304. Meet the Founder Who Scaled to $3M ARR in 13 Months Without VC w/ Nick Singh | Eat Ping

0:00Amardeep Parmar:Great to have you here, Nick. Happy to be here. It's been great to see your journey so far. You've been growing really quickly with EatPing. Can you tell us what EatPing is? Yeah, no, absolutely. Happy to be here too, dude. So EatPing is basically a food tech platform that builds and scales ready meal brands. Look, fancy way of saying that you as a customer, you get like really good Asian ready meals. That's our focus, nutritious Asian food. But under the hood, this is a little science experiment where we've built the entire value chain powered by LLMs, machine learning, and just an automated supply chain.

0:30It's my thesis in that with how advanced tech is right now, why not disrupt the traditional food and beverage economy by layering tech at different points to basically get a lot more margin? And yeah, it's been a wild journey. We launched this month. This is our 13-month, right? And we launched 13 months ago. We're going to hit above 3 mil ARR. We're going to be cash flow positive. And we've gone from zero to 13 people without any venture funding. So I guess the world loves Asian food. What's interesting too, right, is that when you look at it from the outside,

1:01Amardeep Parmar:you think, okay, it's a food brand, right? Yeah. But then the tech bit behind it is, I guess, the real secret sauce, right? I think it's a bit of both, to be honest. I think the tech enables the food and the food enables the tech at the same time because at the end of the day, you're a consumer brand. You're not going to get anywhere unless you have a good consumer-facing product. But where the tech really gets us forward is just like the speed of iteration. you know with my sort of a tooling i'm able to just immediately take customer feedback on the intra-cohort basis to my entire production line to make sure that next cohort a week later our cohorts are week by week they don't have the same issues like the previous cohort had and like how did you come up with this honestly it's i this is gonna be the most cliche thing dude but i like after my first like venture died i went and climbed the mountain in morocco and i got the idea i know it's like such like typical founder bs right no but it's true dude so like basically like i went on like a mountain climb right and like a guide on that mountain climb turned to me he's like dude i really wish there was like nutritious asian food i'm like 30 she said that a variation of that but like but that but that's what he said i was like huh okay interesting and then that got me thinking i was like why has there not been any disruption in the traditional food beverage space with tech let's just explore and see what happened and yeah like how do you go about starting that so okay cool you've got the you've got the the moment that everybody has and to rock a mountain.

2:19Amardeep Parmar:And then from that, how do you actually make that reality? In all honesty, like, so it was my second sort of time starting a company. I definitely learned from the first time like what to do. And I think the second time before I started everything, right, I just basically just wanted to see if this was something people would buy. And I ran like the basic Sean Ellis test, like, you know, give people your product and if like 40 % say that they'd be very disappointed if they couldn't have it again, then you have a product. That, And unlike a traditional sort of tech MVP, this MVP involved me like cooking in my kitchen and going to random people to give them like free food in exchange to like fill out a SurveyMonkey form.

2:58And then when you have like a high degree of confidence that this is something people wanted, 45 % said they'd be very disappointed. I was like, okay, let's do this. And let's like just like figure it out, you know, basically. I had no co-founder. I had no experience in food and beverage, but I just wanted to just grind it through and just see what would come of it. So, yeah. Have you cooked before? Do you like cooking? I like cooking. I like cooking, but I like making my girlfriend like steamed scallops, like feeling like a little master chef. I don't like cooking for like 6 ,000 people.

3:31Amardeep Parmar:Yeah, that's like a different ballgame entirely. So yeah, dude, actually that's the hardest part, like learning all these like nuances about like blast chilling rice and like how many like, like I was just like, dude, like it's a science. It's like a full blown science, like honestly. When you started out testing that product, was that before all of the data stuff came into play? Or were you doing that even when you were testing? No, that was way before it because I think, you know, I looked at this from like two perspectives. I'm not technical, right? So that part would have taken me a lot longer to integrate and a lot more, it would have been a lot more expensive to build like there's no point building it if no one wants like the base product first so i tested it out i actually once after that sort of um sean ellis test ran i didn't even get my own production unit i actually went and contracted like a third party like dark kitchen to make and deliver my food and then when you started and yeah i built the first website on wix and like i paid like it like a like an offshore dev store to just like build like subscription logic was so bad like i still have the website um and then well the once we started getting like two to three K MRR and like the, when like the MVP, the MVP test, I was like, okay, cool.

