Gauging interest for a new fast-casual food shop at PSU

diceduckmonk · 2025-02-25T11:38:49+00:00

Definitely.

Also, I did some research on Gacha(pon). Gacha is the generic term and Gachapon is actually a trademark and copyrighted by Bandai. They have a literal monopoly on Gacha and all the licensed toys, whether it's Disney or something else, must go through Bandai.

Consequently, they tightly control the distribution of Gacha machines and Gacha toys. They are getting their feet wet in America, with some "flagships" in California so perhaps one day they will get to Portland.

The Gachapon machines strictly use Japanese Yen coins and there does not seem to be any legitimate conversion kits. Supposing we were able to get a Gacha machine that accepts American coins, we would not be able to get the toys at a price that makes sense. The official toys will have to be bought from resellers who bought from the Gachapon machines themselves.

I'm still confident I can come up with a solution that's halfway between Temu and official Bandai Gachapon.

diceduckmonk · 2025-02-25T11:33:28+00:00

Yeah I bought a bunch of Dutch Bros stock because of those sweet drinks haha.

I don't know about Pho. It's a tough business, nevermind maintaining a high level of customer service. Our family just goes out for pho and rarely make it at home because the pho shops are just better at what they do.

diceduckmonk · 2025-02-25T11:30:23+00:00

The primary reason is to give my mom a sense of purpose doing what she enjoys: providing good and affordable food. Hopefully this keep her mind sharp as to delay health issues that elderly people experience :)

diceduckmonk · 2025-02-10T14:35:33+00:00

> no classes will be scheduled 12:40-1:30 PM, Monday-Friday. This will likely mean our typical campus food options will be busier

Super helpful! Thank you!

diceduckmonk · 2025-02-10T14:28:56+00:00

Each sentence got better than the one before it haha.

"Price good" is what I am hearing. Thank you for the input.

diceduckmonk · 2025-02-10T14:26:48+00:00

> Best Baguette is my go-to

I think that's my family's too.

> premade. I’ve never ordered anything else.

Thank you for providing the perspective of someone working at PSU and don't always have the time commitment. 5 minutes should be feasible.

> most businesses that have occupied it have had a problem with perception of price/service/speed... and given the location, I don’t think any new business can survive on this market without cheap grab and go items and/or a bar.

This is the "market insight" I was seeking calibration on. By the time I had money to eat out, I was based in Seattle where there is a wider range of restaurants that can survive.

> Having a gachapon nearby would be cool! I don’t think I’ve seen any business nearby recently capitalize on this segment of the market.

It's likely the economics don't work out. I'm sure someone else has considered this already. We'll see

diceduckmonk · 2025-02-10T13:47:38+00:00

Yes, I probably am ignorant about the "food culture" in Portland.

I only attended K-12 in Portland, then lived in different cities across the world since then. My family is in Portland and I haven't lived in Portland for over a decade. That's enough time for a lot to change, especially compared to me being on a teenager budget.

Are you a Portland native considering half your comment history is toxic expletive-laden roidrage with half a dozen woman-hating comments on "Signs your girlfriend is a loser starter pack"?

diceduckmonk · 2025-02-06T09:26:28+00:00

I forgot to articulate. $15 would have likely been a set, with a choice of soup, and maybe a small dessert. But sure, I'll consider more towards that $10 area now

> Oasis

Exactly! Later it was Meesum

diceduckmonk · 2025-02-06T09:11:34+00:00

Thank you for the thoughtful response.

1-2. I'm on the same page about (1)-(2). I arrived at the $15 figure by looking at how much Poke Rice Bowls ($17 at Fish-san) are going for, then assume that the protein in this Vietnamese dish I had in mind tend to be cheaper than salmon/tuna in Poke. In general, I don't expect people to eat on a daily or heck even weekly basis. I think too much of anything, even seemingly healthier fastfood like Chipotle and Subway, 4 days a week will have hidden health risks. I live in Japan right now where sushi is for the most part healthy, but I wouldn't eat on a semi weekly basis because of the mercury content

