The Ledger
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Tapaninaho: Ooni revenue surged from $13.5M in 2019 to $55M in 2020
“Yeah, we went from 13 and a half million in 2019 to 55 in 2020.”
Tapaninaho: Pizza ovens follow the mainframe-to-PC hardware disruption model
“Maybe there is a connection here that has repeated itself over years and years and years in other industries, that there are These large machines, they used to be mainframes, and then there was the personal computer. Things happened in between there as well, b…”
Garland: Ooni is not concerned about competitor brands in portable pizza ovens
“And there's not actually any key brands that we're concerned about.”
Garland: The vast majority of early Ooni customers already made homemade pizza
“And we learned that actually, the vast majority of our consumers, they already made pizza at home.”
Tapaninaho: Ooni experienced zero product returns from its initial Kickstarter batch
“I mean, we never had a return.”
Tapaninaho: Ooni oven has three legs due to 10kg postal shipping limit
“So because I knew I'm shipping this from Finland at the end of the manufacturing, I had a hard limit of 10 kilograms that the product would have to go under. And this has a bit of a funny kind of reason why there's three legs on an uni. The fourth leg would ha…”
Garland: Ooni expanded its team from 45 in 2020 to roughly 350
“Well, in 2020, we were about 45, March 20 20. And then we're about 350 now.”
Tapaninaho: Western manufacturing was too costly for required parts and quality
“Couldn't do it in Finland. You couldn't get the quality and the materials and the parts in any Western country, really, unless you paid a lot.”
Tapaninaho: Ooni founders retained majority equity alongside early family investors
“So we have a cap table. It's pretty clean. So Trina and I own most of it, and we have Options and share schemes for some of the exec team, and then few friends and family investors from the very, very early days of uni.”
Tapaninaho: Ooni had 14 shipping containers stuck on the Ever Given ship
“Yeah, we had 14 containers, 14 forty-foot containers stuck on the ship.”
Tapaninaho: Ooni generated approximately $170,000 in revenue during its first year
“I think we did something like, in dollars, about 170,000 in the first Year of operating, which is compared to what we'd been working on previously.”
Tapaninaho: Early Ooni pizza oven prototypes cost 40 to 50 pounds
“Well, I think the first prototypes were like, 40 or 50 quid or something like that.”
Garland: Low personal burn rates enabled Ooni founders to bootstrap without VC
“We didn't have to give up city jobs to make this happen, which I think is a very important thing when you look at kind of entrepreneurs generally. We were used to, whilst we did fine, like we had a really nice life on very little money before, so it wasn't tha…”
Tapaninaho: Co-founders reduced work schedule to 3.5 days after first child
“We were both doing about three and a half days of working, and then spent the rest of the time doing other things, as well as spend time with our newborn.”
Tapaninaho: 40% of early Ooni Kickstarter orders originated from the US
“I think maybe about 40% were from the US.”
Garland: Ooni secured a £50,000 grant dedicated exclusively to IP protection
“Yeah, it was a 50 grand grant to spend exclusively on IP.”
Garland: Search engines autocorrecting 'UUNI' to 'university' prompted the Ooni rebrand
“When you search for UUNI, often it would auto-correct to uni, like university, or UNI, and so, yeah, there was that, and people didn't know how to say it”
Tapaninaho: Ooni raised £17,000 on Kickstarter and sold 200 post-campaign units
“The Kickstarter raised 17,000 pounds, yeah, and This was the kind of funny part of it was that, okay, there was 92 ovens were sold through the campaign, but we sold another 200 on the back of the extra press that happened in the following month.”
Garland: Ooni gifted pizza ovens to Beyoncé, Dolly Parton, and Bruce Willis
“One of the coolest things, especially during the pandemic, we decided to do this mini campaign called Stars Stuck at Home. Everyone was stuck at home. It was quite a miserable time, and we reached out to people that we just thought were epic and connected to, …”