The Thrill of Losing Money by Investing in a Manhattan Restaurant
Minimal viable product&#x2F;lean startup. This is not that. For a restaurant that means:<p>1. Have good food, that sells. Nothing else matters. No big up front investments. Have a killer product, which you make in your home kitchen if you have to. I thought Americans knew this, with their food trucks and shared kitchens.<p>I see this all the time. People thinking about how to name their company, how the logo looks, or in this case which forks to use. These things matter, but only in the long run, when you&#x27;re able to sell your product successfully already.<p>Access to money and people like the author make this difficult, you aren&#x27;t forced to survive.<p>A restaurant near me has started without a name, no interior decoration and a less than good but not too bad location. After six months they had a line out the door, every night. After a year they had a name. After two years they renovated, but just a little bit. Now it&#x27;s 5 years later, it looks fancy, they have a logo and it&#x27;s nicely renovated. But they started with the product.<p>I think it&#x27;s a good idea to do everything in reverse, especially when we are worried how we are perceived. We see finished, well working things and think we need to emulate everything they are doing, including the expensive business cards, when it&#x27;s really the other way around. Product first, being forced to survive, the details come later. Makes for a much more relaxing atmosphere as well, with much less meetings that go nowhere.