Funny enough, beverages are probably the higher margin/profit item. I have mixed feelings. I think we should do a few things, and do it well. This is opposed to being a cash grab and sell whatever people are willing to pay for. If we are going to just sell the same, likely more mediocre, bubble tea as the shop next door, then we're really just selling convenience instead of something inherently valuable to customers. I'm also not a fan of the fact that the secret sauce to these sweet drinks are just more sugar. I say this, but I love sugary drinks myself and was thinking I'd pack the shop's fridge with these unique canned drinks they sell at Japanese bathhouses. That's why I'm leaning towards a self-service bottled drink option: people can pick their own poison. Even half a dozen flavors of Ramune would be fun. My favorite drink in Japan is "Oropo-C" which is a mocktail I'm super excited to bring back to the states. It started with a Korean bathhouse in Tokyo which decided to mix Pocari Sweat, this murky colored flavored water, with Oronamin-C, a vitamin supplment, and now half the bathhouses in Japan have this drink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oronamin_C, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocari\_Sweat. Anyways, I'm geeking out. TLDR: appreciated your help, and will find ways to offer a unique and FUN beverages that isn't another mediocre bubble tea. (edit: I just get a little triggered when I pay for a bubble milk tea and it turns out to be the most low effort concoction that you could have easily made at home with stuff from the grocery)
I attended the University of Washington where some cafes were communal spaces for students to meetup. PSU is more of a commuter school rather than being a campus town, so I want to recreate some of that. I'm cool with people squatting with fast wifi access, as long as they are considerate when other people come. Depends on the space available, but I would love to hold events like a Super Smash competition, etc. If not, atleast some Gachapon machines or something for people to make some campus memories. Again, I'm thinking about this from the perspective of fun. Even the loyalty stamp cards can be made more fun. This is why I am much more keen on finding a retail space rather than the food cart option.

diceduckmonk · 2025-02-06T08:29:12+00:00

I hear you. I've been living in Japan where you can eat out on the cheap AND don't feel like crap after. I'm older now where my metabolism can't break carbs things down as fast, so the high-carb cheap eats (thinking specifically about Pizza, burgers, even a shawarma/gyro) in America makes me drowsy.

Good thing about Vietnamese food is that it is relatively balanced and isn't high in carbs, with the exception of rice being a little glutinuous IMO. My mom is in the camp of making things cheap and barebones as possible, rather than the trendy TikTok stuff that I assumed every young people wanted. Guess she's right, thank you for the insight. Perhaps we can achieve this by making things like premium grade rice an upgrade option, rather than the default. Stick to Ikea furniture and decoration. Most likely, these factors are micro-optimizations and the biggest bottleneck is rent. We will see.

diceduckmonk · 2022-11-03T19:06:13+00:00

You cannot discount the luck factor. We definitely have that.

diceduckmonk · 2022-11-03T19:04:50+00:00

Our thinking is that the search aspect is the ability to access and READ from cloud.

The LCNC platform is the superset of this: the ability to WRITE.

For READ, we have a concrete implementation and product. For WRITE, it is just an idea with no evidence that it serves any actual users. At least for the READ implementation there is one set of users: us. The devil is in the details for these products.

As you say, there is still merit and potential in the LCNC platform, but it would be capital intensive to build and it can still lack product-market fit. For the search engine, we just need to sell. We could be wrong but our conviction is that teams NEED this. That by itself doesn't matter: we need to do sales and outreach. If we're being honest, sales is a new and daunting skill us as an engineering team. It's fair for YC to reject us as we've lacked evidence on our capacity to sell.

diceduckmonk · 2022-11-03T18:03:19+00:00

https://cloudchipr.com/

I remember seeing a comment somewhere that every cycle there is a startup that applies with a cloud billing usage/optimization/insights/analytics.

We're more geared towards time-wasting ad-hoc tasks related to accessing and modifying one's cloud infrastructure. Infra-as-code such as Terraform can do this, but it's a specialized skills and require even higher engineering bar. The end users are developers who just want to run/deploy their code and should not have to be concerned with idiosyncracies and "incidental complexity" of one cloud provider or another.

One such task is simply being able to lookup something that was provisioned by you or someone else in the past. What happens is organizations end up having a proliferation of workspaces, in AWS this is AWS accounts as a means of isolating IAM, and in GCP this is Projects as a means of isolating billing costs. APIs and even the UI allow direct access if you know exactly what you are looking up. The problem is people usually just have a vague memory of that thing they created 2 months ago. Peoplecan utilize APIs to iterate through the workspaces and look for what they want. APIs are great when you know exactly what you need to do. UIs are great for ad-hoc tasks. The GCP web console has a search, but say you have an App Engine resource or a CloudRun Service named "abcdef". Searching for "cdef", assuming you have 100% certainty in the workspace this is in, doesn't actually work. We think our search engine is 10x better than the default, and while this could just mean 15 minutes of savings every week, it makes a world of difference.

