Questions with Chloe Chia, Founder of Munch & The Lemonade Stand, President of GATSVI Clubs

Chloe Chia is a teen from Orange County and the founder of Munch, a consumer food startup allowing you to use text to place your delivery order and receive discounts, saving time and extra delivery charges for both food consumers and restaurants. Munch launched in September 2020 and is currently partnered with 25 restaurants. Her team was also lucky enough to be interviewed by Y-Combinator, the incubator that grew AirBnB, DoorDash, and Reddit.

Moreover, she writes an invite-only monthly newsletter for high school founders (https://thelemonadestand.xyz/) and implements an entrepreneurship program at 20 schools (gatsviclubs.org/).

On March 27, 2021, Chloe joined TeenTechSF and Bentley Design Thinking Engineering Club for the third event in their joint speaker series, answering questions about the lean startup method, convincing investors, finding the right team, determining primary metrics for your startup, getting into entrepreneurship in high school, and how to get in the right mindset.

Q: How do you stay motivated when working on your startup idea on top of other commitments that you have on top of that, like school?

A: I’d say it’s definitely a bit harder to go into your startup school as school progresses. I had to do a lot of balancing between school and trying not to get my startup to overload my schoolwork, but I would say, try and find a team that makes you feel like, when you’re working with them, it doesn’t feel like work. It feels like play a lot of the times, and it’s fun to work on your startup idea. To give you an example, my friend and I would go to a bunch of restaurants in the afternoon and just pitch them on the spot. If I did that by myself, that would have been such a nerve wracking experience. But because I did it with my best friend, it was more of a fun thing to do…Another thing that we did was we went to Yogurtland and we literally stood outside of there for six hours passing out business cards and trying to get them to sign on to our product. We did it on weekends. And so without a friend that would have been a bit more…not fun, right? But with a friend it’s so much more exciting to do it. So I would say just find a really good team that you really have similar interests in, and you consider them a really close person in your life.

Q: You mentioned that a lot of high schoolers like to create productivity startups that are often mediocre at best. Although are there any high-quality productivity tools that you use to stay focused?

A: Honestly I used to be that person who got really into productivity, I used to watch Ali Abdal religiously and went through a bunch of productivity YouTube channels and all that, but what I found to work best for myself is just keeping it very simple. So what I do is I make a to do list (obviously), and then I grade it based off of priority, and then I just put a timer so I have a time pressure to get things done…I just say I keep it really simple and time block everything.

Q: Which entrepreneurs do you look up to the most?

A: I’m a really big fan of Snackpass, so I would say the Co-Founder of Snackpass. I really liked following their stories and how they got into it. I wouldn’t really say there’s any big famous person, but I would say the YC founders I was interacting with were really awesome, and yeah, I just really like Snackpass.

Q: What’s the best way to get into entrepreneurship? How do you decide when is the right time to create your own startup, or intern at another startup, or participate in a business competition?

A: I say just start with something extremely simple. Interning at a startup is good, but I think there’s nothing that can teach you about running a startup rather than actually running a startup itself. So just start out with a simple idea and then you don’t have to know anything. You can literally just be winging it because literally everyone is winging it in the startup world, so don’t feel pressured to have to know anything before you get into startups.

Q: How do you determine the right primary metric or secondary metrics to focus on? What are the metrics that you track for Munch?

A: Primary metric, we just used the number of users on our platform on how many signups every single week. Most primary metrics are probably going to be something around revenue or usage, like how many times your users are interacting with your app per week or per day — are they going back to it. I’d say revenue also, because obviously if your customer’s willing to pay you for something, that’s the best metric. So I’d say the primary metric we used was revenue and secondary was how many users we got.

Q: Have you ever run into significant points of disagreement with your Co-Founder, or other people on your team, and how do you as a team move forward from that?

A: We definitely ran into a lot of disagreements, but this definitely goes back to the team thing before — if you find people like friends — start a startup with your friend if they’re interested in the same space, and it’s going to eradicate a lot of those things just because you’re interested and you’re comfortable working with them, so it’s going to be a lot easier to take care of disagreements. In terms of actually solving disagreements, I think it’s important not to keep grudges within yourself and just let it out when you see that problem happening over and over again. So just be very transparent with…“hey, I think this is something that, you know, is happening again and again”. What I did was I held a lot of grudges, so I was a little passive aggressive in the way I communicated with people. I would say that in order to solve the problem in the very first place, just bring it up to people and it should solve the problem from snowballing rather than keeping grudges.

