Tag: start up

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Alkhemy Khandy The Pop Up That Never Was…

I’ve had an interest in food trucks and pop up food businesses and got a silly idea in my head that maybe I could do this. San Francisco is a big place for foodies and since we don’t have two million people the big chefs won’t come here [a quote from Anthony Bourdain], but that gives the little guys a chance or so I thought.

Well the first thing I noticed was that if you’re going to start a pop up selling food products you have to have everything prepared like you’ve been in business for 20 years. You need to develop the logo, make t-shirts, print business cards, etc all before you actually figure out what you’re going to be selling so you can get money from people in a crowd funding start up site like Kickstarter.

I’m still kind of old school and I knew I had a thing for making candy and I was quite good at it, but the idea of making t-shirts and stickers before I even knew if I had a market was a bit much. I tend to be a bit of a mad scientist in the kitchen while at the same time there was always a certain art to what I did. I wanted something that I could turn over easily and that would transport easily and so I decided that out of my candy recipes I’d start with caramels. So I came up with a cool logo and phrase for the business. I could have done fudge or toffee, but those seemed kind of one dimensional to me. Fudge and Toffee are always just that they aren’t a base you can build on which caramels that are a basis of sugar, corn syrup and milk work very well with. I started with the fleur de sel caramels because they were the easiest to make then my mind started thinking outside the box and I came up with the following caramels:

1. Fleur de sel
2. Chocolate/Coconut caramels [vegan]
3. Bourbon & Black Pepper
4. Jolly Rogers [coconut and rum, but I needed a new name to avoid trademark issues]
5. Bacon & Maple syrup [yes, you read that right]

I made them all and they were great. The few people who sampled them loved them and wanted more and there is where the problem started. I did my homework while testing my recipes and found the best price to purchase the ingredients. I could even use agave nectar instead of sugar and corn syrup because it’s a natural invert sugar and would stay smooth and not grainy, but the key factor was in the kitchen and time.

I could crank out a batch in about an hour, but the problem was I could only crank out about 3lbs at a time and then I’d have to clean the pots while the caramels were setting so I could realistically only crank out about 12lbs a week given that I was making them at home and had to find time in between my daughter being at school, keeping the house clean and other things let alone going somewhere to sell them.

While I was thinking this I was looking at what other people were selling homemade caramels for and it was anywhere from $10-$25/pound. At this amount that would mean I would be able to earn between $120-$300/week if I sold them all. I also happened to run across an article about struggling pop up food businesses and one in particular caught me by surprise. It was a couple of women who where making homemade pies and selling them for $35 each. I don’t know about you, but that better be one really good pie for $35. I can get a decent pie for $6 and a pie for $10 that will have people asking for seconds, but what is going to make a $35 pie that special? Likewise, the only thing about my caramels that could justify say a $20/lb price would be what I was putting into them.

Then there was the fact that I’d have to sell that much every week to earn a below minimum wage income from it. In the end I’ve lived too long to earn that little, so I’ve had to put the idea of a candy pop up business on the side for now. That doesn’t mean I won’t be making my caramels anymore. I’ll still make some and have them around most of the time because you never know when someone is going to come by. They’ll also make nice end of the year gifts for the people who help us out because they’ll remember a pound of bourbon and black pepper caramels longer than a Starbucks gift card.

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TaskRabbit Revisited

I had written an article on the company Task Rabbit that’s here in San Francisco several months ago. It sounded like a good idea, but I was skeptical. I tried it, but never got a task. Now that they’ve had some time to settle in things have changed and I felt I should revisit them.

When I first join the website as a task rabbit there was hardly anyone in the Sunset District that needed help. They’re name hadn’t gotten out across San Francisco I suppose so no one new about them. Then one day I saw that there was a woman who needed two bags of dog food picked up for her and she lived three blocks away from me. I figured since I could pick up the dog food within a couple of blocks I’d offer to do it for $10. BING! I got the task. I ran off and got the dog food and called her up and actually had to go to two different stores because each store only had one bag, but they were still close by. I called her up and dropped off the food and she even gave me a $5 tip because I had to go to two stores. When I got home my Task Rabbit account had the $10 in it. Entire time spent, 15 minutes.

Not to shabby, but then I realized that I couldn’t access the money until I had acquired at least $25. So back to bidding on tasks. I got a few more and I started to get hooked. I’ve made over $200 in the last week in less than two hours worth of my time. Many of the tasks that I’ve been performing have been virtual tasks that I could do at home like searching for the passenger side mirror for a 2002 MX-5 Miata or helping someone with their website. One task has actually led me to get some freelance work that is turning out to be very lucrative.