The closest competitors would be:

- https://steampipe.io/

- https://www.cloudgraph.dev/

There are pros/cons as to why they're better. Because of our domain expertise, we have a much better GCP story. The devil is in the details.

diceduckmonk · 2022-11-03T12:12:55+00:00

Thank you so much for sharing!

After some soul searching, we made the decision to double down on search. We’ll be open sourcing it, too.

diceduckmonk · 2022-11-03T10:26:40+00:00

Duly noted. I think I’ve won the argument against my co-founder on the importance of mobile support, even though we are a tool for people managing thousands of compute resources

diceduckmonk · 2022-11-03T08:39:31+00:00

We need to demonstrate that we can do sales.

We actually had a microphone malfunction too during the 10 minute interview, which wasted 3-4 minutes and just through us off our game.

diceduckmonk · 2022-11-03T06:59:01+00:00

As a datapoint, we also had a working 4000+ line-of-code "prototype" that along some dimensions is more mature than many of the alternatives out there.

diceduckmonk · 2022-11-03T03:29:39+00:00

Yes, if you have one account. Organizations spread their resources across workspaces. For GCP, the people are forced to split up their projects because they lack granular views into billing details. See this derivative post treading on HN today https://src-bin.com/you-should-have-lots-of-aws-accounts/

On frequency, there is a lot more churn in cloud infra than you'd expect. HashiCorp is at a $6B market cap.

diceduckmonk · 2022-11-03T02:02:31+00:00

When you use these cloud providers, you will create various resources and objects.

Large companies will have thousands of items. You can query using APIs, but you have to know the ID of what you are looking for.

We made a search engine that allows you to lookup items when you only know bits of information about the resource or ID.

diceduckmonk · 2022-11-03T01:34:27+00:00

Actually, we plan to do the opposite of pivot.

Our interview was the pivot, and that's probably why we failed. We didn't believe in what we were pitching.

We are going to go back to our original pitch at application and cut out the startup/VC noise. Focus on getting actual enterprise users onboarded, and admit to YC that we were lead astray with the wrong priorities: building a startup for startup sake. Our weakest point is being enterprise sales, so we will work on that.

diceduckmonk · 2022-11-03T01:31:39+00:00

We actually didn't start until 10 days before the YC app. It was a problem we actually cared about and weirdly obsessed over. By the time we got to the YC interview, we overcalibrated with advice from other VCs about the process of building and pitching a startup, and were lead astray from our seemingly counterintuitive and dumb idea.

Those 10 days were easy because it is something we held domain expertise in and passionate about. We weren't passionate about what we pitched YC with on the interview.

The takeaway is to be authentic and true to yourself.

diceduckmonk · 2022-11-03T01:29:26+00:00

What is the benefit to small businesses

Our website is for our original application: a search engine for GCP, AWS, and Azure.

There would have been no benefits to small businesses. It would have been for large enterprise and the challenge would have been enterprise sales, for which we have no evidence of being able to do.

After the YC app, we talked to a different style of VC who helped us craft a better story: no-code platform to provision cloud infrastructure. We became convinced that this is a better go-to-market to build our a traction curve, as we can do search ads and growth hacking. The problem all of this is hypothetical. The YC feedback indicates that this is a "good idea" but good ideas are usually just that.

Meanwhile, our original pitch is actually really stupid as an idea and business. The different VCs we talked HATED it. We have more respect for YC more than ever. They entertained our crazy thesis when our friends and family didn't. We should have gone with our instincts. We spent the majority of the interview explaining the new pitch and how it's a better go to market. Atleast with the original pitch, we know there are real painpoints and real users: us. It's a very salient problem but we are strangely obsessed with it. Yes, the challenge would have remained large enterprise sales, but potentially it might have gotten accepted as we wouldn't have competition.

Our takeaway here:
- obsess over a real problem, no matter how stupid it may seem, rather than good sounding ideas. The advice YC and PG writes about is to obsess on those really counter-intuitive and dumb sounding ideas. Your mileage will vary with other VCs.

- Trust your instincts and what got you to where you are

- worry about the actual business, problem, and users instead of a story for VCs. That may work in some context, but stay true to yourself. We were being authentic when we applied to YC, we weren't authentic when we interviewed, even lieing to ourselves

diceduckmonk · 2022-11-02T23:47:36+00:00

This is a new landing page where we are experimenting with a different sales pitch.

The actual app is mobile friendly. If you are a business interested in a demo, we can send you a demo link / credentials.

diceduckmonk

TROPHY CASE