How Starbucks, Dunkin’, and Panera Drive Loyalty With Memberships Why the membership model is a win-win for coffee drinkers and local coffee shops
Founder Stories: Haluk Ural of Human Food RVA is All About Community Haluk Ural is a Richmond resident and longtime CrossFit devotee, two facts that led to the natural birth of his clean meal prep business, Human Food RVA. Back in 2012,
How Local Meel’s Flexible Produce Subscriptions Are Building Up Nashville’s Local Food System Marti Emch has had a CSA share for most of her adult life. Cooking meals with seasonal produce from nearby farmers is second nature to the Local Meel founder. That’
How Planted Table Doubled Their Revenue with Simplified Ordering and Top-Notch Customer Service When co-founders Megan Scott and Lauren Mahlke launched Planted Table, a vegan meal plan company that serves the Bay Area, they received swift community traction. After all, the impetus for
How to Build an Audience and Nail Your Communication Strategy So you’ve launched your business. You have a product, maybe a small set of customers, some sort of web presence, and you’re ready to sell and scale. Now
The Pros and Cons of a Subscription-Based Model While a subscription-based model works across many sectors including entertainment, media, and consumer goods, there are pitfalls when it comes to local food and drink businesses. After all, stocking your
Scaling Your Business: From Instagram to Bottle If you’re a small business that’s been selling on Instagram—or taking manual orders elsewhere, like email—here are some tips on how to create a successful digital business that starts with Instagram and ends with Bottle.
How to Take Your Farmers Market Game to the Next Level You can use Bottle to power a weekly CSA home delivery program, to allow your regulars to restock outside of market hours, or to tout exclusive deals to clients that buy in bulk.
Bakers on Bottle: Streamline and Expand Your Weekly Bread Sales Are you a bakery that’s bringing pieces of your sourdough starter, or a farmer that just harvested the first of the season’s asparagus? A personal text to your list of regulars goes a long way to build friendly rapport and generate increased sales.
How Bottle Helps Wine Shops Deepen Customer Relationships and Capture More Orders The real-time access and casual conversation afforded by text message communication positions wine shops to become more than a place to stop in for a bottle. They become locals’ go-to source for all things wine, a fully-fledged neighborhood fixture.
Customer Connection is More Than a Trend With a significant portion of the world sequestered to their homes, people are looking for—and finding—new ways of connection. Co-workers are having happy hours over Zoom instead of
Alternative Revenue Streams These are extraordinarily challenging times for small business, but the economic and social impact of COVID-19 is also lending itself to creative solutions for alternative revenue streams. Few of us
COVID-19 CARES Act Summary and Resources On Friday, March 27th the CARES Act was signed into law. It includes $2 trillion of relief, including $350 billion specifically directed to small businesses. We’ve begun compiling a
Food and Beverage COVID-19: Thoughts and Resources for Meal Delivery Businesses Our team is thinking about all the effects that COVID-19 will have on our friends, family, communities and customers. We sent a note earlier today encouraging vendors to open up
Free Refills Episode 4: Working Remotely On this episode of Free Refills we talk about what it's like to work remotely, the tools we use to manage our work, the challenges and joys of remote work.
Subscription Stats Subscription Fatigue I’ve been working on our 2019 taxes this week, which I enjoy because it gives me a 10,000 foot view of Bottle’s financial picture. As I was
Free Refills Episode 3: Should We Raise Money? We've been talking a lot lately about the future of Bottle. One topic that has come up consistently is the debate about raising money to help fund our growth and
Free Refills Free Refills: Episode 2 On our second episode of Free Refills we talk about wide ranging topics. We name the podcast, talk about Sam Harris on Having No Head, Paul Buchheit's writing, I Am
Subscription Stats Quick Subscription Stats, Volume 1 Subscription services are all the rage. Here's some interesting stats on the subscription economy: Women are more likely than men to have 3+ physical subscriptions at a time (58% of
Building Bottle Where's My Plane? On Friday I flew from SF to LA. Before flying out, I had an impromptu meetup with two of my close friends from college at SFO. They were coming, I
Building Bottle Time For An Email Refresh I’m in San Francisco for the week. Being in the same city as Will is always super fun and energetic. It’s hard to be away from my 3
Building Bottle Barry's, breakfast, and tea This is Andy's matcha latte. He just bought it. I like the heart. It's productive having Andy in town. We woke up at 5:30am this morning, made it to
Building Bottle Timezones and continents Andy flew across three time zones yesterday to get to San Francisco. On a typical day, Andy is in Atlanta, Chelsea is in Texas, and I'm in San Francisco. It
Free Refills Episode 1: Mailchimp vs. Basecamp Marketing This is our first episode! Andy and I are trying to be more vulnerable as we build Bottle. We're incredibly proud of the progress we've made with Bottle. We've built a 6-figure ARR business with no outside funding. We're working with mealprep and local
