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Pivoting from tech to bagels 🥯

Pivoting from tech to bagels 🥯

This is For Starters Issue #6

Daniel Giacopelli
February 28, 2025

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Welcome to Issue #6 👋

Anyone who knows me knows my decades-long love affair with bagels. My family jokes I was born with a bagel in my hand. I regularly smuggle industrial quantities of Trader Joe’s Everything But The Bagel mix on flights from NY/LA to London. My philosophy is that there are few things better in life than a warm sesame bagel loaded with jalapeño cream cheese.

So naturally I love a good bagel story. And today, my friends, we’ve got one. Read why Dan Duncan quit his decade-long tech career to become the bagel maestro of Kansas City – and find out the one big business idea Dan thinks could be huge. Take it and run with it… 👀 🏃‍♀️

How are you finding For Starters? What do you want to see more (or less) of? More interviews? Tips? Pics of baby me holding bagels? → [email protected]

–Danny

In this week’s issue…

INSPO ↣ Coffee, but everywhere
TIPS ↣ It’s time to pay the ‘dumb tax’
IDEAS ↣ Dinosaurs, not unicorns
TOOLS ↣ Where to get design help
TOWN HALL ↣ Side hustles vs day jobs

Laundromats can be pretty great businesses (with 20-35% profit margins). They’re also good places to get creative. An OG laundromat-but-something-more is Celsious in Brooklyn, founded by German-born sisters Theresa and Corinna Williams. Throwing their hat into the ring are Ireland McCaughey and Ben Razin, founders of Launderette New York: laundry, cafe, mini-market, merch, wifi, all in one space. Just makes sense 🧼🧴🧽✨

If you happen to be in Bethnal Green, east London tomorrow, go swing by the very first day of Tita's. It’s a coffee van run by Jamilla Chakar, inspired by the dream of her late aunt. Jamilla gave me the inside scoop…

↣ What are you excited about? I'm genuinely excited to connect with people from all walks of life. I've been so inspired by London’s cafe culture, and how it creates inviting spaces that bring people together. I'm looking forward building relationships, as I could listen to stories all day over a great cuppa coffee (or tea).

↣ …and nervous? Super nervous of things going wrong. Operating a coffee van has already proven to be challenging and I have had several things go wrong. During my trial launches, I ran out of my water tank, had my coffee grinder break down, ran out of power in my battery, and so much more. I’ve unintentionally developed skills as an electrician, plumber, and a handy-woman!

↣ Where’d you learn how to start a business? My Tita! She was a hospitality boss and always prioritised customer experience. My background isn’t in coffee, however I've always had an entrepreneurial spirit. All my knowledge has come from my Tita's experiences running cafes. After her passing, I still had so much to learn. Behind the scenes I've spent time with my coffee roasters who've taught me fundamental specialty coffee knowledge, and endless hours of YouTube watching latte art tutorials! There's still so much I don't know, but I look forward to continuing to learn as I go.

Meanwhile, check out this super cute coffee shop tucked inside what appears to be someone’s garage in Portland, Oregon. I’m sure there were some zoning hoops to jump through, so bravo. And in Ho Chi Minh City, they've turned an old apartment complex into a bunch of tiny cafes. It's like that movie The Raid, except instead of bad guys on each floor, you’ll find adorable matcha drinks ☕

There’s a new “Black American Chinese food” spot in West Philly called Black Dragon, serving up “General Roscoe’s” chicken, “Man Man” noodles, egg rolls stuffed with collard greens, and lo mein with oxtail. They’re also “offering second chances to those formally incarcerated.” It’s everything I love about America. Here’s the owner, Kurt Evans, quoted in Eater:

“Local Chinese takeout spots have been disappearing all across Philly, especially in Black communities… Black Dragon is the cultural culinary response to this as we are at the same location of another Chinese takeout spot that previously closed.”

Over here in the UK, Josephine Philips studied physics and philosophy at university before pivoting to secondhand clothing and becoming a top seller on Depop. Then she founded SOJO, an app for door-to-door clothing alterations and repairs. Pretty cool that a few weeks ago she signed a big deal with ARKET to be the retailer’s online and in-store repair and alterations service. (More here). I love this business. Public service announcement: Don’t throw out clothes – repair them ❤️‍🩹

Elsewhere in the UK, the FT profiles the “new-gen dealers on the pre-owned watch scene”, aka the twenty-something Hutson brothers, Harvey and Jacob, aka the Kettle Kids. They started in 2017 with a £1000 loan from their grandmother and now they’ve got 264k Instagram followers and they’re opening a 4,500 sq ft pre-owned watch shop on a very pricey London street. Great “Guy Ritchie rags-to-riches fairytale” story here.

