Tribal Pizza

Meatball Sundae or Tomato Basil Goodness?

Today, Seth Godin talked about his new book Meatball Sundae. He published a thought piece from the book describing what a Meatball Sundae is. In particular, he was describing it in terms of Web 2.0. You know: social networks, user generated content, viral marketing, and AJAXy goodness! The analogy is relevant to many market trends though. It’s the idea that you can simply have a better business by tacking on whatever the latest trend is. Currently that is Web 2.0. 

This made me think about our approach to Tribal Pizza. The core idea behind Tribal Pizza breaks down into three parts: 

• Tight logistical management of the supply chain. (Whew! Jargon overload)
• A unique (for now) user experience, ala user participation via Pizza Design and Pizza Battle. Add to that order tracking.
• An in your face attitude, all the way from the Web Site, to our approach to marketing. We are different, not trying to be different! 

I weighed each of these prongs against the Meatball Sundae analogy. Here are some conclusions: 

• Tight logistical management is critical to the operation. This is not Marketechure. Tightly controlling the bottom line allows us to compete in a market where food and gas prices will continue to increase in the future. This key enabling technology will allow us to run harder and faster than our competition. Period!
• The user experience is highly influenced by Web 2.0 trends. Jay and I have always felt that brining our customers into the experience and actually making them part of the company is part of our not so secret Juju. We want our customers to feel like they own part of Tribal Pizza and our success can be theirs as well. Further, we think once we are up and running this is going to be a big part of driving our word of mouth marketing. “Dude, I kicked Johnny’s butt in a Pizza Battle yesterday! I took his money and his design.” “Really, that sounds cool, what’s a Pizza Battle?”
• Our attitude at the surface seems to be very Web 2.0’ish. Not really. This is just our combined personality manifested in a corporate entity. Jay and I have really tried to build the company that reflects us. Behind the visions of sugar plums dancing in our heads, the real motivation is to  build our company. You can see it in everything. From the vague references to Snowcrash to the deep red tomato colored website. Tribal Pizza is us! 

I like the analogy Seth uses. Going forward I think it’s a salient mental picture for us to weigh some of our approaches against. Does this make the sundae taste better or are we just placing meatballs on top? 

What’s your experience with Meatball Sundaes and the high priests of what is cool today?

Misery Loves Company

Starting a company is hard.  Really hard.  One might even say "wicked hard", if one were from Boston.  That's the beauty of Against the Odds, an autobiography of James Dyson.  See, no matter how hard things are, they're probably easier than they were for James.  I knew that he had toiled for a long time to perfect the Dyson vacuum cleaner, but I didn't know how long.  He spent years building prototypes in a barn while in debt that other might find crushing.  He knew that he had something that worked, but all of the math he found to support his empirical evidence was "rubbish".  Instead of trying to prove that he had something valuable by working out formulas, he proved it by building it -- over, and over, and over again.  But it gets better.  Even once he had a working prototype, he had a bear of a time getting funding.  I'll admit, the first couple of chapters were a little slow (in my opinion), but the book on whole was fascinating. 

If you're working on a tough problem that seems to be getting tougher by the day, pick up Against the Odds.  After all, misery loves company.

Deadheads Had Garcia, Breadheads Have Reinhart

Peter Reinhart writes books that make you want to bake.  His latest is all about whole grain breads and it goes even further into his delayed fermentation technique, which he introduced in The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread. One of the "secrets" of Tribal Pizza is to make each ingredient the best it can be individually and then combining it with others to make something even better.  We're not satisfied with run of the mill pepperoni.  Our broccoli gets blanched and shocked to bring out it's color, flavor, and texture.  Our crust will need to be great bread on its own before we put anything on top of it.

Crust is particularly important to pizza.  In Peter's book American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza he talks about having pizza with Jeffrey Steingarten, who weights crust 5x more than any other aspect when judging a pizza.  That seems pretty reasonable to me, so for the past year I've been reading Peter Reinhart's books and baking bread.  I even built a Texas sourdough starter last October and have been feeding her ever since.  I named her Agnes -- she's a sour mother.

If you're at all interested in bread baking, or simply like to cook and want stunning bread to compliment your other dishes, you need Peter's books.