4:38Now let's build like sort of the, the orchestration layer. Let's actually like raise a small safe or like 50 K and like, let's just do this properly. So like, yeah. Where did you get this early customer? Where's that two to three K coming from? Honestly, Instagram. I think the hardest part of this was just like putting yourself out there on social media. And that was just me like filming my entire journey, memeing out and just like yeah i think it was like i definitely got a lot of hate i still get a lot hate in my comments but that's fine because like you know people are like you're getting reached awareness of your product organic social has always been like an engine for us and at the early stage it's not this now organic social actually counted for 95 percent of our lead gen the remaining five percent was friends and family because i didn't have money to run ads now now that's a different story but like yeah just pure organic referrals what hate do you get um i think people think i'm cringe i am very cringe i definitely have a cringe person it's just people

5:32Amardeep Parmar:just can't deal with it that's fair enough but i guess isn't it also quite cringe commenting on a straight yeah to be like calling somebody else cringe right yeah that's fine i mean i can be the class clown as long as you buy my product just just buy you can hate me it's fine but i i guess what i always find is that interesting thing of for some people that hold them back right yeah they won't put themselves out there because they're worried about those comments yeah why do you think you're able to get through that i think i'm naturally like quite extroverted but i think I'm also just like married to my mission entirely I'm like I don't care what you say about this I just need to get from point a to point b and like like your opinion just really doesn't frankly matter what works for you on socials when you're posting what works for you so we like find that reels work a lot like just like short form reels that just like highlight the product and also what kind of works a little bit more which I guess is what you're trying to do is like we focus a lot on like Asian entrepreneurship because there's not really a lot of representation on social media about Asian entrepreneurs.

6:30And I think people start resonating with that a lot. And naturally, if our food is Asian food, then they start like, you know, using our product quite a bit too.

6:38Amardeep Parmar:We had someone here recently who was talking about the two different types of founder brand, right? Yeah. Because one is like, okay, you're building it as a company founder, founder-led brand. And sometimes that can attract people who want to come entrepreneurs or investors. Yeah. And then you have the stuff that's more around the topic and about the food, for example. How do you try and blend those together? Or do you focus mainly on the founder side? Or also about this ingredients or the foodie style? How do you manage that? We actually split the content. So all that food stuff, like the behind the scenes sort of food porn, the inspiration behind that, that's just like solidly eat pink socials.

7:12For my socials, it's basically the company social as well. We just focus on the pure BTS entrepreneur grid, the Asian entrepreneur stuff, the faith-driven entrepreneur stuff and things like that. And that seems to resonate. It's funny, before this started, we were talking about the Arnie guys. That's how they reached out to me too. They're like, oh, we see you're giving some entrepreneur advice. Just full disclosure, I probably don't give the best advice still.

7:35Amardeep Parmar:And it does resonate with some people. So, yeah. I just think as well, the people who say that they don't give the best advice, the fact that people have the humility to say that is actually the people you should ask for advice from. The people who think they know everything. You should listen to that. yeah but i think whenever somebody comes in and like oh yeah they know everything yeah that is the worthless goes for advice for because they don't have the self-awareness to be able to make a nuance as well yeah no i do thanks man i agree that i i definitely don't know everything i think the beauty about this like weird crazy journey that is e-peng is just like figuring out and just like learning new things along the way like you can read like zero to one as many times as you can but like once you get into the weed of things like it just it's it's completely different ballgame and i think it's it's true because you know like when i first started right when i spoke to people that to give me advice these these were the exact same types of people they're like the people that just didn't know it all and they just in the and like are still like titans in your industry but they're they're still just figuring it out i'm like how you figure it out you have like you have like a 20 bill like yeah yeah and difficult as well right so you said eping is your second company yeah and you said you made a lot of mistakes in the first oh for sure what was the first company i think so the first company was called like journey it was a fintech rent to own sort of platform we wanted to you know we wanted to basically like convert people's rent into a portion of equity and they would use that equity to buy their house out good idea in principle horrible and execution it was just so capital intensive i think the worst thing about that was i mean it wasn't a bad thing it was great because it's a great learning lesson and it was a great like first time sort of venture but um i just didn't speak to customers to see if this is a product that they wanted and i just didn't know who my customer was i was i built and hoped that they will come as opposed to building for them which is what's which never works as you know it just doesn't work at all so yeah because for some people they do the first venture if it doesn't quite work out yeah that can scar them for life okay i'm not built for this i should never do this again yeah and then other people take the lessons and go on from it yeah When that company didn't quite work the way you wanted it to, what was your thought process then?

