Why I started a business during the pandemic

by Todd Baldwin

In this interview, Todd Baldwin shares why he co-founded the platform Crafted for international food lovers usecrafted.com, @cookwithcrafted

What inspired you to start your own business?
I was always interested in entrepreneurship, but didn’t initially have any venture capitalist or technology startup connections. When I came to Princeton, it became my prerogative to connect with people who were engaging in these spaces. As part of this process, I started a company while still at university that was initially providing solar powered water filtration to developing regions. Over the winter break we built a solar powered water filtration system in Kenya. We later realised the problem was deeper than just producing low cost water filtration. The water needed to be delivered, so we started to focus on finding a solution to getting water delivered to everyone’s doorstep.

During the COVID-19 pandemic I couldn’t travel to Kenya to develop WellPower Technologies. I began thinking about what I wanted to do after college. I asked myself if I wanted a ‘traditional’ job or if I wanted to try something else. At that time, I started to get into cooking with my sister and I watched endless cookery videos. I realised that a lot of the mainstream food shows on the TV didn’t show the food that we grew up with — I’m from the South. Food is so tied to culture and identity. Diverse cultures are not represented in mainstream media. I wanted to build a unique business that solved this problem.
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How did you develop your business idea?
I started talking to more food blogging friends to find out how the system works. I became aware of why food videos from diverse cultures are so hard to find. It’s very hard to drive traffic back to your site unless a large food account posts one of your recipes because they’re catered to the mainstream audience. They don’t give a whole lot of exposure to niche cuisine. I wouldn’t consider African food a niche cuisine — there’s an entire continent of diverse dishes!

What does Crafted do?
Crafted is a live streaming platform for food content creators. Creators can create paid or free live streams on our platform, collect tips, engage with fans through live chat functions, and get booked for private virtual events. Crafted celebrates culture through food. What really excites me is that Crafted empowers others to build small businesses, sustain themselves, do something they love and at the same time share more on their culture. I would really be excited if ten years from now a group of millionaires were created through using Crafted alone.

What have been the main challenges in setting up Crafted?
To date, meeting people and looking for investors online. It is great to meet people consistently in person but it has been so hard to do during the times of COVID-19. We are still fairly young and there are many more challenges to come.
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What pieces of advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs?
Just like Nike, just do it! If it’s not your main gig, really try to work on it on evenings and weekends.

Start small and distill your idea down to a minimum viable product. Think about the simplest way you can prove people want what you’re building. In general, that should only take you a week or two to build. If it’s taking too long than that, you aren’t thinking simple enough, make it as simple as you possibly can. You could make a landing page with a one liner about your company and drive traffic to it. That would be perfect proof in people wanting what you’re trying to build.
Test early. Increased interaction will help you gain confidence in your idea. You’ll feel much better about developing the idea further.

Create a bank of ideas. I have a list of ideas on my phone that I’m constantly adding to as soon as an idea comes to me. I’ve a compilation of hundreds of ideas that I could be working on for a startup. I’ve found it has boosted my creative thinking.

If you have more than one business idea, take a step back and think about what type of business you want to build and why. Do you dream of starting up a venture backable business that scales rapidly or do you want to set up a lifestyle brand? I’d recommend focusing on the idea that has the biggest market opportunity. Which one do you feel you are uniquely-mostly equipped for? Which one is your skill set mostly aligned with? Do you see a path where you can turn the idea into a fast growing company? Whatever you do, you need to be incredibly passionate about it because it’s going to be a long road.
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Todd Baldwin graduated from Princeton University in Chemical Engineering. During his undergraduate studies, he co-founded WellPower Technologies, a company that provided on-demand clean water delivery in Kenya through a smartphone application.