Are you a likely customer? That is, are you a current influencer looking for a platform to sell things?
My general experience is that feedback from people who aren't in the target market has negative value. When entrepreneur friends ask me for hot takes, I used to just tell them whatever came to mind. Now, though, I refuse to that unless a) I have a lot of experience on the topic, or b) I'm in the target market.
I think that's especially true with branding and other style-related choices. A brand needs to work well for the people it's aimed at. But it's fine if it doesn't work for other people. Indeed, that's often better. E.g., nobody should ask me my opinion on branding youth fashion. If they make their product more appealing to me, it will almost certainly be less appealing to their actual customers.
> Are you a likely customer? That is, are you a current influencer looking for a platform to sell things?
I'm sure the majority of people on "Hacker News" wouldn't fit into the archetype of an "influencer" using this platform as a publisher. If you frame the question more fairly: Would I be on the consumption end of this platform as a customer? Perhaps, but I don't know about quality control.
With Goldbelly, I can trust that the restaurants have been vetted by public health agencies. Likes and follower counts don't entice me to ingest some muffins from some random Instagram "influencer".
Why do you think you aren't allowed to ship product from your home under the California cottage law?
No, I asked the question I asked for a reason. The people choosing this are the influencers, so it's their reaction to the brand that matters the most. For people buying influencer stuff, their reaction is at best secondary, and may be almost irrelevant if they only ever see it on a packing receipt or a credit card statement.
It's really important for startups to focus relentlessly on the people who make the early purchasing decisions. If those people don't get on board, no other potential audiences matter.
To help with the understanding around the name, as we mentioned above, we actually launched Global Belly with a different concept. It was our own food brand, direct to consumer food products to help you make global cuisines at home. We pivoted over the last 6-8 months into this current model and we felt that the name still worked but it could be something to explore in the future.
Thanks for the extra info! Curious how you are reaching the influencers - Instagram DMs and emails must be a black hole for accounts that size and I am sure a lot of them have a team actually managing inboxes for them.
Emails were our preferred channel in the beginning, and that's what we still use if we want to reach out to someone.
However, now having launched close to 20 inlfuencers, our inbox is flooded with inbound requests with influencers reaching out to us to understand how they can work with us and what will it require from them to have them join the GB platform. So we don't do much outreach anymore.
My general experience is that feedback from people who aren't in the target market has negative value. When entrepreneur friends ask me for hot takes, I used to just tell them whatever came to mind. Now, though, I refuse to that unless a) I have a lot of experience on the topic, or b) I'm in the target market.
I think that's especially true with branding and other style-related choices. A brand needs to work well for the people it's aimed at. But it's fine if it doesn't work for other people. Indeed, that's often better. E.g., nobody should ask me my opinion on branding youth fashion. If they make their product more appealing to me, it will almost certainly be less appealing to their actual customers.