A: The legal side of startups is definitely a little more term-y and business-y, but I would say don’t go for incorporation until you are sure that you have the right team, and that you’re willing to give them stocks, and that they’re deserving of stocks in the first place. The second thing you want to do is only incorporate once you are getting revenue, so in the ideation process, don’t worry about incorporating because it doesn’t matter. Only incorporate when dealing with large amounts of money. So when you’re in the beginning stages of your startup and you’re just making very little amounts of money, you don’t need to worry about incorporating then because your startup might change, but only when you’ve found product-market fit, I would say that’s when you should incorporate. I’d say for actually incorporating, go for Stripe Atlas. Stripe Atlas is the easiest way to incorporate as a Delaware C-Corp because most investors like that…I would say just Google “Stripe Atlas” and should be pretty easy to incorporate — that’s what my team used — and it’s pretty easy to get it set up.

Q: What is your best networking advice? What has been the most effective method for reaching out to people?

A: I would say being very genuinely interested in what they’re doing. Don’t network for the sake of networking, like if you don’t want to talk to that person. Like if you’re not interested in networking with the person, I wouldn’t say do it. Because in the networking call, they will tell, and it’s going to leave a bad impression. So actually reach out to people for the sake of getting to know them, not just for “oh you have this one thing, and I want it”. Network for the sake of actually believing that people are genuinely cool people in the startup world. And the second thing is, go on Twitter. Create an account for yourself, and just start tweeting about things. Just like oh, “this is what my startup is doing, we’re having trouble with x, y, and z”, and I guarantee you people will be commenting on it, people will be following up with you, and just DM people on Twitter. Most startup people are on Twitter, so go on Twitter and reach out to people who you are genuinely interested in.

Q: Now that you’re thinking of selling Munch, looking back at your experience, what would be the one thing you would change about creating this company?

A: I think the number one thing is, we really have to internalize the mindset of building things quickly, even if they’re bad. So do not get held up for a couple weeks just because your product is not perfectly built yet. If it is taking too long of a time, I just wish we would have gone to the restaurants and just showed them the sucky product because it would have saved us a lot of hours in marketing and engineering. So just get the product out first into your customers’ hands, even if it’s sucky, and yeah, I just wish we didn’t wait so long for the product in making it perfect.

Q: Any regrets in the process?

A: To be honest, I think aside from the building quickly mentality that we had to internalize, I wouldn’t say that we had any strong regrets, just because if we didn’t experience those problems then we obviously would have no idea how to solve them later on. So like, to be honest, I’m kind of grateful for how badly things could have gone, because if they didn’t go so badly then we wouldn’t have been able to learn from it, obviously…Munch was honestly really fun, it was a really fun process just trying to learn things through this time.

Q: How did you find a mentor for your startup journey?

A: I found a lot of mentors through the YC interview prep. So one of our mentors, he was actually working on a food delivery thing where you can actually get your food delivered in 10 minutes on the UCLA campus. He started at UCLA, and then went to USC. He’s not there anymore, but we met him through the entire YC interview preparation process, so that was how I met my mentor at YC.

Q: At what point do you decide your startup idea won’t work?

A: I would say that you are constantly marketing, and you’re constantly trying to get people to use your product, but they’re like, “yeah I’ll use it” but then they don’t really use the product, or they don’t really have a natural tendency to want to pay for it. If you think your customers wouldn’t pay for your product, that’s when I think your startup idea won’t work. However, I think the most important thing is, most of the time you don’t have to change the problem you’re solving, most of the time you have to change the solution. Changing the solution by changing which customers you’re trying to target, most of the time will make your product closer and closer to product-market fit.

Q: Who could we reach out to if none of our close friends have the same interests or determination as us?

A: Try to build the product yourself, and try to document your experience of building a product online on Twitter. Get on Twitter, build in public — there are tons of teens on Twitter who are trying to do things in the startup world. You could also join a group called GenZ Mafia — that’s a Discord group and there’s a lot of teenagers and young people on there — so I’d say the easiest way to find co-founders is to show them that “hey, I have traction”, and then “would you like to join me”, because they’re much more likely to join if you already have traction, rather than if you’re complete strangers and you don’t know anything about one another.

Watch the event recording here! https://youtu.be/5r0c4Ho9khc

To register for the TeenTechSF x Bentley DTE Speaker Series to hear from more young entrepreneurs, register today at ttsf-dte-speakers.eventbrite.com!