And I think that is one reason, you know, one of those reasons
is that we're here in the Midwest. Another reason is cost. Just running a business out
here cost of living is so much less than it is on the West Coast in the area. It's allowed
us to extend our runway. And then the third one is more practical, but actually moving
people across the country in a permanent way is not easy. Especially when you think about
it's not just your team, but it's their spouses. And if they have kids, it's their kids. And
at that stage, after YC, we just didn't want to deal with it. We had too much on our plates.
It's like we want to build this business. We don't want to worry about relocating people,
finding housing, getting new jobs, all that stuff.
Yeah, it's very well thought out. When you put it that way, it almost seems like a tremendous
disadvantage to try to build a business in a tech hub.
I think there are, you know, YC tried to convince us to stay saying, well, you know, there's
this pattern of hugely successful companies coming out of the Bay Area. There's a halo
effect of being here, you're going to be surrounded by like minded people that will push you and
help teach you and guide you and mentor you and there's more investors and, and all those
things are true. Some of them have, you know, negatives to them as well. We just at the
end of the day thought the pros of staying in Chicago outweighed all of those positives
of the Bay Area.
So I'm sure given all the things that you're working on, you've got to be pretty ruthless
at prioritizing what to focus on at any given moment and where to spend most of your resources.
Do you have any examples of how you've made these kinds of decisions?
I do. So there's a great post by Fred Wilson that says at the end of the day, a founder
and CEO's job comes down to three things. Number one is set the vision. Number two is
hire great people. And number three is don't run out of money. And oftentimes I'll start
my day by thinking about that, or I'll start my week by thinking about that and think about
all right, what is the best use of my time that fits within this framework? And that's
not to say that I don't dive into specific problems because I do that all the time. You
know, there's at any one point, we're always asking ourselves, what's going to kill us
this week? What's going to kill us this month? How can we help solve that problem? But I'm
a big believer in giving people autonomy, empowering them, making sure they know what
the goals are, but letting them go do it and figure it out on their own. I think people
accomplish a lot more under that management style. And so I'm not super involved in the
day to day of what a lot of people do. But if an employee or a teammate at any point
asks for help or needs my time, to me that is always time well, and it will always give
them time. But again, to your point, I am very particular about thinking about how I
spend every day.
It's interesting to see the sort of interplay behind the first of those two points. Number
one, set the vision and number two, hire great people. And how if you're doing what you do,
which is seems like you sort of tell people, you know, here's the end goal, you figure
it out on your own, then it's super crucial to actually know what the end goal is and
know what the vision is so that everybody's on the same page.
That's right. I think people need to know where you want to end up. And you can help
them get there, you know, I'll hold their hand if they need it. But people need to know
what the goal is. And I think we've been pretty good about articulating that. I think we've
gone through periods where the path from here to the end is very foggy and very gray. But
I think we've been pretty good about setting the goal post out for people.
So one of the things that a lot of founders struggle the most with is not just building
the product, but actually getting the word out so that people actually learn about it
and start using it. How did you get these first appliances in people's kitchens? And
how have your strategies for growing Tobala changed over time?
I guess the first way we did it was through Kickstarter. That's how we got our first base
of early adopters. And Kickstarter is a great platform for finding early tech adopters.
So for us, it was successful. And our success really was because of two things. Number one,
we did a lot of on the ground work to get the word out, get people to beta test the
product, collect their emails, and build up some buzz. It's actually three things. So
that was the first one. Number two, we were maniacal about leveraging all of our own personal
networks. So I remember the day our Kickstarter campaign went live, we're sitting around our
conference room table, which was also our kitchen table. And basically, all of us were
texting almost every single person we knew, we were sending messages on Facebook, we were
posting on LinkedIn, we were just asking people to help us share the message, send this to
people that you know will like it and, you know, help us get over the hump of hitting
our goal in the first day. And then the third piece was press. So we did a pretty wide press
tour in New York and the Bay Area and LA before the Kickstarter campaign launched. And this
wasn't some, you know, massive PR firm or anything, it was it was us, it was, you know,
three of us just working our networks trying to get in front of journalists that we thought
would be interested, taking our, you know, our one working prototype into these meetings,
making food that we had made into the meetings, demonstrating the product for people and just
getting them excited about it. But we got a lot of people to write about us the day
our Kickstarter launched and combination of those three things kind of led to really successful
first day allowed us to hit our goal and ultimately translated into our first several hundred
customers about a year later.
How have things changed since those days? I imagine you're no longer on Kickstarter
or are you guys still doing Kickstarters?
