5 minutes with...Spoon Guru
We caught up with Spoon Guru co-founder and co-CEO Markus Stripf to ask him a few questions about the launch, growth and future of Spoon Guru.
1. What are the 3 things that you wish you knew when you started Spoon Guru?
Even when you have the best idea in the world, it can take longer than you think to build a successful, sustainable business so make sure you, your co-founders and your board are committed to the long haul.
Get together with other entrepreneurs to learn from their experiences. It doesn’t matter how many business books you have read on the topic. Experience trumps everything and hearing it first hand from people who have been there before is the next best thing to experiencing it yourself.
Failure is not the end of the journey, it’s the start. You will hit bumps on the way. Don’t get disheartened. Stay nimble, fail fast and constantly adjust with the market. Being agile and able to adapt is one of the biggest advantages any startup has over established companies.
2. Where did the idea for Spoon Guru come from?
My two co-founders (Tim Allen and Simon O’Regan) and I had successful careers in a different industry but we became aware of the struggle people encounter when they try to manage on a difficult diet. Whether you have an allergy, prefer a vegan diet or simply want to eat more healthily, as soon as you change your dietary regime you run into immediate problems which can be a very frustrating experience. We witnessed the problem first hand in our families. So we decided to do something about it and started a company that takes the fuss out of finding the right foods, whatever your needs may be.
3. What’s your best memory since you started the Spoon Guru?
There have been many. Getting together with my co-founders to form a team committed to tackling this problem was a great moment. Raising seed funding very quickly from Nicole Junkermann and Jorg Mohaupt was another. Being featured on BBC TV as soon as we launched our app and signing one of the world’s biggest supermarkets as a client were also massive milestones. Winning pretty much every award going has also been a great morale booster. I read once that as an entrepreneur you are constantly caught between either a state of euphoria or terror. That is very true! The whole journey continues to be a fantastic experience though and thankfully we continue to make rapid strides in our quest to solve a huge problem affecting hundreds of million people around the world. It’s the biggest incentive you can imagine.
4. In today’s world, where everything can appear urgent, how do you prioritise workload and opportunities?
It’s a tough one. We tend to look at how everything we do is aligned with our core mission and of course our business plan which sets out specific milestones we need to hit. Google’s 80:20 rule is a good benchmark but generally, we don’t have the luxury to dedicate 20% of our resources to investigate new opportunities. We tend to prioritise the list of opportunities (which seems to be endless by the way) so that we can, at the least, research one of them.