9:42Amardeep Parmar:Where was your head at? I think there's two things that just motivated me to go on. One, my mom says I'm a slave to pain. So I just want to go get it again. And two, I just felt that I may get some flack for this, but I feel like God put me on this world to do what I'm doing right now, which is to pursue my goal of entrepreneurship. And I was like, you know, look, Nick, you can either just take the hit and just go away from it and just wither and go back to your boring corporate job. Or you can take the hit, learn from it, and build better. And I'm very fortunate. And I will recognize my privilege in the sense that I came from investment banking.

10:16I had saved enough cash to be able to allow me to try and do this again. I much admire the founders that, like, burned their first company down, had nothing, and still went again. I think that's like another degree of just like balls. But, you know, I just wanted to just keep trying until I got it. And I don't know if I got it right now, but hopefully I'll be able to keep trying again if this one doesn't work out.

10:40Amardeep Parmar:We were talking about hunger earlier as well, right? And obviously there's a hunger as a founder, but there's also the hunger of what you're looking for your employees. Yeah. To help you to scale this quickly. For sure. So how are you picking your team and growing that team? Yeah, honestly, and we said this, right? So for me, it's all asymmetric forms of recruitment. I want the people that are completely aligned to the mission, that are hungry for success and do not come from traditional backgrounds. You know, my ops associate, shout out Vipo right now. You know, he came from Reddit. Like he's someone resourceful enough to post and look for a job in this horrible job market.

11:13And like that is a degree of resourcefulness that I just need to tap into. And it's just finding these sort of little gems out there as opposed to posting out job ads. That's what I find works for me the most. People that are willing to grind and just know the reality of it. And I'm very upfront too. I let them know what the working hours are like. I let them know what the expectations are. And I let them know that we're very well compensated for it. But this is what I feel like.

11:40Amardeep Parmar:And you said as well, you're not technical background. But then data and machine learning is a huge part of what he does. How as a non-technical founder did you find the right team to be able to do that? A lot of trial and error. And I think I did have technical friends that were able to point me in the right direction. We have some angels that are super technical as well. One of the Rahul I'm in, he founded on Feeder. So he's been able to give me some very good advice on what to build and which type of person to find. And honestly, with the efficacy of Claude Code right now, there's no excuse for anyone that's non-technical to not know what they want to do.

12:15Amardeep Parmar:With the AI adoption, when did you start thinking, okay, now I'm going to start using myself as opposed to getting people in the team to use it? We started, so I started like very early on because it was just me at the MVP stage and I didn't have a co-founder. And that was just me using like GPT-3, I think, to just come up with like ad copies and to like understand like, you know, like sequencing. I was like, wow, this is actually like really, really good. And then as we start getting more of a team, I think the one great thing that we've done is like, you know, we got Claw Enterprise and we mandated that everyone is like fluent, at least in AI.

12:47And that just doesn't extend the Claw. You know, we use other tools as well. Nano Banana is great for sort of content creation. And it's just linking everything up to make a more efficient Streamline team. I think that's actually one requirement that I have for anyone that joins. Like, you need to be AI fluent. Because in this day and age, like, you should be an outlier. We have this thing internally called ruthless efficiency. It's in the sense that you as a person should be able to affect an outcome that five people can do with the efficacy of what tools that you have right now at your disposal.

