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How to Launch Your Microbakery When You Feel Stuck | Episode 21

  • Nov 12, 2024
  • 7 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts


You have the recipes. You have the logo, the prices, the menu and the ordering platform, and you have been sitting on all of it for three months.


That was exactly where Alissa Simmons was when she applied for one of my free coaching calls. She lives on a little piece of land north of Phoenix, she homeschools her two kids, and her bread is gorgeous. She had done every bit of the preparation and she still had not told anyone she was open.


She called it analysis paralysis, and I think that is the right name for it. Underneath it was something simpler, which was the fear that she would put herself out there and nobody would want what she made.


Here is the whole conversation, and the actual steps she left with.


Your first post does not have to go to your friends

Alissa had decided her launch had to be an announcement on her personal Facebook page, and she had built it up in her head as the one scary thing standing between her and being open for business.


I have never once posted about my bakery from my personal Facebook page. I use my personal account to post in local groups, and that is a completely different feeling. You are talking to people who do not know you, which sounds harder and turns out to be much easier.


Here is how I started. I put a post in a local group saying I had some extra loaves of bread, and I asked what I should do with them. I did not list prices. I did not say these are for sale. I asked a question, the question invited a conversation, and the conversation turned into orders.


Try that this week:

  • Pick one local group you are already in. Moms groups and local business promotion groups both work well.

  • Post from your personal account rather than your business page, because groups tend to bury business pages.

  • Tag your business page in the first sentence or two so people can go follow you.

  • Ask something real. Extra loaves, a flavor you are testing, a question about what people around you actually want.

If nobody bites, you have lost nothing and you try a different group next week. Some groups have rules about business posts and some are just hard to get seen in, so it is trial and error and a bit of a numbers game.


Put your face on your page

People scroll past pretty pictures of bread all day long. They stop for a person.


If you have not introduced yourself yet, write a short post with a few facts about you and pin it to the top of your page. Then cross-post whatever you put on Instagram over to Facebook so you are building both audiences without doubling your work.


That is how people go from knowing there is a bakery in town to knowing that you are the one with the bread around here, and the second one is what actually sells.


A small menu is a real menu

Alissa's other worry was her menu. She kept looking at bakers with twenty items and wondering whether six was enough.


Her menu was four loaves of sourdough, one cookie and one scone. I told her the truth, which is that it is almost exactly my menu. I run a regular loaf, a sandwich loaf, two flavored loaves (one savory and one sweet), cookies, a scone and focaccia, and I rotate the flavors.


I have tried the bigger menu with multiple flavors of everything. It did not feel good and it was far too much work.


A small menu is not a smaller business. It means you can bake the same things consistently, calculate the cost of your ingredients across a handful of recipes instead of twenty, and still have a life at the end of the week. If you are building something you want to still be doing in three years, it has to fit the life you actually have.


Once you have a few weeks of orders behind you, ask your people what they are loving and what they would like to see. Keep the favorites around week after week and rotate new flavors in to keep things interesting.


Cap your orders before you open, not after

This is the piece new bakers skip, and it is the one that turns an exciting launch into a miserable week. Before that first post goes up, set a limit in your ordering platform. Decide how many loaves you can genuinely bake and hand off without hating your life, and cap it right there.


If you sell out fast, that is a good thing and not a problem to solve. Message the people who missed out, tell them the menu opens again next week, and point them to notifications so they do not miss it twice. Selling out builds more demand than being endlessly available ever will.


What actually happens after you launch

You will get a frenzy. For a couple of weeks you are the novel new thing and orders come in faster than you expected.


Then you will get a dip. You are not new anymore, and it will feel like the whole thing is not working.


That dip is where most bakers quit, and staying consistent through it is the entire trick. Keep showing up in the groups every week, keep posting, keep being the sourdough baker in your area, and it evens out into a gradual climb. Those posts get seen even when nobody comments on them.


One number to plan around: on my list, roughly 10 to 20 percent of people order in a given week. That is a rule of thumb and not a promise, but it means when you have 50 people on your ordering platform you can expect something like five orders a week. Which tells you exactly what to do next, and that is keep adding people.


About the other bakers at the market

Alissa wanted to do a farmers market and felt nervous about the sourdough bakers already there.


Most market organizers cap how many of one category they let in. My regular market has two other sourdough bakers out of about thirty vendors. One of them has become a good friend, we both pretty much always sell out, and our menus overlap a little. She uses different flours and a slightly different process, she has her regulars and I have mine.


That works because we have both kept showing up. Picking one market that feels like a good fit and coming back to it is most of what makes a market pay off, because people need to know where to find you.


As the new one, be friendly and ask the seasoned bakers questions. And when I sell out, I like to walk around and hand extra loaves to the other vendors, which is the fastest way I know to make friends at a market!


Fitting a bakery into a full life

Alissa's last worry was time. She gets a lot done before her kids wake up, and after that the day is anyone's guess.


What works for me is sitting down at the start of the week with my fixed points. I have pickups on Thursdays and a market every other Saturday, so I reverse engineer from those. Then I time block: break the day into hours and drop the tasks in. Mix the dough between 5 and 6, do your folds while everyone eats breakfast, mix cookies from 10 to 11.


The part that surprised me most was bringing my kids into it. One summer I explained my time blocks to them and we built the schedule together, so they knew I was working from 12 to 1 and they also knew exactly when they had my full attention for board games. Knowing what to expect made the whole day smoother for everybody.


If you are already a year or two in

This same fear shows up later wearing different clothes. It is the wholesale account you have not pitched, the price you have not raised, the product you have baked forty times and never put on your menu.


Run Alissa's question on yourself. What is finished and still not launched? Then do the smallest public version of it this week, whether that is posting the question, sending the email or making the ask. You already know how to bake it, so the only step left is telling people.


Final thoughts

Alissa left that call with one action for the next day, which was a post in a local group asking what she should do with her extra bread. That was the whole assignment, one honest question in one group.


Your first post will not be your best post and your first month will not be your best month. You get to adjust as you go, and you will, because every baker I know has changed their menu, their prices and their schedule at least once.


The worst thing that can happen is that nobody orders, and then you try again somewhere else.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If this one landed with you, here is where I would send you next.


Links to things you might like!


 
 
 

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