Setbacks and changes

This week was interesting for two reasons.

 A) we didn’t launch as we planned to

B) we began our journey in Startmate, a startup accelerator in Australia.

Why didn’t we launch?

Well, it’s hard to launch when you expect to launch because there are so many unforeseeable things that can come up. In our case, our tech wasn’t ready and our legal team hadn’t finalised a few documents on the website. This is normal when you're building out your first product and you don’t have too many formal processes in place. hopefully, we will be launching next week!

We renamed the company

We renamed Everyafter into Entry Level. The main reason for this is that a name should be phonetic, i.e should be easy to say and convey. I found that most people would walk away thinking our company name was ‘Everafter,’ a word others are more familiar with. We didn’t want that since most of our platform growth will come from word of mouth. Entry Level was easier to say, clearer and actually very much what we’re doing.

We changed up the angle and pitch

After the customer interviews, we picked the highest leverage problem that we could help solve with the least amount of effort. Previously, I ran a Non-Profit called Real Skills, which ran a program that invited companies to design projects that students would work on.  Projects mimicked real work,  students worked with real mentors and walked out with practical experience to add to their resumes. The unknowns we want to explore are:

• Could we scale this without losing the magic?

• Can we add a  monetisation model that makes sense?

These are questions you can only really answer by doing. So we began work on launching our solution: Entrylevel.ai. How it works:

One month, automated email internships designed and facilitated by real industry experts to provide practical experience to people going for entry-level positions.

Luxury Beers

This week's idea is a little left-field but something I thought could be interesting. A friend of mine who works as a beer marketer at Lion Co. told me there were 3 ways to grow the market

• Get people to drink more (tricky and irresponsible from a marketing perspective)

• Get more people to drink beer (which is the main focus)

• Get people to pay more for beer (currently not tapped into)

So, the idea is to create a new market of luxury beers that people will pay a premium for. This has been done in the past - the Ambassador Reserve, by Crown. Crown only made 3200 bottles, and now they are being auctioned off at almost 10x the original price on eBay, starting at $90 but going as high as $800! The idea is to launch a new beer brand that brings a classy touch to beers and brings them closer to whiskey-type brands. Aging in barrels and premium ingredients are some ways to add more ‘class’ to beer. 

How would I execute

I would start with a contract brewing company - there are many across the world that can do small batches for you. I would talk to some people in the industry, and get some advice on co-creating a luxury recipe. Then, I would run a pre-sales campaign for the bottle with a really classy website on Shopify. Then, use all proceeds to manufacture and deliver the product. I would keep the runs small and limited edition, and each batch would be distinguishable from the previous one. That’s it. A simple idea but something that could be an interesting opportunity in the beer market. As always - if you decide to go ahead and do this let me know! (I’d love to help)

Till next time,

Ajay