The Muffin Company - 4

2026-07-10

To recap, the things we have done so far are:

And this is where I find the hardest part, see this chart again: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5e9d7e35a92e9283f989aa33/653c0b675cf2a031e702bfa8_0*4S1o6ytSfDCwbloK.png

This is the ‘valley of death’ phase or as I like to call it the ‘pivot until you fail’ phase. You need to get other people to buy or care about your muffins and they dont care. They already had breakfast, most people have eaten. We take our muffin truck to the corner, set it up with a pretty sign and our muffins, and no one buys any. And we go the next day, and no one buys any again. And we go the next day, and yet no one buys any. We try to a different spot, we try a different muffin recipe. Perhaps we get a single success, someone buys one on Tuesday. But then again Wednesday there is no one. And Thursday there is no one again.

And this is where pivoting, making changes, and trying to find product market fit lies. It is hard to tell what is going to make your product fit or if it ever will. Some products and destined to fail, I have made a few of them, but some get through this phase. And lets say for the sake of this exercise we work at it, it will probably take months or even years.

We keep trying new things, we drive to different corners with our muffin truck, we try different recipes. We do vegan, we do bacon filled, we do a theme for the world cup (that is currently going on). We get an Instagram and a TikTok, we post every day about our muffins, we get a few followers but not a ton. We keep posting, keep driving around, keep trying recipes. We waste a lot of muffins, every day we dont sell any we have to dump it in the trash.

And we get some success, after a year of very little. One of our customers buys a dozen and asks if we have a card. We dont but we make some the next week. The following week someone likes our blueberry and lemon flavor, they buy two dozen for a birthday part. We notice that we sell after an SF Giants game we can sell a few dozen. We get a few more social media followers. We continue to grind it out and post every day. A minor celeb posts about our muffins, we get a small bump there, a food blogger mentions us.

And I think this is what product market fit would feel like, again I have never been a part of this stage. A bunch of small successes adding up. And still at this stage the company is fragile, maybe we are just breaking even. We wake up early in the morning, every morning, seven days a week making muffins and driving around SF. We develop a popular menu, blueberry and lemon, double chocolate, poppyseed and orange, ube cream, and one flavor of the month. We know how many muffins we are going to bake everyday, our waste goes down, we sell out most days but not all. We continue on social media, we hire a part time cashier on weekends.

And this is the first step out of the pivot stage into the product mark fit stage. Again I think we are a very lucky company if we make it this far. 95% of start ups fail before they get here I think.

-Gary