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.

Worth the drive. Delancey, New York has fewer than 800 residents and zero stoplights. It’s also got a pie shop people drive hours to reach.

The shop is run by Maggie McDowell, who previously spent more than a decade acting in NYC while working restaurant shifts. Burned out, she did a stint upstate in the Catskills that ended up becoming permanent. She started baking in her kitchen, she says in a recent profile, because the wild blackberry bushes behind her home were making way more fruit than she could use, and “pie became an easy excuse to meet people.”

A few pies a week turned into a few dozen, and... well, you know where this is going, folks: Maggie’s now got her own brick-and-mortar.

The name? Magpies. 🧑‍🍳🤌

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Starter Stack, in partnership with Hostinger

Last week I wrote about a wall that lots of starters hit. 25 tabs deep, trying to piece together a tech stack you don’t quite understand, with your biz (or at least your revenue!) still a dream in your Notes app. Okay, okay, fine Danny, we get it – but what does Hostinger actually do? Fair question. Here’s their pitch for starters:

Whether that’s your whole stack depends on what you’re building. But that’s a lot of tabs closed for one login… ✅

Hatsadee “Yoyo” Xayavongchanch had £4 left after a day’s work cutting hair. Her husband Frazer Rhodes had a hunch about her homemade ginger chilli sauce.

The hunch was that the sauce Yoyo kept bringing to barbecues – built from childhood memories growing up in Laos – might be worth bottling, and a way to turn a passion into much-needed income.

So they took 27 bottles of the stuff to their local market in West Yorkshire... and sold every single one. The number that convinced them they had a biz on their hands was their conversion rate: roughly 85% of people who tasted it, bought it. And that hasn’t budged since.

What has changed: YoYo Laos Sauce was crowned overall winner of the National Chilli Awards, now produces in Laos and the UK, and puts 10p from every bottle towards clearing unexploded bombs from Lao farmland.

→ Below, Frazer and Yoyo tell For Starters how those first few bottles became 36,000. Keep reading… 🌶️🌶️🌶️

💬 Hello, both! Where did the idea for your hot sauce come from?

Yoyo: I used to help my family at Khua Din Market, an early morning market in Vientiane, and the three ingredients that now form the basis of the sauce – ginger, chilli and garlic – are what they used to sell. I’d help peel and prep and sell. I was about six or seven years old then, and every morning people from the farm would bring a big truck with chilli and ginger to my mum’s sister’s house. Chillis have a green stalk, and they’d paid us to take it off. We tried to do it as fast as we could. The kilos would pile up! So I’ve worked with chillis from a very young age.

💬 Where did you two meet? In the UK?

Frazer: We actually met in Bali. I was traveling and Yoyo was there, too. On that same trip I was riding motorbikes up through Laos with some friends, so Yoyo and I met again in Laos. I’d hardly ever ridden a motorbike in my life. And we ended up getting married and moved to the UK in 2015. 

💬 And is that when the eureka idea for the hot sauce arrived? Or not yet?

Yoyo: Not yet, although in Laos I made a ginger chilli sauce just for myself and family, but I never thought about selling it or starting a brand. Back in Laos I had a beauty salon. My sister cut hair, so when I was a teenager I helped her out and I ended up doing that too. And then I did the same when I moved to the UK.

Frazer: The challenge is, when you’re an immigrant, you have to start again. Yoyo went to English school and then bounced around jobs. It was really difficult – whether it was cutting hair, care work, waitressing, or making less than minimum wage. One nail place said you can work for us for two weeks for training and we’ll give you £100. The final straw was Yoyo got some work cutting hair at a barbershop in Bradford, not too far from us. She came home and said, “My train fare was £6 and I earned £10.” She had £4 left. I just thought, we’ve gotta do something else.

💬 I can already smell the ginger, chilli and garlic coming…  

Yoyo: Yes! While I was working these different jobs, I was making ginger chilli sauce. I’d take it to barbecues with friends and family. I cook sticky rice, too. In Laos you eat sticky rice with everything – breakfast, lunch, dinner. And people just loved my sauce. It was crazy – nonstop dipping sticky rice in the sauce along with this special barbecue duck I prepare.

Frazer: People started to say, “You really should sell this” or “If you bottle this, I’d buy it.” I’d had some businesses – some failed, some hadn’t. So I wasn’t afraid to try something out. What’s the worst that can happen? We registered with the local authority. We bought some bottles. We got our friend Michelle to make us a label with Yoyo’s face on it. We went to our local market, Todmorden Market, with a few dozen bottles – and we sold the whole lot.

Yoyo: It’s because it’s homemade, so when people try it, they’re like, “Wowww, I’ve never tried sauce like this before.” They call over to their friends and family, “Hey, guys, come try this sauce!” It was so nice to see.

💬 At that point, were you producing the sauce in your kitchen at home?

