Would you pay for it?

In this week’s instalment of Founder’s Feedback, Caffeine sits down with Toby Skilton, a young entrepreneur from Christchurch.

Skilton, alongside his partner Elise Hilliam, are the brains behind MenuAid, a technology platform that makes meal planning easier and – as its marketing blurb goes – helps answer the perpetual question, ‘what’s for dinner?’

MenuAid, which provides users with recipe inspiration and personalised shopping lists for $4 a week, went live in 2021 and had more than 3000 customers within three months.

Today, it has 21,000 users of its app and 45 B2B customers, and is growing on average by 3000 users and five B2B customers per month.

While the company is currently New Zealand based, its planning to expand into Australia in the first quarter of next year. 

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What advice would you give another founder starting out?

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There are plenty of mistakes you make along the way, but I think the first thing that I would advise someone to do – and it’s free – is idea validation.

First, it’s thinking about, am I solving an actual problem that causes pain and suffering, or is this a slight niggle that annoys people? Second, do a lot of people have this problem? Third, are people willing to pay to have the problem solved?

This all comes from our own experience, really. Before MenuAid, we created a company, Mutu; essentially, it’s an Airbnb for everyday items like bikes, kayaks and drills.

It still exists, but we learned the hard way that while it’s a cool idea that people are into, it’s not really solving a painful problem that people will pay to go away.

So that’s the advice I would give. Just go and talk to loads of people, ask good questions and figure out: is this problem felt by the masses, and would you pay for it?

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What’s something that went wrong, and what did you learn?

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This was off the back of Mutu, but the way I set up that company was trying to surround myself with amazing specialists.

I learned very quickly that startups are chaos. They need generalists in the beginning – people who can roll up their sleeves, be open to crossing different departments, and if it needs to be done, they do it.

Learning from Mutu, I’ve done it differently with MenuAid, and it served us well. You kind of earn the right to hire specialists as you grow.

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Who have you worked with that’s been helpful to your success?

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I break this into three areas in my head.

We’re lucky in Christchurch because we have a super-solid founder community run by founders. When you attend events, you often fall into bad habits and just talk about the good stuff. We’ve done it long enough now that everyone talks about stuff that sucks, which is actually more useful.

MenuAid is also really lucky with our investors – we went through Sprout, the New Zealand VC. They bring a lot of advice, like a healthy devil’s advocate, challenging and growing, always in our best interest. It’s value adding, not just cash.

Finally, while I couldn’t single out a person, I think New Zealand is a very small country, and people are really receptive when you ask for help. Typically, I’ve used LinkedIn and just asked myself who would be the best person to talk to?

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What’s the best piece of advice someone gave you?

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Something that is probably quite topical for founders is around giving away equity.

In the early days, you connect with lots of people who want to help and advise. It becomes quite easy to look at it as just a percent or two percent here or there for an advisor. We get easily caught up in all of that and not think about the future implications of how you might be left with only 10 percent.

Be deliberate with who you bring on – especially if you’re going to give equity – because it’s very hard to get it back once you give it away.

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Is there anything you wish you knew starting out?

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The big one, and this is really important, is getting the work-life balance right.

With startups, it’s your baby – every waking hour is spent on work. While it is epic because when you’re loving it, you don’t feel it, it does get a little bit of an ‘ambulance at the bottom of the cliff’ when, all of a sudden, you hit burnout.

I learned the hard way that your body has a limit. Now, I try to be really proactive about managing it. I get out into the bush once a month and spend a couple of days away from screens.

So get ahead of it, be conscious and know that it’s okay to have a weekend every now and then.

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Finally, take us back to your first entrepreneurial moment.

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I have two, and they are quite different.

When I was 14, I set up a lawn mowing business where I had seven teachers who all lived within about 500 metres of each other. I don’t know how I managed to get this good of a gig, but I used their lawn mower and their petrol. So that was kind of my first little taste of business. I did it for $20 every week for two years.

My first actual entrepreneurial-style business was at uni in Dunedin – lots of student flats, lots of partying, and the houses tend to get messed up. So, I set up a company called Scarfie Repairs, where I fixed student flats for student rates. I was able to scale it up and have a bunch of employees, which set me up.

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Founder Feedback is a weekly series launched today where founders are asked a set of questions that profile their startup journey so far.

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