And I really enjoyed reading this profile of the incredible 68-year-old starter Saori Kawano, founder of Korin:

“When Saori Kawano arrived in New York City in 1978 from Yokohama, most Americans’ ideas of Japanese food ended at instant ramen and onion volcanoes. Since then, if you’ve enjoyed hand-cut soba noodles or an omakase dinner, or admired the graceful curves of a rice bowl or the flash of a Japanese knife blade, you can probably thank her.”

You received this because you’re subscribed to For Starters, a weekly briefing for the next generation of small business owners. It’s written by Danny Giacopelli, a New York-born, London-based journalist (ex Monocle/Courier), photographer and starter. Thanks so much for being here.

It wasn’t even noon yet in Kansas City when For Starters caught up with Dan Duncan, but the bagel baker had already finished work. “You're catching me at the end of my day,” he says. “I’m still kind of getting used to bakers’ hours. I’ve been baking since four this morning!”

This is all a bit different from the life Dan was used to for the past decade, when he was a product manager for mobile app companies. Yet he’s recently traded tech for bagels, and is busy building a thriving business called Bread Friends. To think, it all started with a tour of a local flour mill…

“It was a Christmas gift from a friend,” Dan recalls. “And at the end of the tour, I asked if I could have some of the flour, which they weren’t even selling to the public. They gave me a bag, I took it home, and I made my first loaf of bread that night,” he says. His new hobby quickly evolved into a serious pursuit. Despite never having baked before, Dan was soon baking sourdough bread regularly and experimenting with the discarded starter to reduce waste. A recipe for sourdough crackers proved to be a hit at the office.

“Eventually a couple of coworkers were like, ‘Hey, my daughter's graduating high school. We’d love a charcuterie spread, can you make more of these?’ Or ‘Can you make some for my birthday party?’ So I started making larger and larger amounts.”

Demand grew, leading to annual Christmas drops where Dan would hack together a website, take preorders, and spend late December frantically baking and hand-delivering boxes of crackers. “The first year it was all friends. Then it started spreading via word of mouth. The next year there were some folks I didn’t know at all who placed orders, which was pretty cool,” he says.

In 2020, amid pandemic isolation, he rebranded to "Bread Friends" with the idea of connecting people through shared food. "The deal was if you bought a box of crackers, you also had to ship a box of crackers to a friend. You couldn't just buy one for yourself. I just thought it was a fun way to enjoy something with someone from afar."

Unbeknownst to Dan, this caught the attention of someone at Universe, the no-code web company he used to create his site, which led to a surprising job offer. “I ended up kind of jumping ship and working with them for a few years and helping build that app! All while I continued baking.”

And this gets us to the bagel part of the story. Sweet, delicious bagels. Inspired by a revelatory sourdough bagel at LA’s buzzy Courage Bagels, which he tasted on a road trip in California the week before starting the Universe gig, Dan began experimenting with Montreal-style wood-fired bagels. He even ordered a frozen batch from the famous St-Viateur Bagels in Montreal to try and recreate the taste.

Sunday morning “bagel parties” for friends soon followed, in which he made use of a modular wood oven in his backyard. Positive word-of-mouth led to pop-up events, which led to a wholesale deal, and ultimately, last year, a major life decision. “I've either got to take the leap or stop it entirely,” Dan realized. “I've been doing this as a pop-up for too long for me not to do something with it, but it’s also taking up too much of my time to continue operating it as just a little part-time thing.”

A soul-searching tour of Copenhagen's bakeries helped to clarify his vision. “Over the course of that 10-day trip, without even trying, I wrote the business plan for Bread Friends. I came back and have been working on it ever since!” As of November, the business is now Dan’s full-time focus. He’s scaling the pop-ups and the wholesale accounts and he’s currently working on opening his own brick and mortar space.

