Startup Struggles: Overcoming Rejection and Finding Success

Teacher-turned-entrepreneur Rachel Kettlewell 🍓 went down to a four-day week just as her business started to scale. It’s not a move many founders would make, but it felt right to the 41-year-old mother of three, and it worked. In the year since Kettlewell made the transition, Fearne & Rosie ®️ | B Corp, the Yorkshire Dales-based low-sugar jam company she founded in 2019, has seen its fastest period of growth. Over the last 12 months, the company — named after Kettlewell’s two young daughters — said it has grown from about 300 to over 5,000 shelves nationwide, enabling it to claim to be the fastest-growing jam brand in the UK. Fearne & Rosie, which sells jams containing about 40 per cent less sugar than average, can now be found in retailers including Waitrose, Tesco and Ocado. Revenues have grown from £326,000 in 2024 to above £1.6 million in 2025, and Kettlewell expects to reach profitability on revenues of just over £4 million this year. Read more below 👇 https://lnkd.in/eBP8exeX

Restaurants wanted to deliver but couldn’t afford it. Drivers had spare time but no work. Four guys saw the gap — and built DoorDash. They started as their own delivery drivers, launched a simple website with smart routing and batching algorithms, and in the very first month — with almost zero marketing — they already had 150 paying customers and generated over $10,000 in sales. This is a perfect example of spotting real friction in the market and solving it elegantly. Thank you @ycombinator for sharing this video! In The Value Investing Playbook I teach exactly this kind of thinking — how to identify businesses that solve meaningful problems using the 4 pillars: Meaning, Moat, Management, and Margin of Safety. Link in bio → investingsprints.com What everyday problem do you see that could become a big business? Tell me in the comments 👇 #startupstory #doordash #entrepreneurship #businessgrowth #techfounders

A food seller named Kishore Bhaina sells around 200 kg of mutton every day at his hotel. Because of this high demand, his daily earnings can go close to ₹1 lakh, which is around ₹30 lakh a month.   However, the final profit is lower after costs like buying meat, paying staff, and running the shop. Even then, it shows how a busy local food business can earn very well.   His success proves that simple businesses can grow big with good taste, quality, and consistency. When customers trust the food, they keep coming back.   This is a strong example of how small food ventures can quietly build a big income over time.   #startupshivay #business #food #success

🚀 From Kitchen to Freedom: How a Food Truck Can Fuel Your Financial Independence Tired of the 9-to-5 grind? Dream of being your own boss? Let's talk about a path less traveled but packed with potential: the food truck business. Here’s why a mobile kitchen could be your ticket to financial freedom: 1️⃣ Low Barrier to Entry Compared to a brick-and-mortar restaurant, startup costs are significantly lower. No massive rent, fewer permits (though location-dependent), and leaner staffing needs mean you can launch with a fraction of the capital. 2️⃣ Unmatched Flexibility & Agility - Test concepts and menus quickly without long-term lease commitments. - Follow the demand: be at office parks for lunch, festivals on weekends, and residential areas for dinner. - Scale up or pivot rapidly based on real-time customer feedback. 3️⃣ Direct Connection = Stronger Margins You interact with every customer. This builds loyal fans and lets you keep more profit by cutting out middlemen. Social media buzz from a great customer experience is free marketing. 4️⃣ Scalability on Your Terms Start solo. Grow by adding trucks, expanding to catering, or bottling your signature sauce. Many successful restaurants began as a single truck. 5️⃣ The Lifestyle Dividend Financial freedom isn't just about money—it's about control. Set your own hours, choose your locations, and turn your passion for food into a living. The Recipe Isn't Easy: It requires relentless hustle, meticulous operations, and a standout product. But for those willing to grind, the rewards—both financial and personal—can be immense. Have you considered the food truck route? Know someone who’s made the leap? Share your thoughts below! 👇 #FoodTruckBusiness #Entrepreneurship #FinancialFreedom #SideHustle #SmallBusiness #Startup #RestaurantBusiness #OwnYourTime