13:19Amardeep Parmar:And I know you're hiring right now, right? Yeah. Do you want to share what you're hiring? We will always look for someone senior engineering. Always also looking for a hardcore growth lead as well. These are the two people that we think are going to get us from 3 mil this month to sort to 30 mil in a couple of years from now. And yeah, but right type of profile will be for sure. But I'm always happy to be great candidates. And you said obviously, 3 mil now, right? How has that journey changed on the way of like what channels are you using? So you said you're now using paid as well. Yeah. What's working?

13:52Amardeep Parmar:Yeah. So we index a lot on sort of meta now. I kind of want to move away from that to be honest because we're not venture backed and we don't have the wealth or resources to just try multiple channels. we find out we are now still we're still going very hard on organic social now we have paid social we find a lot of sort of linked in actually kind of works and I really like you know just word-of-mouth referrals we have a basic referral scene actually just goes like goes like a million miles away but I think what really works for us is a degree of customer intimacy you know I still reach out to my customers you know on their first delivery to just check in on how they are and that builds a high degree of trust you know you should always do shit that doesn't scale in my opinion and until until it doesn't work out but um but yeah it's it's like a nice sort of multi-faceted sort of um approach that we take which just works for us hello hello i hope you're enjoying the show so far i'm amadeep palmer co-founder of bay hq and the host of this show for those of you don't know BayHQ is the community for high growth Asian heritage founders and investors in the UK.

15:04Amardeep Parmar:Over 7 ,500 people have attended our events, 200 people have been for our impact programs, and obviously there's been over 250 episodes of this podcast. If you want to join us and take part in the programs and come to the events, go to bayhq.com forward slash join. We also just released our first ever book called startups for outsiders which you can get amazon now and the link is in the bio hope to see you soon at event hope you enjoy the rest of the episode and like obviously when you started to your cooking the future self now you've got the people who do it for you yeah what's the vision for this like where does this go to so obviously 30 million revenue said beyond what you're going to do to get there yeah i will say ready meals are part of the story that we have with the infrastructure layer that we've built we're very excited to sort of see what else is there and i think the real way you win this game is by becoming a platform and uh you'll be the first to know for sure but that platform will come that platform is probably going to come alive sometime this year and right now you're uk focused uk focused only but we have global ambitions yeah and but how are you thinking about when's the right time that you're going to enter other markets or yeah i think about that i think for me we have the luxury of not being venture-backed in the sense that we can make sure the operations now are super turnkey, are super, you know, like, I define that as I can just step away and it just runs itself with the right team, with the right sort of distribution in place.

16:31That point, we feel, it would be roughly that sort of 30 mil ARR range when you tap into the market and you have sufficient enough scale, sufficient enough branding, and then for us, okay, let's look to plant our flag someplace else.

16:44Amardeep Parmar:And one of the content scientists who said, I know it was much beforehand, you've grown the growth team out as well and like you've done meta ads and that on the personal brand side right yeah what is it that you like doing like what are you enjoying the most of this journey you enjoying making the content side yeah enjoying being the leader and growing the team what's the bits that kind of wake you up the most i actually love everything no but it's so cliche to say that i love i'm someone that operates very well when the sun is right to my face so i just love the intensity i love the feeling of just like metaphorically just like going to war every day and just like you know fighting for like your team fighting for your customers um i like the leadership element um but i the thing that really like makes me feel great is just nurturing like a very junior team so some of our team some of our team members right there they're straight out of uni and watching them grow from like zero to like being very competent i think we give everyone like a crash course in any ping of just like career survivability and just watch them grow from like point a to point b that's just really nice because like oh wow you can actually like impart knowledge on someone else which is the most important thing for you to do as a leader so one thing we're going to do right so with this will be episode 300 and something nice so every two years every 200 episodes we'll get people back on again so like how things nice right hopefully i want to have like white hairs by the way but i were asian i mean you can see it now my been yeah it's like we're both getting old now right 34 this year yeah so we're gonna have a little tv here or it's even with cv it's like a nano banana kind of tv that's like right and it's like this moment we're gonna play back if you come back on 20 episodes right what do you hope to say in two years time in 200 episodes time you've been able to achieve i think in in two years time i like to build something that that is what i would define as a legacy and a legacy for me is something that is permanent and it's a household name and people know what Eping is and people are buying Eping and most importantly our product is helping out people for whatever they want.