Dan’s advice for starters:

1. Get ready to pay the ‘dumb tax’

“I’ve rolled countless bagels at this point and I feel like I know what I’m doing, so I thought that if I was really confident, if I put the 10,000 hours in, then I wasn’t going to deal with imposter syndrome. But I’m meeting with friends who are opening burger shops or who run bars and I still feel like the impostor in the room, even though we all have a similar background. I expected that the day that I quit my tech job I’d have this wealth of confidence. That did not happen. But that’s okay. It’s motivating for sure.

I forget who I heard this from, but I’m definitely paying the “dumb tax” right now. Everything that I expect to take one week takes two weeks. Everything that I expect to cost $1,000 costs $2,000. If it’s your first time, it’s always going to take longer. You have to start to account for that right now.”

2. Be a lifelong learner

“Once I figured out how to make a bagel with the flour that I've been using for years, I decided to branch out with other flours. I’ve started doing research into regenerative grains – you plant this wheat one time and then you don’t have to plant it again. It’s probably the biggest thing happening in Kansas for the climate, because the time, water and energy that goes into replanting is so laborious. So, I want to learn how to make bagels with regenerative wheat.

It’s motivating but also a totally different ballgame. Everything I’ve learned about making bagels no longer applies. I have to start from scratch. It’s funny, I wouldn’t have even thought about this two years ago. I thought once I get this recipe down I’d be on autopilot. That is definitely not the case. I just love the constant search for something new. If I was content making the same bagel every day, I don't think I’d be doing this.”

3. Build this business…

“I have not yet seen a great platform or ecosystem for food pop-ups, or any quick pop-up concept that takes pre-orders and facilitates the logistics of running that sort of business. The point of sale solutions of Toast, Square and even Shopify just aren’t oriented for something like pop-ups or pre-orders. I've talked about this a lot with fellow popup food operators over the last few years. A lot of them have been using Instagram DMs as their entire ordering system and then dealing in cash or Venmo or Apple Pay. But that doesn't translate easily into Quickbooks or any sort of accounting system once you get big enough.

The solution I put together was basically hacking together a pretty basic e-commerce pre-order system by creating a bunch of different products for different pickup times, but it wasn’t robust enough for me to customize a form to collect an address or anything. So then I’m sending out all these emails afterwards and it became a logistical nightmare. I was a product manager so I spent a lot of time combing through data and organizing things. I use Notion and Google Sheets and all these things. But if someone doesn't have that background there's not a lot of support for them. So I think there’s still a gap in that market. I have a couple friends from companies that I’ve worked with. We’re like, what if we started a web app for this?!”

Businesses that last centuries. Lots of new entrepreneurs think the lifecycle of a business journey is: launch, grow, sell, retire. And that is 100% amazing. You do you. Live your life. Go get that bag. Etc etc. But also – wouldn’t it be cool if your business lasted 400 years? What a legacy that would be.

Tsundoku (積ん読), the phenomenon of acquiring lots of books but letting them pile up in your home without reading them (and why it may be good for you…)

❝

There are no wrong notes; some are just more right than others.

Thelonious Monk

Resources 🛠️

↣ Pete Brennan runs a community for brand people and designers, and he's created a landing page where you can post a design job for free, and get designers from his community applying/pitching you for the gig. No fees, all free.

↣ Friend of For Starters Éva Goicochea, founder of modern intimacy brand Maude, is launching a new podcast in March with Emma Bates (co-founder of social search engine Diem) and Charlotte Palermino (co-founder of skincare brand Dieux). It’s called “Can I Call You?”. Éva explains…

“CAN I CALL YOU? I get texts like this all day every day. No context, no details—just sky-is-falling panic. Sometimes it’s a founder making a tough call. Sometimes it’s a friend wondering if they should quit their job. Sometimes it’s just: WTF do I do next? Between building maude and Founders' Weekend (a community of 250+ founders with Grace Clarke), my inbox is full of “Have a sec?” and “Need your take on this.” So I decided to call my friends (and powerhouses) Emma Bates (Diem) and Charlotte Palermino (Dieux) to put these conversations to the mic.”