Our founder Nick Singh asked: "What dishes have we deprecated but never brought back?" Within seconds, I pulled up our Dish Tracker. Every dish we've ever developed, what's live, what's archived, what's ready for revival. No scrambling. No "give me a day." Just the answer. By the end of that conversation, we had 7 dishes prioritised for R&D. That's not luck. That's ops. We're currently running a 45-50% menu rotation week on week. The goal? Push that higher. More variety. Less repetition. Because we know from our customers that variety is one of the top reasons people stay or leave. The unglamorous truth about food startups: the spreadsheet you quietly maintain on a Tuesday is the thing that lets your team move fast on a Thursday. Operations isn't the backend. It's the backbone. If you're curious what those dishes taste like when they hit the menu, check us out at https://www.eatping.com/🍜

The best startups are built out of frustration. Ours started with an espresso machine — and my stubborn refusal to pay full price for one. I'm the kind of person who refuses to buy something at full price knowing it'll go on sale eventually. So I waited. Checked every site. Waited some more. Nothing. Just the same machines, same prices, mocking me every morning as I made my sad instant coffee. So I tried setting up alerts. Bad idea. I ended up drowning in newsletters that had absolutely nothing to do with espresso machines — flash sales on garden furniture, "exclusive" deals on things I'd never heard of, promotional noise from brands I definitely didn't sign up for. And the tools that did track prices? They could only follow one specific product. I didn't want to stalk a single SKU — I wanted someone to tell me when espresso machines, as a category, went on sale. That thing didn't exist. So, naturally, I built it instead of just paying full price like a normal person. Scout sends you one email a week with deals in the categories you actually care about. No fluff, no irrelevant noise, no sponsored garbage dressed up as deals. The espresso machine? Got it at 35% off. ☕ Worth it. If you've ever felt the same way, Scout was built for you.

“Robby Sansom didn’t need to start another company after Epic Provisions.” So why take on one of the hardest problems in food? Because the system needed to change. For the past 50 years, food has been optimized for one thing: efficiency. Volume over values. Faster growth, larger scale, lower cost at the register, often at the expense of soil, animal, and our health. Consumers are left navigating a system that doesn’t always reflect what they actually value. As our co-founder Robby puts it: “We’ve been conditioned to see cheap food as normal. We’ve traded value for cheapness.” So we began to build something different. At Force of Nature, our mission is to redefine the food system through meat you can trust, by connecting people to meat from healthy animals raised on healthy land. Any marketer knows that trust is both the most critical element of any brand to harness, but also the hardest to build. For us, it means working with independent ranchers, building a supply chain rooted in relationships (not consolidation), and investing in education, helping people understand what’s behind the food they buy, and why it matters. Today, that looks like over 917 independent ranches, 17 independent processors, and a supply chain built on relationships, not consolidation. When we understand the system, our definition of value begins to shift. And when that happens, purchase by purchase, the system starts to change. Robby recently unpacked more of this in Entrepreneur: https://lnkd.in/gFv--Vz4

Most food businesses don't close because the food was bad. They close because the backend was. Missed orders. Burned-out owners. Inventory chaos. Customer messages are lost in three different inboxes. The product was beautiful. The operations were quietly bleeding it dry. As a former food business owner turned systems builder, I've seen this pattern repeat. Talented founders, incredible recipes, but no infrastructure to hold the weight of growth. A good system isn't a luxury. It's the difference between a business that scales and a business that survives one season. Build the kitchen. Then build the system that protects it. What's the one system you wish you'd built sooner?  #FoodIndustry #SmallBusiness #BusinessOperations #Entrepreneurship

One of the biggest misconceptions in food startups: Getting a “yes” from a buyer does NOT mean you’ve made it. After approval comes: Distributor onboarding Retail setup paperwork Imaging requirements Promotional commitments Freight planning Launch timing Inventory readiness Potential deductions Retail resets And if one thing is off? Your launch can stall quickly. Founders often spend all their energy trying to get the meeting. Very few prepare for what happens after the buyer says yes. That’s where many expensive mistakes begin.