Frazer: Yup. We sold our furniture and our house became the unit, initially! Early on we hadn’t quite perfected the process, so we had stuff that fermented and bottles that exploded. The weather was another challenge. Doing markets outside isn’t for the faint of heart. On 3 or 4 occasions it was -4C (25F) or -5C (23F). We used to serve the sauce on chopped cucumber slices, and it got so cold that the cucumber froze.

💬 Not a problem that happens in Laos.

Yoyo: Exactly.

💬 What else went wrong? You’re making a physical product that you bottle. Things break.

Frazer: It’s really tough. There was one moment when we ended up with containers in the wrong place all over the world. We’ve also had huge swings in the price of ginger, for example. We were buying ginger from a wholesale market. It cost £16 or £17 for 10 kilos, and we’d buy four or five 10-kilo boxes. Then the price went to £54!

💬 Whoa, there goes your margin.

Frazer: So much seasonal variability, too. From January through April, for instance, it might be rubbish quality, so you’d lose a load. Ginger’s also a pretty gnarly thing to peel – and we were doing it by hand! Another big challenge, believe it or not, is: “Where is Laos? What is Laos?”

💬 “What part of Thailand is Laos in?” Yikes. On your bottle, you write “Laos sauce.” You’ve got a bit of an education job.

Frazer: Yeah, and we put the map on it, too. Part of our broader mission is to raise awareness of Laos more broadly. When you tell people the country is about the size of the UK, they’re like, wow!

💬 I was actually in Luang Prabang last Christmas with my wife Kim (who’s French-Lao) and I saw bottles of YoYo in a grocery store. How’d you scale to be a UK brand selling back into Laos?

Frazer: Things really picked up when we submitted our sauce to the National Chilli Awards run by the Clifton Chilli Club. They’ve got a huge following on YouTube. They’re the experts in chilli. We submitted with no expectations. Three months later, in February 2022, an email came through. I was at the top of the house, Yoyo was downstairs, and I just came down, like, “Oh my god… look at this!” We had won the entire category. Gold. And then we won the whole thing: overall best chilli product!

💬 I can’t imagine how happy you must have been.

Yoyo: That was the absolute best day.

Frazer: After that, there was a snowball effect. Local shops started to get interested, then our website came along. We produced sauce for about another year and a half, and in 2023 we hit the limit of what we could do: 8,000 bottles a year. 

💬 Just the two of you?

Frazer: Just the two of us. I’m chief bottle washer and sticker applicator. Yoyo was doing most of the making. I was also working full-time – I had a wedding car business and was working on video game publications and some other stuff. The sauce was evenings and weekends for me, but full-time for Yoyo. Around that point, we moved out of our kitchen and got a small unit. That helped us reclaim our house. It’s always hard to switch off as a starter, but at least now we had a bit of physical distance between home and work.

💬 No more ginger and chilli in the sock drawer. It’s such a potent ingredient, too. I can’t imagine what 8,000 bottles does to your house – or eyes.

Yoyo: Especially when you’re frying or boiling it. Making our Luang Prabang sauce, you really cry!

Frazer: So at that point, we had to figure out how to scale. There were two options, either 1) invest in bigger premises, buy machinery, hire people, and continue to run it yourself; or 2) look for somebody to make it for us. We chose option two – but we hit a brick wall in the UK. We struggled to find somebody to help us.

💬 What did the UK manufacturers say to you?

Frazer: We just got zero responses. There are only so many times you can message or ring people before you realise it isn’t going to happen. At that point it was early 2024 and we were travelling back to Laos. At a tourist shop in Vientiane, we came across a tiny bottle of a hot sauce called “Laobasco”. I thought what is this thing? It said ‘produced in Laos’. So I emailed them. We discovered it was produced by a social enterprise, Mai Savanh Lao. Within a day we met the CEO and visited the factory. They do so many good things. We hatched a plan to work together.

💬 Serendipity is such a huge part of the journey, isn’t it? What did you do next?

Frazer: Suddenly the problem had shifted from not being able to make enough to swinging the other way – we need to push, push, push, and sell! But the thinking behind that was it would free up Yoyo’s time to focus on sales and marketing and content. So we produced at scale and shipped back into the UK. That meant jumping from 8,000 bottles to ordering 36,000 bottles. This attracted attention. The UK trade minister was in Laos and met the team. This was one of the first instances somebody had shipped food under the Developing Countries Trading Scheme. Since Laos has ‘least developed country status’, it benefits from trade agreements to the EU and UK. We landed the shipment with no tariffs, fees, or VAT. It was amazing.

💬 What a huge change. Did you have to completely rewire how you think about your small, homemade product now? 

Frazer: Massive. It completely transformed things. We had to get a fulfillment house to store it. We were able to focus on marketing and sales. Another big change: we thought, well we’ve got our original recipe, we can just multiply that by 100. But no… it doesn’t work that way. It’s much more complex. It took weeks to get the recipe right. We’ve also now got some UK production again, which we needed for food safety regulation reasons when we launched into Ocado.

