How would you describe Spice Kitchen to a 3-year-old?

Spice Kitchen believes it is really important for families to spend time together at mealtimes, and so we create exciting, colourful spice collections that everyone loves. We are passionate about introducing people to flavours from all around the world so that we can all learn more about one another’s culture and heritage.

What is the story behind Spice Kitchen? 

This is a legendary story we regularly remind ourselves of! 

Spice Kitchen was born in a relaxed chat over the dining table on Christmas Day in 2012. Shashi (AKA Mamma Spice) had just retired and was looking for a little project or hobby. I (Sanjay) suggested that she try selling a Masala Dabba on eBay. She liked the idea and so we gathered the ingredients and put one up for sale. It went immediately. So, we did another. And another. Then, we got a massive order for 10,000 tins and suddenly all hands were on deck, blending and grinding spices. And we haven’t stopped since. 

Coming to the present day, we now have two distribution units, an ever-expanding team and a wonderful array of products that our customers love! It’s been such an incredible, unexpected journey and we are all having a blast.

What is the most difficult aspect of running your own company?

Up until quite recently, I had a relatively small team and was juggling lots of balls, as well as wanting to spend quality time with my wife and two-year-old daughter. 

Bringing in the right people is always a challenge for any company, but especially when it’s a small family business. I’ve been so fortunate recently that – having taken the decision to expand – the people I’ve brought in have slotted into position and are really passionate about the brand. It makes a massive difference and I’m loving having more team members around to share the load!

Tell us a curious fact or an anecdote related to Spice Kitchen.

Everyone who works with me (and even those who don’t) knows that I will stop any conversation to answer the phone to a customer. So, I can be in the middle of a business meeting, but if a customer calls with a question about a spice, I’m taking that call. For me, answering that call is the most important thing I am going to do that day. I’ve always stuck to that philosophy in business and so far, it’s never let me down.

Spice Kitchen is given $1 million; how would you spend/invest?

There are probably many more glamorous answers to this question, but for me, I would probably look at introducing some of the best staff benefits that I could find. I’m very aware that a business is only as good as its people, and so I’m really keen to ensure that I take care of the people that make Spice Kitchen possible.

Where is Spice Kitchen headed now? What’s the next big thing you’re striving to achieve?

I recently joked that I would like a spice tin in every kitchen, but the reality is not far from that. 

When you’ve tasted really good spices, there’s no going back, and so I want everyone to be able to experience the difference that these incredible ingredients can make to their recipes. 

We are right in the middle of some incredible growth. With lockdown, many people started to cook at home again and so our products were flying off the shelves. So, in the middle of upscaling our distribution, we are also in the process of creating recipe guides for all of our spice tins and (deep breath) doing some serious work in creating our very own Spice Kitchen cookbook. Watch this space!

Connect and do business with Spice Kitchen on Enterprise League

Meet our incredible member, Koala Rank, a B2B content marketing agency like no other. We asked their Founder, Arrigo Lupori, to share the story behind the company, and the enthusiasm and professionalism we witnessed were unheard of.  

So if you need a fresh perspective and guidance for your blog and overall content marketing, reach out to them on Enterprise League ASAP.

How would you describe Koala Rank to a 3-year-old?

Koala Rank is like a koala climbing up a tree: it takes them a lot of effort to get to the top but once they’re up there, they can stay there for a long, long time (and reap the benefits!). It’s the same when you create content for a website: there’s a lot of work done beforehand so that you can eat and sleep happily for a long, long time.

What is the story behind Koala Rank?

Like most companies, Koala Rank was born from frustration. I was working as a freelance content writer for a long time and couldn’t help but notice that my work was absolutely useless. Clients were happy but they didn’t really understand what it meant to create content that brought results (i.e. money). So I decided to change that. Today, Koala Rank offers a complete package that takes you from no traffic whatsoever to making sales. And it does so with continuous care for our clients’ education.

How is Koala Rank different from your competitors? What is your unique selling point?

This was a bit hard to identify as I first started out building Koala Rank, but it’s clear to me now: it’s all about user experience. In fact, Koala Rank doesn’t provide you with just the content you need to rank high on Google and make an impact on your future customers; it also provides you with all the components of an incredible online reading experience, one that a reader feels totally engaged with, from top to bottom. This comes in the form of UX design, mostly done on WordPress but also on other platforms.

What is the most difficult aspect of running your own company?

The most difficult aspect at the moment is getting out of the feast and famine cycle where you get one really good client and then nothing for weeks. That’s because the company is still really small and there isn’t enough bandwidth to manage a continuous stream of customers coming in. The service also requires a few adjustments before that can become a reality which is something I’m already working on.

Tell us a curious fact or an anecdote related to Koala Rank.

One of the questions I get the most about my company is why I chose to name it after a koala. People give me all kinds of weird looks (and even smiles!) when I tell them that and I see that it makes an impression on them. So, why a koala? 

Because of two reasons mostly: 

1) it’s been demonstrated that animals are easy to remember and that people have a positive attitude towards these kind creatures, so using them in branding only makes sense as they make everything more approachable and fun (think about Mailchimp, HostGator, Hootsuite, TestGorilla, and even more creative approaches like OptinMonster), and; 

2) RK are the initials of an old nickname that I used to have online but Rankin’Koala didn’t sound good to me so I just swapped them around.

