Cara Chen, Founder of Altitude Tea
What made you want to start a business?
Passion for high quality tea, passion for health, passion for finding different ways of doing things.
How did you first start?
First tested the idea on a B2C level through market stalls to identify my target market. Got some good traction there and feedback regarding the product, tweaked product offering and then tried again a few times.
Discovered that on the B2C side volume was rather low therefore decided to test B2B market through door knocking on cafes. Some traction there however volume also wasn't great and customers were not sticky.
That is when I starting knocking on doors of corporate (Google Sydney headquarter being one of them). This wasn't an easy path, as there were multiple stakeholders involved and decision takes time.
Process took about 1 year of frequent product demonstration and relationship building before getting into one of their kitchens. 3 years later, Altitude Tea got into all their micro kitchens and delis, volume was excellent and order was consistent.
At what point did you realize this could be something?
The point where Google agreed to have me onboard as their tea supplier.
It's not about making the product perfect, but constantly fine tuning it as you go.
Building solid relationships.
Tools or services any business trying to scale should know about?
Read the book: Mindset by Carol S. Dweck