Hey, starter! Read on for…

—Danny (tell me your biz dreams: [email protected])

👋 Thousands of business-builders around the world read For Starters every Friday. Thanks for being one of them. Learn more.

1. Slice of the wild. Becca is a self-described creative soul living in a 600 year-old cottage in the Eryri mountains of Wales with her partner Max, cute dog, and 6 ducks. She also happens to make seriously gorgeous ceramic sculptures, paintings, and TikToks about her life as a starter. You want to live in her world. That’s what good storytelling is all about.

2. Brick-and-mortar stars. Here are some starters we’ve spotted who are opening amazing physical spaces…

3. Factory forward. In 2017, Josh York quit a corporate fashion job, one where he’d bought 6 million pairs of boys’ underwear in a single year (“Not for me,” he says), moved back in with his parents, acquired 3 used Juki sewing machines and a cutting table, and set up a garment factory on the second story of a warehouse in Corktown, Detroit’s oldest neighborhood. “I wanted to build something in my hometown that actually made a difference,” he explains.

Josh was only 24, with a few thousand dollars. His training: screen printing band merch when he was a kid, teaching himself to sew in college, and studying YouTube videos of factory workers. He made a new shirt every day for two months until he perfected it. Today, Soft Goods makes garments for some of the best brands in the market – and last year they finally launched their own collection, straight from the factory. 🧵

4. The YOLO diaries. And speaking of second-story factories, one of y’all should really buy this former hat factory in France for €170,000 and turn it into a new hat factory. Life is a circle.

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Starter Stack, in partnership with Whatnot

For the last few weeks I’ve been playing around on an app called Whatnot. And it’s super interesting for starters. It’s live selling: a small business owner goes live on camera, shows their products, chats, takes bids, and ships it out. People spend an average of 95 minutes a day on the app, because they’re there for the sellers as much as what they’re offering.

Whatnot started out as a platform for selling collectibles, but the fastest-growing categories are now beauty, fashion, jewelry, even food. Here’s why I think it’s such an interesting channel for starters…

Over the next few Fridays, For Starters is partnering with Whatnot to spotlight a few of these starters in the US and UK – who they are and how they did it.

→ If you sell things, or want to, keep an eye out. And if, like me, you just enjoy nice cameras & vintage jackets, it’s definitely worth a look too… ✨✨

Seif El-Sobky was a self-described ‘corporate boy’ – until he listened to the voice in his head telling him to follow his passion and start a food business.

After a corporate gig at Mars, a stint in Berlin as an early team member of hyper-growth grocery startup Gorillas, and learning the industry ropes at healthy Egyptian street food joint Koshari Street in London, Seif’s now building his own sandwich biz, Sarnie Social.

He’s also doing it very publicly on Instagram, sharing everything he learns in fun daily videos as ‘a clueless guy who has no idea how to set up a company.’

→ Keep reading to hear Seif’s career journey, lessons, and life as a starter…

I grew up in a family of cooks. My mom and dad cooked and I hosted a lot of dinners. Cooking makes me feel good. I like cooking with people and for people. But I didn’t come from an entrepreneurial family. So I thought, I’ll go to university, get a safe job, build up experience, and then once I’ve amassed enough experience and money, I’ll eventually launch my own thing. I thought that year after year after year… 

My corporate career was going well – and I soon joined the grocery delivery startup Gorillas, as one of the early employees. Prior to that I worked for Mars and other huge companies. I was a cog in the machine, just showing up and doing my tiny bit. But Gorillas was a catalyst moment. Every day I’d go to the office and feel completely out of place because I was coming from this suited-up corporate world. At Gorillas I was in charge of tons of areas, most of which I’d never done before. I was working directly with the founder. It was just a completely foreign and exciting experience. 

‘Open your own thing’ was still banging around my head the whole time. I absorbed a lot of learnings from Gorillas: What happens when you take VC money versus angel money? If the company is growing at hyper speed, what do you lose along the way? I was making little notes for when I launched my own thing. What would I avoid? What would I want to adopt? Gorillas raised around $1.3 billion. Silly numbers! And a lot of that was spent by yours truly. I was like, “Thank fuck this isn’t my own money,” you know? Gorillas was built very quickly and fell very quickly. They started laying off tons of people. And then I got made redundant.

I’m not going to apply for another job, I said. I’ll give myself six months to see what ideas I could conjure up. I was living in Berlin back then, and I started making Egyptian-style pizzas in my kitchen and selling them via DMs on Instagram. It wasn’t an income I could live on, but it was validation that I could build something. I barely had 300 IG followers, so it was a leap of faith. Nobody knows me, I thought, so if I embarrass myself, it’ll be to strangers. I was doing maybe 20 or 30 a week at £20 each. People would come to the house to pick them up. I’d write individual notes. I got a thrill from it.

What would it take for me to go a step further? I was making something completely from scratch, marketing it, selling it – so what next? It would have to be restaurants. My girlfriend, who’s German but was living in London, was calling for us to be reunited. I grew up in the UK, so I thought, okay, now might be a good time to come back. I picked up my stuff and left.

By the second week in the UK, I still had no idea what I was going to do. Then such a random thing happened. A year prior, I was chatting with someone I’d hired at Gorillas, and mentioned I was interested in opening a restaurant one day. She said, “Oh, nice! I know this Egyptian guy who owns a restaurant in the UK. Here’s his number.” I remembered I had his number, I gave him a ring and we met at his restaurant, Koshari Street, and we hit it off. He said he needed a CEO for the business and would I be interested? Literally in the first meeting. So I did it!