Koala Rank is given $1 million, how would you spend/invest them?

One million is a lot of money. Koala Rank is a tiny bootstrapped startup that doesn’t even need that much investment to “thrive.” With that said, if I was given $1M, here’s what I would do: immediately hire two/three people to help me out internally, focus on having them onboarded appropriately and happy with their position. 

Then, make sure all the SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) are in place so that we can scale operations once we get to full-blown marketing efforts. Iterate on the service with a few betas offered for a discount or on partnership bases to understand which parts of the service need refinement. Gather feedback and improve it until we reach product market fit. 

Then establish a complete messaging platform based on our positioning and restyle our visual identity from scratch based on it. Have a sound content process in place for all the most important touchpoints (website, social, ads, etc.), and then probably hire a few more people to handle the huge marketing effort that will come out of that. 

Set quarterly goals and iterate quarter by quarter to become profitable.

Where is Koala Rank headed now? What’s the next big thing you’re striving to achieve?

The next big thing is product-market fit. I’m understanding what my clients want through direct feedback and I’m also gathering a few reviews. That will help us improve our reputation and make a name for ourselves in the content marketing industry. Currently I’m working on a restructuring of the service based on all the feedback I’ve gathered and that will come with new assets as well. Excited to release more information soon!

How would you describe Tekrevol to a 3-year-old?

Tekrevol is an app development company. We develop mobile apps in different industries such as social media apps like Instagram and Facebook, or game apps like Candy Crush, or apps on which you can buy and sell things you own or produce.

We make apps that work on both Android and iOS and specialize in creating apps for businesses so that they can reach out to interested customers through mobile phones.

What is the story behind Tekrevol?

We started Tekrevol in a small bedroom. We were two people who had the urge to create something that can help people across the globe and solve problems faced by people in society through our expertise in technology. Be it businesses, non-profit organizations, or individuals who are passionate about entrepreneurship but don’t have the technical skills required to leverage technology the same way as big corporations do. As such, the name Tekrevol is a combination of “Tek” which stands for technology and “Revol” which stands for revolution.

The story behind Tekrevol is simple; we understood the struggles of starting a business and then scaling it, so we decided to do something that can help ease that process for others through our tech support. This is what we refer to as the Revol way

How is Tekrevol different from your competitors? What is your unique selling point?

We don’t position ourselves in the industry as just an app development company, but also as a tech partner to businesses. Developing an application is only the practical aspect of the business, but we work side by side our clients to also ensure that their business can achieve maximum growth and scalability through growth-hacking.

As experts in growth hacking ourselves, we act as both the tech support and as consultants to ensure that our clients are more than just apps in our portfolio but companies that we’ve worked alongside from their formation to their eventual break as an industry leader.

Tell us a curious fact or an anecdote related to Tekrevol.

Whenever we’re planning a sprint or a plan, especially in marketing, we have open discussions with all team members putting in their thoughts, and we have no limit to crazy. We might not implement “crazy” all the time, but we do entertain out-of-the-box completely crazy ideas and keep them in our books.

At first, this brought a random element of humour to our meetings, but now we’ve actually started to list these completely absurd ideas that come up in the meeting and document them separately. In the middle of the sprints, we then revisit these ideas and have a conversation specifically on them, to identify the results we’re lacking and which of these ideas we can use or mould to get those results. All of this started simply because our employees and the culture we have at Tekrevol is all about creativity and out-of-the-box thinking, and our team members never feel hesitant to share their thoughts, even if they sound absurd.

We’ve found that more often than not, these crazy ideas that sound incredibly random have some wisdom in them, and if you can bisect the idea and extract that wisdom, with a bit of tweaking, it can add a bit of genius to your overall marketing strategy.

So we’ve now started documenting completely crazy ideas that you’d usually dismiss, and we have a list of them both that have been used and implemented to those that we’re going to be using for the future.

Tekrevol is given $1 million, how would you spend/invest them?

Infrastructure and presence are what we’re looking to scale, and that’s where I would spend a million dollars. In terms of infrastructure, I mean both our technical infrastructure, which includes technology investments but also our internal infrastructure that directly impacts our resources, such as training and benefits. By investing both of these, we would ensure that our clients and our own resources feel happy and satisfied with being associated with us as an organization.

When it comes to presence, I mean both from a digital and a physical perspective. Expanding our digital presence and improving our overall company branding is something that will require significant investments. From penetrating communities and spaces from where we can reach out to our target audience in the most meaningful way to actually having physical offices across the United States and beyond is where I see myself investing a million dollars.

Where is Tekrevol headed now? What’s the next big thing you’re striving to achieve?

The next big step for the company is definitely the launch of our New York office. Today, we are located in Houston and San Francisco within the US, and we are soon expanding our portfolio of physical offices to New York. We’re looking to expand our offices to become a lot more accessible to our clients and provide a more personalized experience to clients dealing with us.

Hopefully, that way we can grow as a company and work a lot more closely with our clients, something that becomes a possibility with a new physical location.