If you’re a tech entrepreneur or you know any tech entrepreneurs, then you know a little secret about us.

We can sometimes be...arrogant.

It’s true. Even the nicest among us can begin to see ourselves as startup wizards. Yes, even me.

Being part of building a seventh company taught me many things. It taught me that tech entrepreneurs can’t do everything — more than that, I learned that honesty about how your skills and expertise line up with what you’re trying to build is much more important than a passion for what you’re selling.

You can read the first six lessons here:

Starting Real Food Works

I got turned on to plant-based eating through connections with a handful of entrepreneur colleagues. We were all getting older, starting to see changes in our bodies (not ones we appreciated). We were also broadening our perspectives, beginning to focus more on our impact on the earth as well as our own health.

I wasn’t sold on plant-based eating at first. But after the third entrepreneur started talking to me about it, I said alright, I’ve gotta try it. I was a convert within three months. My body, my mind, everything changed. (That was nine years ago, and I remain plant-based.)

That third entrepreneur wanted to turn plant-based eating into a business. The idea might sound ho-hum today, but ten years ago, plant-based eating hadn’t been so popularized.

She knew this type of healthy eating took a lot more time and energy than the way we’d been eating before. There was an opportunity.

We thought, how can we make it easier? How can we make this plant-based lifestyle available to more people?

While I helped frame the business idea, I was running an incubator at the time and wasn’t able to join when she started. Six months later, I had the opportunity to transition and excitedly leapt over as COO/co-founder.

The idea was to partner with restaurant chefs. They know how to layer flavors and compose dishes that many home chefs simply can’t create, and they have a commercial kitchen with lots of down time.

We’d coach the chefs to prepare healthy, plant-based meals for us and we’d sell those meals as a subscription service to health-conscious consumers.

It seemed like a perfect model. We didn’t have to carry the overhead of our own kitchen. Our customers got a variety of healthy meals from well-known, respected chefs.

We were passionate about the health benefits of plant-based eating. And we were a team of successful tech entrepreneurs. How could we fail?

What you don’t know can kill...your business

We’d seen people struggling to build these types of businesses. That didn’t deter us. We said, look, we’re tech entrepreneurs. We’ve each built five or six tech businesses. We know about marketing and branding. We know how to leverage technology. We know how to build teams, and how to raise money. We can do this.

What we didn’t know much about: running a food business.

Yes, we had a chef and someone from the restaurant industry on our team, but neither of them had ever built a food business either.

We had expectations that we could build a food business like you build a tech business — big and fast.

We proved the concept on paper, and we went out to validate our riskiest assumptions in true “lean startup” method. Yes, restaurant owners were interested in this business model. Yes, they could cook our healthy meals. Yes, we could operationalize the collection and delivery of a week’s worth of fresh restaurant meals at a time. (Check out this fun time lapse video of one of our early pick and pack Tuesdays.)

We had the luxury of founders with startup experience, and split the responsibilities so that one could fundraise full-time while the other managed the operations. My co-founder raised a million dollars from purpose-driven investors that believed in our vision and from investors that believed in our team.

Ultimately we had to sell the product to consumers, and that’s where we got stuck. Which, at the time, was a surprise. We’s believed that our assumptions about food and delivery were our highest risks. Customer acquisition, which we had plenty of experience in, was supposed to be lower risk.

The food was great. We went to health events where people could sample the food. They loved it. Some, but not many, would subscribe for the first week (at a discount, of course). They’d eventually drop off. We couldn’t get beyond about a hundred customers - many friends and family.

What kept them from signing up and staying loyal to such a convenient service?

Some weren’t prepared to plan their meals out a week in advance. They wanted the flexibility to go to a restaurant at the last minute and not worry about the pre-packaged meal already in their fridge. Some were still cooking conventional (not plant-based) meals for their family.

Plus, it wasn’t cheap.

We simply couldn’t get the price down to an affordable amount — like the low rates that are popular with meal services today. There were too many layers to the process. Every good solution we found (to problems like how to package a salad so it stays fresh for a week) drove up the cost. Especially the local delivery piece. It was a business model problem we simply couldn’t resolve.

We tried to figure out the problem with product-market fit. Was it our launch city? (Philadelphia isn’t known for its healthy eating or expensive tastes.) Or our value proposition and messaging (get healthy, weight loss, disease prevention, or even virility)? Perhaps it was the wrong timing.

We were running low on cash, which meant we were running out of time. I and a few others left the company to reduce the burn and give the company more runway.

The company continued for another year or so, trying new messages and models (such as a soup cleanse).

Switching costs

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to chat with Rob Fitzpatrick, author of The Mom Test. Rob’s working on new concepts, including a “toolkit” for entrepreneurs. He suggests that if entrepreneurs focus on the same industry for each subsequent business, they have valuable advantages:

Industry insight and connections
Access to strong co-founders and partners
Pre-built audience and an activated network.

In our food business, we were operating in an industry new to us. There are big switching costs.

The problem wasn’t that we thought we had the experience. We knew we didn’t. We interviewed colleagues who had been in the industry like Nutrisystem, Weight Watchers online, and Blue Apron. We consulted with a lot of people and tried to implement what we learned from them.

Even though the failure rate in the food industry is remarkably high, we thought we could do it better. Not because we had some special insight into food businesses. Because we’d built tech businesses. That was our problem.

Had we not been so arrogant, we would have gone into it knowing that a food business is likely to be a long, slow grind. Successful food businesses almost always are.

We wouldn’t have raised so much money so quickly. We wouldn’t have hired as many people. We wouldn’t have tried to build a food business like we were scaling a tech business.

Ultimately, it was a humbling reminder that past success isn’t always an indicator of future success — especially when you’ve jumped into a different arena.

Final thoughts

The food company was eventually folded into a tech company in what could best be described as an “acquihire” of the founder. Back to a familiar industry, with insight, connections, and experience. It was a way to provide some residual value to the investors who had trusted our team to build a healthy food business from the outside-in.

Separately, the remnants of the operations made a final pivot to corporate catering and ultimately folded.

As a coach, I know that people grow most when we’re pushed out of our comfort zone. I’m not suggesting that entrepreneurs don’t try new things. We’re wired to see the possible in the impossible and take risks.

There is an advantage to focus and consistency that should not be discounted. And a mindset of being humbled when we’re out of our league. You don’t know what you don’t know — and there’s a cost to not knowing.