From a personal perspective I love the idea, but I’m not sure how unbiased I can be, given how much I’d like to try them.
I would say that 1x market growth doesn’t seem very conservative to me—closer to a best case scenario. Dramatically increasing the market share of tofu would be great, it doesn’t seem like the most likely outcome. It might help you to do expected impact calculations for more modest successes as well—EG a successful niche product sold mainly in gourmet grocery stores, a more widely available alternative type of tofu, etc. and put some probabilities on each (as well as on total failure).
A prediction market on those would be great too, but it seems like a hard thing to judge if one can’t go out and sample the thing.
I guess that brings up the question, (and you mention working with chefs and writing the book, so I’m not sure to what degree you’ve already done this), but how possible/practical would it be to get some of these tofus in front of people who could help you assess their likelihood of success? Spending some up front time getting “outside view” assessments could be help you decide whether to move forward.
That’s a great point about modeling concrete scenarios (like types/numbers of distribution points), rather than just assuming some percentage of market growth. I’ll try fleshing that out a bit. The reason I’m bullish on potential market size is that most common tofus have abysmal product-market fit outside the Asian American community, whereas rare tofus (at least in our research) seem to fare much better. If that pattern holds, and we can find high leverage marketing methods, it would seem strange if rare tofus don’t eventually eclipse the former. Like you said, though, this hypothesis needs more validation.
Also would be great to build a better “outside view.” Hopefully we’ll get a better sense in the coming months as we look into restaurant partnerships :)
If you or anyone else is interested in trying some rare Chinese tofus and are in London, I can take you on a tour.
The best tofu tours are by George, of course, but in his absence I try to get the same rare tofus and provide some (small) fraction of the context he does when he leads tofu tours.
From a personal perspective I love the idea, but I’m not sure how unbiased I can be, given how much I’d like to try them.
I would say that 1x market growth doesn’t seem very conservative to me—closer to a best case scenario. Dramatically increasing the market share of tofu would be great, it doesn’t seem like the most likely outcome. It might help you to do expected impact calculations for more modest successes as well—EG a successful niche product sold mainly in gourmet grocery stores, a more widely available alternative type of tofu, etc. and put some probabilities on each (as well as on total failure).
A prediction market on those would be great too, but it seems like a hard thing to judge if one can’t go out and sample the thing.
I guess that brings up the question, (and you mention working with chefs and writing the book, so I’m not sure to what degree you’ve already done this), but how possible/practical would it be to get some of these tofus in front of people who could help you assess their likelihood of success? Spending some up front time getting “outside view” assessments could be help you decide whether to move forward.
That’s a great point about modeling concrete scenarios (like types/numbers of distribution points), rather than just assuming some percentage of market growth. I’ll try fleshing that out a bit. The reason I’m bullish on potential market size is that most common tofus have abysmal product-market fit outside the Asian American community, whereas rare tofus (at least in our research) seem to fare much better. If that pattern holds, and we can find high leverage marketing methods, it would seem strange if rare tofus don’t eventually eclipse the former. Like you said, though, this hypothesis needs more validation.
Also would be great to build a better “outside view.” Hopefully we’ll get a better sense in the coming months as we look into restaurant partnerships :)
If you or anyone else is interested in trying some rare Chinese tofus and are in London, I can take you on a tour.
The best tofu tours are by George, of course, but in his absence I try to get the same rare tofus and provide some (small) fraction of the context he does when he leads tofu tours.