We're not, no. So so we only did that one Kickstarter today, you can buy the product
on our website, on Amazon or in a pop up shop that we've got in Chicago. And those are really
the only three places you can find the product. And I would say the ways people find out about
us somewhat similar, somewhat different. One is definitely still word of mouth. So friends,
people that own the product, they're telling other people about it. It is something that
is unique and interesting. So people like to talk about it. And like I mentioned earlier,
for a lot of people, it's made a huge difference in their lives. I'd say number two is still
press. We have gotten a lot of press that's kind of evergreen, and we still continue to
get press. And then the third one, our digital channels, Facebook has been amazing for us
in terms of driving awareness and helping educate people and retarget people that have
shown interest. And then you know, we've built out email funnels and things like that to
help slowly convert people that have expressed some interest in our product.
I think, you know, all these sort of growth and marketing and sales related activities
are challenging because they can sap so much time to investigate in a particular channel.
And then it turns out not to work. Have you guys done anything that didn't end up working?
Definitely. So we work with a an agency called bell curve. And they've been fantastic to
work with. And a lot of what they did, you know, in our first few months with them was
test a huge variety of different digital channels for us. And the goal obviously was to make
them all work. But at the same time, we wanted to rule things out and say, you know, Snapchat,
for example, not to single them out, but Snapchat is not a great channel for us to attract eyeballs
that are ultimately going to convert or or whatever else it is. And each of those took
time to validate. And you know, there's a lot of assumptions behind that. But yeah,
it is it is painful and time consuming, where you know, everybody just wants to see growth
and results immediately. But some of these things take a really long time to kind of
vet out.
What is the future of Tuvala looks like? And what are sort of the milestones that you're
anticipating hitting from here on out?
Our goal is to be in every kitchen in America. And that might sound overly ambitious. And
it probably is within the confines of our business today. But we ultimately want to
work with other companies too. So we hope to sell millions and millions of Tuvala ovens.
But we know that, you know, the appliance industry is one that's that's fairly fractured
and segmented. And so to actually get huge majority adoption, we're gonna have to work
with other companies. And that's something we've talked about doing, and I'm sure we'll
be part of our future plans.
Similarly, on the food side, if you think about Keurig as an interesting analog, they
worked with a ton of different brands. So if you buy a Keurig today, you know, you can
have Dunkin Donuts coffee, you can have Starbucks coffee, you can have Green Mountain coffee,
on and on. We want to do something similar for our customers. So today, you can buy Tuvala
meals and get them delivered, or you can cook your own food through the app. In a future
state, we imagine there will be lots of different ways for you to get Tuvala meals. And there
will be a lot of different food that will cook automatically in the oven. And there'll
be different ways to get that food as well. And ultimately, our goal is really just to
build a product that people use every day, and literally cannot live without. And you
know, I think we've made a lot of progress towards that. But there's still a lot of room
to go there.
Yeah, I want to get into your mind as a founder and having this grand vision, and yet not
being there at this point in time. Do you have a roadmap in your head of the different
things that you'll have to do in order to get there? And if so, can you share some of
that with us?
I do. I do have a roadmap. I don't have a clear idea of exactly when each of those things
happen, except to know that in, you know, five to 10 years, I have an idea of where
our business needs to be at to be, you know, successful and as big as we are hoping. And
I would say tangibly, it really does come down to continuing to build our own food operation
and expand and, you know, open up more facilities in other parts of the country, and start to
add more SKUs for people that have different diets. And, you know, today, we only serve
dinner, but we've always talked about serving lunch and breakfast and dessert. And those
things will happen over time. And similarly, getting our food in other places. So we'd
love for people to be able to pick up our food at grocery stores. And to get to that
point, we need a lot of people with our ovens. And so it's kind of a chicken or the egg.
But at some point, that will happen. And that will open up a whole new avenue for our customers
to get our meals. And then in terms of working with other food companies, I think it's just
a matter of who's the first company we're going to work with? What does it actually
look like? How do customers learn about that? What is the product? How do they cook it?
Things like that. But eventually, we'd love to have tons of different food companies on
the platform so that our customers can kind of enjoy a whole bunch of different meals
that are cooked automatically.
What is life for you like personally, as a founder? You mentioned earlier that you'd
always sort of wanted to be involved in business and run your own company. Now that you are,
and you have this incredibly successful company, does it feel like everything was cracked up
to be?
Yeah, you know, I love what I do. And I wake up every morning, I'm excited to go to work.
