Innocent Drinks: Don’t be Afraid to Start Small
The main thing separating those who are successful from those who aren’t, is that the successful people are the ones who actually got started.
This is an advice from the founders of Innocent Drinks, Richard Reed, Adam Balon and Jon Wright, three college friends at University of Cambridge. They were working in consulting and advertising after graduation but always wanted to work together someday.
Finally, in 1998, when they decided to set up a smoothie business together, they found it difficult to follow up their own advice. After spending six months working on the recipes, they didn’t have the confidence to give up their well-paying jobs to tackle the project full time because they didn’t know if there was a market for their drinks.
So they decided to start small. They set up a stall at a music festival in London to sell their smoothies and test the market.
To do so, they needed a way to collect customer feedback. Originally, they’ve designed a detailed two-page questionnaire for people to fill in but they thought it was too much to ask people to fill out at a music festival. So their friends suggested the following solution:
“Don’t you just want to know if people like them or not?” to which our reply was “Yes”. Their suggestion was keep it simple. Put up a big sign above the stall that asked, “Should we give up our jobs to make these smoothies?” and place a bin in front of the stall that had YES written on it and a bin that said NO. Then get people to vote with their empty bottles, by chucking them in the appropriate bin.
At the end of the festival, they had sold out all of their smoothies. The Bins Test result? The YES bin was full, and the NO bin was nearly empty.
Because of this, they’ve made the decision to quit their jobs and make smoothies for a living.
After that, innocent had a successful 15 years run selling over two million smoothies per week across 11 different countries in Europe. And in 2013, Coca-Cola took full control of Innocent smoothies in a deal that will make millions for the company’s founders.
Lesson: don’t be afraid to start small.
Source: A Book About Innocent: Our Story and Some Things We’ve Learned
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