Okay, so the squid ink pasta didn't turn out so great. Actually, it was more of a disaster. There, I said it. Acceptance is a good thing.
The effort reminded us once again that you violate lean startup principles at your own own peril. So let's use those lemons to make lemonade and focus in on a couple of these. If you think of more, please chime in in the comments.
What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?
For first-time homemade pasta makers, squid Ink pasta is not it. We wasted the first batch because we added the squid ink too late in the process. But ultimately our pasta sucked, but not because of the squid ink. We'd have been better off making plain pasta and we'd have learned the same lesson at much lower cost.
Metrics
We had a goal of producing 16-oz of fresh pasta to match the sauce recipe we planned. Our first mass of pasta dough weighted in at 9 oz and was not going to be enough (traffic) to create the whole meal (revenue). Adding more ingredients onto a short batch? Not so good. Restart.
Fail Fast
When all proceeds normally, making sauce is much more difficult than the pasta that carries it. So we sent several large blobs of failed pasta into the compost bin. We got this part right. But we would have managed more iterations and increased our chances of edible pasta before our self-set 9 PM dining deadline. Out of time = out of cash.
Early Warnings
We took a bunch of pictures. We should have recognized the early warning that not all was well with our squid ink pasta when the best picture was of us playing with our food, pasta writing on the cutting board.