The restaurant was a moving ship, so I didn’t have to build it from scratch. It was losing tons of money and we turned it around. A lot of it was basic stuff: great customer service, focusing on the food and consistency, store cleanliness, smiling staff, knowing what to say when customers come through the door. We raised some money to build a second, bigger store, then we stabilised the finances of both sites. After that, I told them I was leaving – we’d hire an operations guy to take care of both sites. I finally got the courage to do something completely on my own.

I love baking my own style of bread, and a sandwich idea had been in my mind for a while. It’s a thing that we do in Egypt. We just love bread so much. Egypt’s got something like the highest per capita bread consumption in the world. Growing up in the UK, everyone knows sandwiches, but the bread’s not the best! Recently, however, a lot of Italian focaccia places have popped up and they’re getting a lot of clout because the bread’s so nice. I was watching this movement, and I decided to jump on it and make my own thing. That’s how Sarnie Social was born.

Imagine a clueless guy who has no idea how to set up a company. What does he do? A lot of it is Google and ChatGPT: “How do I open up a company?” Literally, that’s what I did. I registered it and then I decided to share my learnings and experiences on Instagram, because surely there are so many people out there who have a dream of setting up a business but don’t know where to start. You always see success stories on Instagram, but I’m not sure that’s encouraging. It’s good to dream big, but I want to see someone I can relate to who doesn’t know the first thing about what he’s doing.

I now publish daily updates with a bit of tongue in cheek humour. Stuff like, “I had a photo shoot today, I’d never directed one before, and here’s how I did it.” I was nervous at first, but a friend of mine said What are you scared about? No matter how much you embarrass yourself, the attention span of a modern human is far smaller than your embarrassment. I can literally do anything and people will forget about it in 10 minutes. Luckily, it hasn’t been that embarrassing… 

Sarnie Social recently got approached by Deliveroo, who must have come across us on social media. They said: We love what you’re doing, the food looks amazing, and we’d like to offer you a dark kitchen. Funnily enough, we were looking at that idea already, but they were quite expensive to build. They offered to pay for everything: equipment, setup, fitout, insurance, maintenance. So I recruited an amazing ops guy and also a chef, and together we set up this Deliveroo kitchen in Islington. We’re now operating 6 days a week and going strong. The first week was chaos and manic with so many orders, and now it’s stabilised a bit. The biggest struggle is finding staff and getting them to actually show up on their first day!
 
Then something happened and I can’t let it go. A real estate agent friend called me and said there’s a shop site on Portobello Road that’s available – they want to sell the lease. The shop is literally the only thing I can see from my bedroom window. I’m not spiritual, but it’s weird. Is that a sign? I went to visit. The space was perfect. The whole idea behind Sarnie Social is amazing sandwiches and great customer service, but I also want to bring people together over a table of food; to share things on a deeper level than just English small talk about the weather.

I called my mom: “What do you think?” She’s like, “Why not just go for it?” I need £150,000 for the lease, which I don’t have. So, since then, I’ve raised £130,000. That’s unbelievable for me. But we’re still not there. Our first offer was rejected, so all sorts of possibilities are on the table. We’re waiting to see where it goes. But I’m so busy trying to stabilise the ship in the kitchen that I’m not so bothered by the speed at which we get the shop. That’s where we’re at right now. If it works, it works, happy days! If it doesn’t, at least I won’t wake up every morning, see another shop through my bedroom window, and regret not ever trying. ☼

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Desirable difficulties 🤷 → “Without effort, knowledge slips away…”

Tech’s hottest job 🎦 → Documentary filmmaker.

Evergreen companies 🌲 → ‘Purpose-driven companies that stay private, profitable, and enduring for generations to come.’

Solid cocktails 🍸 → Just don’t call it a Jell-O shot!

Google Search 💀 → It’s over.

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Product Disrupt — A curated list of resources to learn product design.

Fonts.xyz — A creator-driven indie type platform, “built for (and by) the oddballs, the obsessives, and the originals.”

How much should an illustrator charge? — Two agents who negotiate fees for a living explain how to charge what you’re worth.

How I’d use social media if my job wasn’t social media. Embedded

Hanoi’s humble beer glass and the memory of a nation. The Sunday Long Read

The 40 most rage-inducing problems in tech. The Ringer

The young traders reviving Britain’s market stalls. Positive News

Refinery29 alum Paula James-Martinez launches a new teen magazine. La Fronde

The rise and rise of balloon racing’s first family. Texas Monthly

A few things I’ve learned about using Instagram as a creative. Sebastian König

$1.1m → The net sales during the month of May of NYC’s new luxury grocery store Meadow Lane, per a TikTok of the founder, across 31,400 transactions.

Rick Rubin is hiring an “AI summer resident” to live with him in his villa in Tuscany this summer and teach him how to use AI. Lol.

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Congrats to FS subscriber Kolton Procter for building Found You Magazine, an independent arts & literature print mag and podcast based on Coast Salish territories (Vancouver, Canada). The latest issue “encourages writers and artists to interpret the theme of Abundance in unexpected ways.” → Pre-order a copy 📚

Big thanks to subscriber Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick for featuring For Starters in his fantastic newsletter The Trend Report™ last week. → Have a read (and subscribe) 👏

And new subscriber Jennifer Koo is also a new CPG founder – she recently left the corporate world after 25 years as a senior exec to bet on herself. The result? League, a sports nutrition brand “focused on the developing athlete.” The idea, she tells us, is “to fill the gap on the shelves between kid products and adult formulations.” → Congrats, Jen! 🏃‍♀

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