Task Rabbit works with a point system so that the more tasks you do and the more difficult tasks you do you get more points which raises you in level. At various levels you get perks such as a Task Rabbit t-shirt at level 5 and Task Rabbit business cards with your name on them at level 10. Once you pass level 15 you get access to the Task Rabbit VIP store where your level earning give you access to more free stuff.

In the beginning there were somewhat ridiculous tasks like, get me a 6 pack of beer. How much was that worth really? Fetch me a pint of Ben and Jerrys? Now the people placing tasks are getting more serious. I’ve got a task to hook up someone’s cable box to their home theater system. It turns out the guy who hired me did so because we had previously worked at the same company so it’s also useful for networking. After you’ve done a few tasks each month you get a free task for yourself as well. Task Rabbit calls the people who do the tasks micro-entrepreneurs and it is like freelance work, but you also have to sell yourself like you’re a start up. Some of the top people actually are making $5000 a month which isn’t something to sneeze at in this economy. I’ll be supplementing my income more with Task Rabbit, but I won’t quit my day job.

If you need a few bucks here and there and aren’t afraid to work for it check out Task Rabbit. You’ll be surprised at what people will give you money for doing. Oh and if you need a task done I’ve got a code that will give you $10 off your first task.

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Sandbox Suites: A nice place to work, when you need it.

I received an email from a friend of mine about a meeting she wanted to set up with a few of us who work for a non-profit. I was told it was at the Sandbox Suites and first thought, “That’s a funny name for a hotel.” I looked it up on google maps and even looking at the street view I couldn’t see a hotel that might have conference rooms anywhere. Then after searching for it on the regular google I found out I was in for a surprise.

Sandbox Suites is aimed at start up tech companies. I used to work for one and I have to say it was great. I was working from home 5 days a week with a couple of hours on Monday’s spent in a meeting when we all got together. With everything now working off of the cloud you don’t really need a big office that costs you lots of money. Each person can work from their own virtual office space and then you either get together once a week or just use something like skype to have a free conference call.

This was a change that didn’t take much getting used to and the old place I worked would use a conference room at the place we’d have our meetings when they were making pitches to investors. Sandbox Suites was a bit different. Yes, there was free WiFi and you could print out up to 50 pages/hour, but it had something other places I’ve been at didn’t. It had amenities. Not just clean bathrooms, but they had a water cooler and coffee for free and there was a small dispenser that sold candy bars and chips that sat on the counter top. The best part was that it didn’t look like it was a carpeted echo-y room. It looked and felt like an actual workplace. The room we were in was about 12’x12′ and had a whiteboard, telephone and projector [big bonus!]

I believe this room cost around $25/hour and sat the four of us rather comfortably. There were smaller cubicles on the two floors and in the entrance area they had a couch and several plush chairs with tables you could use for small one on one meetings. Very nice.

For many people they need to get out of the house to actually get their work done and I know I was a bit like that at times. When I was working with a start up I’d get up and start working around 7:30 and sometimes not finish until 8pm at night with the day broken up by trips to the store and such. Sometimes you just want to be able to say I’m done with work for the day and with a place like this you can make it happen.

The place was busy with people who were renting cubicles, but it wasn’t the least bit noisy. Everyone there seemed very happy and at least looked like they were being productive. The receptionist was more of a concierge in that he was getting us everything we wanted and when we wanted it.

They have several locations around San Francisco in the SOMA and Union Square areas and also locations in Berkeley. You can rent conference rooms by the hour and each room has an electronic calendar outside that shows who has the room booked. You can rent cubicle space on a daily or monthly basis as you need it. We’ll probably we using this place again in the near future. It’s a short walk from a short metro trip and the environment is definitely worth it.

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So a Bull Walks into a Union Shop…

I was working at a printshop a little over a decade ago and lost my job after I had a stroke. I wasn’t exactly told why, but they let me go. I can only assume that it might have raised their insurance premiums because I has a health risk. As it turned out the company started to go downhill from there. I have a curse that I somehow developed in that every company that I have been laid off/fired from usually goes under within 6 months. There’s only one company so far that’s still moving along in a crippled state and they should be gone shortly.