18:47And in two years time, I want everyone that's here right now to still be here on this journey. A little bit older, a little bit wiser, but still just as hungry and just still intense.

18:58Amardeep Parmar:So yeah. And maybe a few more white hairs with that as well. No, I mean we will supply hair dye. it's fine. And you said the intensity, and I think it's something which often it can be lost in the kind of, say, what we're doing, right? Supporting early stage entrepreneurs and like trying to encourage people to grow. But intensity needs to come from within. You can't force somebody to be intense. You have to be hungry. Yeah. And like with you, you said, very different motivations, but you also worked in investment banking before, for example. And I had two years of military, so. I was about to say, where do you think that intensity came from like i think i've always been an intense kid like you know i um i i play contact sports when i was young competitive swimming i'm very competitive as a person and i think like every single like touch point in my life has just cranked up that dial even more like you know play competitive sports in high school then went to the military for two years then did investment banking for six years then did my like my first venture so i've just never had like any anything to like mellow me down and i'm happy for that to be honest it's just who i am it's like god made me like this so like why not just embrace it completely with their military side as well right because i think there's not that been that many people who've been on the podcast military back from before yeah what do you think that taught you how do you think that's made you better two things i think like discipline and and the ability to just withstand punishment punishment in the sense that like it's gonna get tough like it's gonna suck you need to suffer but you can choose to suffer well put one foot one foot in front of the other and just keep going for it and another thing that really taught me is it's actually my leadership style today um the idea that it's like you don't you don't really act for yourself you act for this idea of a core and that's my my my leadership approach serving leadership i will never ask my team to do something that i wouldn't i wouldn't do for example you know we have to like crank entire weekends back to back to just launch to launch version two of our sort of recall player, the admin UI that orchestrates everything.

20:55I was there with them. There was no way I was going to say, hey, you guys have to work. I won't be there. No, I'll be there. I'll be the guy messaging from the front line because you should never ask your men or your women in this case to do things that you want to do.

21:06Amardeep Parmar:And you mentioned a few of the things you've got internally as well. It's like the roofless side. Is there any other concepts you use internally that you find is like North Stars or things that kind of bind the team together? And I guess, how do you make sure that they all are on the same page? Yeah, I think we scan for ruthless efficiency. That's like the number one thing. Are you someone that understands the need to work towards an outsized outcome? Are you someone with high agency? And are you someone that's intense? And are you someone that's able to be emotionless when it comes to decision making and data driven?

21:37And that's the idea of ruthless efficiency. We just want to win, but we want to be able to do it well.

21:44Amardeep Parmar:And with that philosophy as well, right, are people seeing that before they come to you? So say, for example, you've got social media content. Yeah. Is that kind of attracting the right people because they get that from you, right? Yeah. Rather than joining the job and realize, oh, this is so much harder than I thought it was going to be. Yeah. Is your kind of social media presence also helping you in terms of recruitment too? I'd say yes, but I think the number one thing that works is actually the screening that I do before. So whoever applies, if their CV comes to me, I make them very aware about three points.

22:11you know like one we don't have a work from home culture it's five days in the office two because we have a physical product that's linked to tech you need to do a shift in the kitchen once a month no exceptions i do it too because you need to see how like the tech affects product and three like it's going to be a minimum 50 to 60 hour work week and like yes you have to sign away you have to sign away your working time sort of a regulational protections or whatever I've got so much flack for this, but I don't care. But I pay you extremely well. And hey, if it's not for you, it's not for you. Like, that's totally okay.