↣ Good Services (book): Learn how to design a service that your users can find, understand and use without having to ask for help

↣ Just Make Your Magazine (book): “Indie magazine making has never been more popular so I thought I’d make an easy to read guide on how to do one yourself”

Reads 📚️

↣ “Top London restaurants adopt minimum spend to deter bots and influencers” / FT (thanks to Josh Spero, one of the article’s authors, for gifting this link to For Starters subscribers – first 300 clicks free)

↣ “Coffee Prices Are at a 50-Year High. Producers Aren’t Celebrating” / NYT

↣ “High-end cleaning supplies is a booming business. Here are the major players to know about” / Business of Home

↣ “Vienna’s Refugee-Run Hotel Is Thriving: Since 2015, Magdas Hotel has helped refugees access jobs — while proving that a social business doesn’t have to sacrifice its bottom line.” / RTBC

↣ “Texas’s Barbecue Schism: As the state becomes more urban, so does its barbecue. So why does a small-town family feud feel so important?” / The New Yorker

↣ “Is GoFundMe the new insurance?” / Dwell

↣ “‘It’s Covid 2.0’: Mom-and-pop shops are already feeling the squeeze of Trump’s tariff wars” / Modern Retail

↣ “Cool Chefs Cook at Bouldering Gyms Now” / Broadsheet

For fun 🙃

↣ Possibly fun (to hate-follow from afar, at least), but also possibly the complete opposite: Fyre Festival 2 tickets are now on sale.

📩 Share your juicy links: [email protected]

↣ Paul Noble, the entrepreneur and musical wizard behind Spiritland in London, was opening listening bars before most people (outside of Japan) even knew they were a thing. Huge congrats to Paul, along with Spiritland's operations director Sophie Uddin and their whole team for expanding the empire abroad, with two absolutely gorgeous new bars opening in Lisbon recently: The Kissaten and Spiritland Lisbon. Can't wait to make the pilgrimage.

↣ Becca Millstein, cofounder and CEO of everyone’s favourite tinned seafood brand Fishwife, has got a super fun looking new cookbook out this week. I caught up with Becca, who told me why she’s so excited…

“The illustrations are truly so magical and fill so much of the book; it really is an art book as much as it is a recipe book. And the recipes are so delicious and mostly super simple, so the tinned fish beginner will feel totally at home playing around with the book. I think it's going to be a wonderful tool to help people use tinned fish in more and more delicious ways. It’s just a fun, easy, joy-making book and I think it will make people happy to look at!”

Grab a copy

↣ In an interview a decade ago, Chris Wheaton, then an optician in Boston, described his ideal optical store as “if Charles Eames and Steve Jobs co-owned a speakeasy”. Today, Chris runs North Optical in Portland, Maine, a gorgeous shop that recently earned the title of America’s Finest Optical Retailer for 2024. Talk about manifesting!

↣ Eagle-eyed Sarah Drumm calls attention, with a bat signal to For Starters on IG, that Blondie’s Brewery in Leyton, London has got a huge unit up for grabs ASAP. Someone wanna start a cool business next to Sarah’s home? It’s the nice thing to do.

↣ Chris Bolton, a freelance graphic designer, runs a small business called The Attic Archive, in which he hunts for vintage design and ephemera such as matchbox labels, and frames them in minimalist white frames. Chris used to sell directly on IG, but found it hard to keep an engaged following as he dipped in and out of the business in recent years. Recently he’s switched to selling via Etsy, with IG ads.

Chris’s conundrum → “Whenever I decide to dive into the side hustle, my freelance design work normally picks up and that's what ultimately takes priority and pays the bills. The business is scalable. There is definitely a decent market for my products. They always sell once I get them up and running. And I’m comfortable with the sourcing and creation of the frames (I have collected enough items to make 50-100 frames). But I find myself stuck in limbo between my job that provides my income and a 'side hustle' that has the potential to supplement or become my source of income. I'm stuck. Maybe a mentor or partner could help drive me and the business idea forward. Creative part: no problem. Going beyond an Etsy shop: no idea.”

This is such a common situation, so I’d love to hear what you think. Get in touch with helpful ideas & advice. We’ll publish the most useful feedback here.

↣ And some of our best ideas come when we’re walking. Ian Sanders, a wonderful writer and storytelling coach I’ve known for years, has recently launched a walk club called Unplugged. For anyone near Leigh-on-Sea, England (a beautiful part of the world), join Ian at midday on Fridays to “take a break, breathe fresh air, get stimulated, and walk together by the coast.” We all need this. (I know I do...)

📩 Share your news & updates: [email protected]

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