Now after I lost that job it turns out there was a print service bureau up the street that was getting more work than they could handle and I was the cute hard working guy they new because when we had a breakdown in our film processing equipment they’d send me over there for a fix. This was a union shop and I had never worked for a union shop before and my eyes lit up. Unions! They always paid you big bucks, got you great health benefits and you got lots of time off and in this case you only had to work a 7 hour day which included your lunch. Two thumbs up! Strangely enough, the three owners of this small business started the company unionized. As a matter of fact the printers union was the first union ever started int he United States. Well, this is where the fun stops.

I was used to having to produce start to finish 30-40 jobs a day from electronic artwork to finished printing plates. Now I only had to produce the finished artwork. I liked starting at 7:30 in the morning which seemed ambitious to everyone except one of the owners who would open the place at 7am. While things went fine for a few months I noticed them asking me to slow down on my work because I wasn’t leaving anything for the other two workers to do. Then with the dot com bomb there slowly became less and less work coming in and because I was so efficient they were having to send home employee’s with more time on the job. This was totally against union rules and so since I was the newbie to the bunch they finally laid me off. The unfortunate part was that the others who worked there weren’t as efficient as I was so in the end even though they had less work, what was taking me 15 minutes to do was taking them 2-3 hours to do and they started to lose customers which meant even less work and they eventually closed down.

Today you won’t find a single union printer within San Francisco and you won’t find very many small non-union printers in San Francisco any more either. So now let’s move forward a few years. I was out of work and heard that Safeway’s union had re-negotiated their pay scale so that checkers were making $20/hour. I start thinking this would be easy so I went in and applied and they were very eager to hire me. I passed all the tests with flying colors and was invited to the first training meeting. Here’s where it starts to get weird. Most of the people in the meeting did not have English as a first language there were four people who fell asleep during the training session and one women who just about passed out, but it still sounded great so I went along with it. They didn’t say anything about pay though so after the four hour training session which happened to be at my local Safeway I went down and found the manager that I always said hi to when I was shopping there. I asked him, “So I hear that the checkers are making $20/hour now when does that start?” His answer, “They didn’t tell you in the meeting? You start at minimum wage which after a year you were eligible, but not guaranteed full time work at minimum wage and you get incremental pay increases each year so you won’t be making $20/hour for about 10 years.”

Crap, waste of time. I can’t raise my family on $9.75/hour part time. Start looking again. This led me to start thinking about unions.

Unions were started to protect workers from being exploited by their employees. This was a good thing. People weren’t being paid what their job was worth in the marketplace and when they unionized they had higher wages, job protection and benefits. In Safeway’s case they may as well have not been unionized because they were paying crap and had a high turnover rate. Most of the people in the training session with me weren’t even legal voting age yet. For them it was probably a good job. For me having a family it sucked.

Then you have toll takers on the Golden Gate Bridge that they’re going to be getting rid of because their union get’s them paid $27/hour and fully paid benefits for them and their families at no additional cost. They have to paid about $50 union dues a month which at $27/hour is nothing and their job…taking money and making change. $27/hour is a bit on the high side wouldn’t you say? You don’t even need a high school diploma to get that kind of job.

Workers do need some protection, but by this I mean good workers. People who have the talent and skills to do the job should be paid accordingly. We now have lots of “start ups” I attended a meeting of one last night and I worked for one a few months ago under the jobs now program. Then I was getting paid because they were getting reimbursed by the federal government for hiring unemployed parents. Great job. I was being paid what I was worth and encouraged to learn new skills. Then the subsides ended and so did the job unless I wanted to work for private equity. Private equity means you earn shares in a company that are pretty much worthless unless someone offers to buy out the company. There are many companies who managed to make this work, but there are far more who haven’t. While computing is moving towards the cloud, I’m not letting my paycheck move there as well.

San Francisco has tons of start ups all over the place. We have our Twitter who’s doing quite well and hasn’t gone public yet, but I’m not sure how they’re making their money other than getting rich investors to toss money at them thinking they’ll make it work one of these days. MySpace on the other hand which isn’t SF based, does or rather did have an office in SF where they just had to lay off everyone because they aren’t a cool start up anymore.

Just as our government has become polarized on the left and right so has the workplace. You have unions that support unskilled laborers with high pay and good benefits, then you have startups who support highly skilled laborers for little or no pay. We need something in between what San Francisco needs is a work meritocracy. If you’re good at what you do you should be paid for it. If you’re not good at what you do then you should be paid less or not at all and lose your job. Work efficiently and produce more at a higher quality means you are more valuable to your company and are a more commercial commodity. Let’s move back to that way of life.