22:46And like 80 % of people just like digging themselves like, no, thank you. I'm not for this, which is cool. Like, there's nothing against that. But I'm attracting the people that want to be able to do this. And it's sustainable, right? I'm not cranking them 60 hours. Like, there are down times too. But like, on a regular, I'd say those are a lot more sort of common than not. I think one of the things that, again, it's tough in this whole social media space, right?

23:08Amardeep Parmar:When people talk about things on LinkedIn and then people get flack. But at the end of the day, it's like as long as you're transparent, that's the most important thing. Yeah, be authentic, right? Yeah. And it's like if you're saying to people, okay, when you join this job, these are hours. And people know that in advance. Yeah. Then that's fine because they're opting into it. Yeah. I think if somebody's trying to force somebody, you signed on to like, okay, I'm going to do a 35-hour week. I'm going to be working from home all the time. And then say you've got to work 60-hour weeks. Cool, I can understand that problem.

23:33Amardeep Parmar:Yeah. but i don't have any problem with somebody who's choosing to have that kind of difficult lifestyle absolutely because that's what they care about absolutely and they shouldn't be shameful they should be looked down on for that no i agree i agree it's quite hard sometimes because it's and it's always this difficult nature when you're talking to people in public and people can misplace things in different ways yeah but if you want to build something exceptional and be part of that journey you want to get paid exceptionally well you can't have your cake and eat it no you know i was like that comes with hard work absolutely and that's totally fine because there's going to be other places where you can do this lighter hours and you can earn money.

24:05But that's just not with you, right? No, it's not. And we pay very well. I think one thing as well on that sort of note on transparency, we let people know what their earnings potential will be in like the first year. I do this thing called salary ratchets where, you know, like your salary increases up to like 40 % to 50 % above market value alongside the company performance. You know, like our first ratchets were like when we hit 1 mil AR, and we get 2 million AR, those have been triggered already. And now we have other sort of ratchets in place. And it's just, you need to be honest with people.

24:37Like, yes, you're going to work, but this is how much you're going to get. And I think people that leave the salary discussion towards the end of the process, because processes are intense, that's where I also take a little bit of a fence because you get people emotionally invested, pregnant with the idea, and you bait and switch almost. But be upfront about what your working culture is. Be upfront about how much you're paying people. And then you can all just be harmonious together.

24:57Amardeep Parmar:I think as a leader is what comes with experience remember when we first started getting people on board it's almost the element of you're trying so hard to like make people like you yeah which isn't the right thing you want people who are aligned as opposed to that and yeah I think as a mistake often founders make at the beginning yeah is they almost trying too hard to just appease yeah and so we're actually I didn't know if this be a business that makes sense for the business to meet its goals yeah you need the people who want the same thing there's no point getting somebody on board who's definitely aligned with that I completely agree with you like and and And that's so true.

25:26If there's any one advice that I could give to any young founder out there, again, my advice, money help me the best, is don't ever compromise on your hiring standard. If you want a specific type of person, get that specific type of person. If you want a five-day-a-week office culture, make sure that someone is aligned to a five-day-a-week office culture. And just don't compromise. You don't have to be a friend to them. You are not their friend, technically. You are their boss. And I think, yes, you can be empathetic. Yes, you can show them consideration and care.

25:57Amardeep Parmar:But at the end of the day, and I actually decry people that say my organization's a family. It's not. We need to offer it as a high-performance team. And that's where you are. Because you're also doing every other team member to service that want to be there. The team is only as good as we can think. It's also the thing for an early-stage startup. Reality is that most startups fail. If you hire and then you don't get the people doing the right job what they need to do. if the company doesn't exist that's way worse for everybody 100 it's like if you need to if people need to work hard to make sure the company still exists yeah then that's benefiting everybody as long as like you said you're doing the applications up front no i agree and that's actually like like the motivation that i well like that's not motivation but it's like the justification i have when unfortunately we have to let people go because like yes you're not performing in your role but i have a fiduciary duty to the rest of the team to make sure that they're they're they're working alongside someone that can ensure the longevity of their sort of job security too.

26:56And that for me is like, hey, like, you know, it's not just me you're laying down on my investors, you're laying down your teammates and I can't have that.