From chicken nuggets to a 9-figure exit

“Taco Bell and chicken nuggets, every day.”

23-year-old Ooshma Garg is fresh out of university, and already three years into her first startup, “Anapata.” It’s going well. She has made the Inc. “30 Under 30” list, won a Fortune Magazine award, and built a growing customer base.

But her day-to-day reality isn’t what she had dreamed of. She works 24/7, is mentally stressed, physically unhealthy — and has just enough time to eat Taco Bell and chicken nuggets, every day.

But amidst all this stress, Garg starts to get curious. Is she the only one who doesn’t have much to time to cook, but still wants to eat healthy food?

This question wouldn’t let her go. So much so that she decided to sell her current company and commit full-time to working on this topic. Her new startup, “Gobble,” was born.

In its first incarnation, the company started as a marketplace for home-cooked meals. A smart idea on one hand, because it spared Garg from hiring her own chefs and kitchen staff. But, on the other hand, also a difficult idea: quality and consistency are very hard to get right when you don’t have control over the complete process.

Luckily, early investors believed in the model. Only eight months in, Garg was able to raise a seed round of $1.2 million from a group of all-star investors in Silicon Valley.

But two years later, Garg had reached a dead end:

In the minds of potential investors, Gobble had turned into a “lifestyle business:” something that generates a bit of money, but lacks the big potential that a big investment requires.

Understandably, this situation weighed heavily on Garg: “I was sitting on a friend’s couch, a fellow entrepreneur. I showed him a model of how much money we needed, and I remember everything on our business charts was just going down and to the right. He has told me since that he had never seen me so sad. I genuinely felt like I had to close the company.”

But Garg wasn’t willing to give up.

Instead of pulling the plug, she applied to “Y Combinator,” a popular startup accelerator program. She hoped this would get her ready for the next step, a big Series A investment round.

After three months, the program ended — without a big investment round any closer. But Garg had benefitted in a different, maybe even more important way. She had learned what the bottleneck in her company was: Garg was missing other experienced executives that would help her build and steer the ship.

Shortly after Y Combinator had ended, Garg was able to celebrate after all. She hired Thomas Ricci, previously a trusted Executive Chef in multiple Michelin-star restaurants.

Garg called this “one of the most important decisions I’ve ever made.” And it doesn’t seem like an exaggeration. Because soon after they started working together, they invented their “15-Minute Dinner Kit.” It was a game-changer for the business.

This was clearly the pivotal moment in Gobble’s journey. In just 12 months, the company’s revenue increased 25-fold. And it also ended a painful, 4-year search: finally, Gobble had found “product-market fit.” They had a product that customers loved, that set them apart from their competitors, and that also took off financially.

Gobble went on to grow and thrive. In 2022, it was acquired by Intelligent Foods for a nine-figure sum.

———

Ooshma Garg’s story is littered with little learning nuggets.

First, it’s an important reminder of how long it can take to find product-market fit. Garg had to tinker, test, and try for four long years until she found a product that really worked. It shows how much patience and grit founders need.

Second, it’s a perfect case study on how innovation can make a business defensible. According to Garg, most competitors considered the meal kit industry only from a marketing, brand, and logistics standpoint. They saw a great opportunity to disrupt a market with classic “Silicon Valley playbook” tactics. But they were missing a crucial point that titans like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or Starbucks have understood for decades: it takes a unique flavor to stay in their customers’ heads — and on their taste buds.

Garg understood this. That’s why Gobble invented countless sauces that their customers love. And that they can’t simply recreate by throwing together a couple of random spices from their own kitchen shelves.

Finally, this story also shows how the right people can change everything. There’s no doubt that Ooshma Garg is an incredibly smart entrepreneur…

But it was only after she had hired Executive Chef Thomas Ricci that the business really took off. It was only with the right people by her side that Ooshma Garg could realize her potential — and build a business worth a nine-figure exit.

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