💬 How have you found new customers?

Frazer: The bigger retailers are where we started to shift the units. Booths [a high-end supermarket chain in northern England] have been amazing. They’ve actually helped us with things like labeling. People don’t realize just how long it takes to get into a supermarket. Very rarely do you go to see somebody and it happens next week. It can take a year or longer. 

The thing that grabbed the attention of the Booths buyer was what we’re doing in Laos. We’re working with Mines Advisory Group. We wanted to put something back into Laos and do good. We’d seen MAG’s work, clearing the country of unexploded ordnance (UXO), when we traveled. I’d also known quite a bit of the history of the Vietnam War and the ‘secret war’ in Laos. MAG is based in Manchester, so the buyer appreciated our story and how we donate from every bottle. That gave us a springboard to shift more units. It’s a bit like dominos – once you get in one large retailer, it’s easier to have conversations with others.

💬 Let’s talk Beerlao. The Economist recently called it ‘probably the most important lager in the world’. How did you end up being an importer of this beer?

Frazer: Everybody who goes to Laos either drinks or sees Beerlao. You can’t get away from it. They have over 95% market share. Five or six years ago we knew there was a company that brought Beerlao into the UK, then stopped. I looked at trying to bring it in myself. With the help of the British Business Group in Laos I was connected to an export manager at Beerlao who put me in touch with importers – and we negotiated a first consignment. Once we opened up pre-orders in the UK it just went bananas! Every single day we get a message saying, “When’s it back in stock?”

💬 I’m next on the list. Alright, shoot your shot: who do you want to connect with?

Frazer: We’d love to get our sauce in front of more people, both here in the UK and overseas. It would be our dream to get restaurants to put YoYo on the table. We want to get our sauces into the US in volume, too. The largest diaspora of Lao people is in America, around 250,000 people. There’s Lao restaurants, Lao festivals, and I’m sure they would love YoYo Laos Sauce. Beyond that, we want to spread the message about MAG and the incredible work they’re doing. Around 1,800 square kilometres of Laos still needs clearing. So any opportunity to share that story would be amazing. ☼

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Tablescaping influencers 🍽 → “The new hosting influencers, for whom food is often an afterthought.”

Adversarial patterns ⚠ → On-demand generated patterns that, when applied to clothing and objects, can prevent surveillance cameras from seeing something (…or you).

Gooseneck barnacles 🍢 → Coming to a restaurant menu near you (scroll down that page…)

The importance of mental maps 🧠 → And why taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer’s.

Peak pickle 🥒 → Have we reached it?

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The great EU shipping panic – I’ve been seeing tons of small businesses freaking out about a new EU law, the PPWR. From this week, anyone shipping a packaged product into an EU country where their business isn’t based has to appoint a paid authorised representative in that country. One per country. So, someone shipping their ceramics to 4 EU countries needs 4 reps, at ~€150 to €1,000 per country per year. Which isn’t really sustainable for many (most?) starters. That’s my read of the changes. Anyone currently dealing with this? Any lawyers in the house?

Creators Directory — A new platform to “bring agencies, brands, and the humans who power them closer together.”

Numbers. Mangal 2

The old world is dying: opinionated advice for c/o 2026 graduates. Jasmine’s Substack

Japan has design, Sweden has design, but India stopped at heritage. Layer by Layer

With Sapone, an 18-year-old from Lithuania hopes to crack America’s shampoo market. Thingtesting

The strange business of selling people their own family’s lost photos. Intelligencer

$12 million — The sales pulled in by Boca Raton, Florida-based Jacob Karram for his handmade scented slime product Slime Obsidian. He’s now retired at 25.

Check out this teleoperated centaur-like humanoid. It is the year 2026 and I can no longer tell what’s real or fake or satire.

Silly Little Plastic Cat, a 12-minute film about the 1980s-era orange Garfield phones that have washed up on the coast of northwest France for decades, “baffling the local community.”

Ordinary abundance.

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1. Cool new brand alert: For Starters subscriber Molly Snyder writes in to tell us about the biz she’s building: a DTC jacket strap accessory called Hitchhike. The idea is that it attaches to any jacket interior so that you can carry the jacket hands-free – “no more tying it around your waist or stuffing it in a bag.”

Have a look and keep an eye out for the Kickstarter Molly’s launching in the coming weeks… 💫

2. And For Starters in the press! Two recent pieces about FS by FS subscribers. I was on the Good Thinking Weekly pod hosted by Chris Danton and Kirsten Ludwig. Loved talking with them about analogue stuff, boomers, and candy shops. I also had the chance to connect with Caroline Albro for her fantastic newsletter Brand Baby. Keep an eye out for more of Caroline in this newsletter… 👀

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