What I'd do differently if I started Coconut Bowls today

I wouldn't call it Coconut Bowls

The name was our greatest strength and our greatest limitation. It told people exactly what we sold, which is gold when you're starting out. But it also locked us in. As the brand matured, we couldn't expand beyond the product without confusing people.

We did try. We launched candles, utensils, and other natural homewares. But without a brand name that could house those categories, we were fighting uphill. And eventually, the coconut bowl itself became commoditised by Kmart, Walmart, Amazon, Temu, and dozens of other sellers. When your hero product can be copied and undercut by mass retailers, your brand name is all you've got, and ours was tied to the very product being commoditised.

If I started again, I'd pick a brand name that could grow with me. Coconut bowls as a product would still be the thing that gets people through the door, low cost, photogenic, dozens of use cases from food to decor to kids' play, but the brand would be built to house an entire ecosystem of natural homewares. The coconut bowl becomes the entry point, not the ceiling.

I'd expand the product line earlier

At our peak we had hundreds of thousands of customers, which is an incredible asset. But we were largely known as a one-product business, and when that product got commoditised, we didn't have enough depth in the range to hold our ground.

If I did it again, I'd use coconut bowls as the gateway and scale out into a full range of natural-based homewares much earlier, wooden serving boards, utensils, storage, all of it. The alternative approach would be focusing on what goes in the bowl rather than the bowl itself. Same entry point, but you build the business around food and lifestyle content, recipes, ingredients, and let the bowl be the branding device rather than the revenue driver.

I held onto organic social media too long

From 2016 to about 2021, social media was the engine. We had two to three staff members exclusively focused on publishing content, managing UGC, gifting programs, DMs, and community. And it worked, brilliantly.

But the landscape shifted. By 2022 and 2023, the return on that investment had dropped significantly. We held on to the playbook that built the brand instead of adapting. I was spending real money on headcount for a channel that wasn't producing what it used to. If I started again, I'd still invest in organic social, it's always going to matter, but I wouldn't staff it the way we did. Especially now, when AI can handle most of that output.

I'd have scaled paid marketing harder

At our peak, I was spending roughly $100K a month on Meta ads and seeing a 4-5x return on ad spend. That was more than enough to maintain 20% net profit, which was my target.

A 3x ROAS at $300K spend is better than a 5x ROAS at $100K.

Looking back, I had so much room to scale. That ROAS at that spend level? I should have pushed harder. If I knew then what I know now about the economics of scaling paid acquisition, I think we could have at least doubled our annual revenue. That's probably the single biggest missed financial opportunity.

I wouldn't hire 10 people

At its peak, Coconut Bowls had 10-12 employees, both local and offshore. They were good at their jobs and we achieved some great things as a team. But here's what I know now: I could run that same business today with no employees.

That's not theoretical, it's what I'm doing right now with my e-commerce brand ARTSN. What used to require a team, I've broken down into tasks. Each task becomes an automation or an AI workflow that I can build in a couple of hours to a couple of days. I've written more on exactly which roles AI has replaced inside the business.

The only role I can see myself hiring for now is someone to manage the AI tools and automations themselves. Because my most valuable asset is time, and if I can get someone to maintain the systems while I focus on the highest-value decisions, that's the one hire worth making.

Two product launches that flopped

Our first cookbook, Vegan Bowls, was a huge success, over $1M in revenue and it grew an Instagram following of 3 million people. It cemented the brand.

So naturally, we launched a second cookbook three or four years later. It made maybe 10% of what the first one did. The way people interacted with our brand had changed, and we didn't adjust for that.

We also launched an online cooking school under the Vegan Bowls brand. That failed too. Both products probably didn't break even on production costs.

I should have sold earlier

This one's hard to say, but it's true. I could have sold the business around 2021, near the peak. The outcome would have been life-changing money, a meaningfully different result to what I ultimately got when I sold in 2023.

At the time, I wasn't ready. I was in love with the product, the brand, and the community. I just wasn't done yet. And I don't regret going through that process, because selling when I wanted to sell, rather than when I should have sold, taught me lessons that are making me a better entrepreneur now. The gap between those two dates taught me more than any course could have. I wrote about that lesson separately.

But for my family and my financial future, the smarter move would have been to sell at the top. Hindsight is the one thing you never have at the time.

What I'd absolutely do again

Focus on a niche.

Coconut Bowls worked because we didn't try to be everything to everyone. We went after a specific group: health-conscious people, many of them vegan or sustainability-focused, who loved taking photos of their food. That niche was everything. It gave us product-market fit, organic virality, and a passionate customer base.

Once we'd owned that niche, we naturally grew into a more mainstream market, perfectly timed with COVID, when everyone was at home, cooking, and posting.

I do this with every business I start. Find the niche first. Own it. Then expand. It works every time.

Still bootstrap. Still go on Shark Tank. Different product.

Who this is for

If you're building something right now, or thinking about it, I hope this is useful. Not as a blueprint, every business is different, but as an honest look at what I got right, what I got wrong, and what I'd change knowing what I know now.

The best founders I've met are the ones who learn from other people's mistakes, not just their own. I had to live through mine to understand them. You don't have to. Podcasts, books, mentors, videos, it's all at your fingertips. You don't need courses. You just need to pay attention to the people who've been where you're trying to go.