I love the people that I work with. I count my blessings every day that I've been fortunate
to be in this position to start a company like this. And so many amazing people have
decided to join us for this ride. There's nothing else I'd rather do. It's not to say
there aren't lows and there aren't times when I'm like, man, this is so difficult and so
stressful. But for the most part, it's been an amazing journey. And I hope we don't lose
the feeling that we have now and kind of the state of our team and the culture we've built
where I don't want to lose that because it is so amazing. And I hope and believe that
almost everyone that works here would say the same thing. Because we've tried to empower
people to be a part of building that culture. And it's a great thing. I know a lot of people
that wake up and they're not excited to go to work. And I feel very fortunate that that
is the case for me.
Is there anything that's been unexpected that you maybe thought it would be like to run
a business and yet, you know, the reality is very different?
Yeah, my god, I'm sure there's a million things. I think one of the things people don't realize
is especially in the early days, there's so many logistical and legal and administrative
things that you need to do to get a business up and running. And it's painful. And you
don't have money to afford the automated easy solutions. And a lot of the stuff you just
have to figure out yourself. And, you know, a big part of being a founder is doing that
stuff doing a lot of the dirty grunt work. And a lot of that is not fun. It's just it
needs to get done. And similarly, like, I feel like I have become an expert in equity
in shares in options in the different mechanisms behind how our company raises money, all these
different aspects of the law that I guess I never really anticipated needing to have
such an in depth knowledge on. But it's fun, you know, and I would say like, one of the
most fun, challenging, frustrating, whatever you want to call it parts of running a fast
growing startup is how quickly things change and how quickly things break, and needing
to put in the process and learn new things and adapt to continue to grow at the right
pace, I think is one of the defining characteristics of a fast growing company. And, you know,
we're fortunate to have amazing people that thrive in those environments and are always
looking for ways to kind of solve those challenges.
So I want to take advantage of the fact that I have you on the podcast, someone who's super
knowledgeable about hardware, and he's built a business in this space. What's your advice
for other people listening in who are considering building a hardware business? I know you mentioned
something earlier about how you believe that all hardware will eventually be commoditized.
If it isn't already, what do you mean by that as well?
So I think the way Asia in particular has evolved is ideas get copied very quickly.
So if you see any semblance of success domestically, or even in other parts of the world, someone
will get their hands on your product, reverse engineer it, build it for cheaper and sell
it. And so the way to innovate and differentiate and succeed in the long run is really around
customer experience, user experience, user interface, things of that nature that are
not pure hardware.
I'd say the advice I would give to anyone thinking about starting a hardware company
is again, think about what is your true MVP and what is your true value prop. And really,
really take a step back and think about whether you need a custom piece of hardware to prove
that out.
And I'd say 99 times out of 100, the answer is going to be no, there's probably something
you can buy online, or hack together very quickly and cheaply, just to prove very, very,
very early market validation, and not spend a lot of time or money doing.
So I think that is the number one thing I'd advise anyone to do. And you can do it if
you're a solo founder, just trying to hack things together without having to think about
what does this look like at scale? How am I going to get all this money to build a big
physical product and ship it all across the country? Just think about it. Here, we always
talk about do things that don't scale. That's definitely applicable when you're thinking
about building your first hardware product.
Listen, David, I think that's great advice. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Can you tell listeners where they can go to learn more about Tovala and about what you're
up to as well?
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was a blast. And if you want to learn more
about our product, you can just go to our website. It's Tovala.com. That's T-O-V-A-L-A.
And hopefully you'll be interested in a better solution for dinner.
All right. Thanks so much, David.
Thank you.
If you enjoyed listening to this conversation and you want a really easy way to support
the podcast, why don't you head over to iTunes and leave us a quick rating or even a review.
If you're looking for an easy way to get there, just go to ndhackers.com slash review
and that should open up iTunes on your computer. I read pretty much all the reviews that you
guys leave over there and it really helps other people to discover the show. So your
support is very much appreciated.
In addition, if you are running your own internet business or if that's something you hope
to do someday, you should join me and a whole bunch of other founders on the ndhackers.com
website. It's a great place to get feedback on pretty much any problem or question that
you might have while running your business.
If you listen to the show, you know that I am a huge proponent of getting help from other
founders rather than trying to build your business all by yourself. So you'll see me
on the forum for sure, as well as more than a handful of some of the guests that I've
had on the podcast.
If you're looking for inspiration, we've also got a huge directory full of hundreds
of products built by other indie hackers, every one of which includes revenue numbers
and some of the behind the scenes strategies for how they grew their products from nothing.
As always, thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.