Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Case Study: Lisa Qiu Fetterman, Nomiku”.
I’M lisa, i am one of the cofounders of na miku and this is our maker story. One of our images not showing up there – Who am I, Who am I talking to today – are you guys all makers are you? Are you makers, okay, word? Okay, great sweet for a second there I felt, like everyone was from GE and like really big corporate people, but it’s because you know who I’m speaking to how cute our way boy, girl boy girl, all right. Okay, yeah! I I’m not very polished. I am a professional maker.
This is not going to be like a sexy TED talk or I have a big lesson for you guys. It’S just what I know. I started this company with my husband when I was 22 and I’m 25.
This is what we do. We put your food inside well, actually, you put your food inside of a bag and then it goes into a precise water oven, which is what we create for you with our little thing. You clip it onto any pot that you already own and it circulates your water and heats it to a precise temperature, and it looks like this. I’M going to Vanna White it a little bit and I didn’t always look like that it.
When we first started it was when we first started with the PID machine. We have an aquarium bubblers over there, some duct tape and a chopstick, a heater there’s our little temperature gauge over there, and you know we. We were watching workers doing the most banal things. We’Re just watching TV – and I was watching top chef, and I saw oh my God look at that sous-vide machine right. It is, it is beautiful. It’S making the food so perfect and when you watch like the judges, eat that food, it’s like pure, like orgasm, like crow, tears out of their eyes. You’Re like I want that for myself and then I went online to check the price and it’s eight hundred dollars and like well, I’m a student. I really can’t afford that and my husband then boyfriend at the time we have been dating for a week he’s a plasma physicist. He really wanted to impress me oh, but we can make it ourselves. I was like holy crap. Are you? Are you serious? Okay? Well so he’s like well, what’s in it, let’s think about it: it controls the temperature right.
It reads what the temperature is and then there’s a heater, then there’s a brain that switches it on and off. Look: okay, sure, let’s, let’s do it and lo and behold $ 90 later there we go. We thought you know it was the greatest thing that we had ever ever experienced.
We put an egg inside, it was probably like we could hear after we built this. We could hear the garbage trucks coming in. It was four. In the morning we had started like at six pm and being in New York City.
We could run down to our Bodega and get an egg. We set it to 64 degrees Celsius and at that temperature, the middle of the egg, actually coagulates and cooks before the whites. So it’s an inside-out cooked egg. Oh my god! This it blows our minds and it’s delicious.
We have to tell everybody, we put it on a blog, nobody read our blog. I like the line, guys were changing the culinary world and then what happened is we went to make our fair New York Maker Faire? I was like okay, we got to make a big splash gods or something frenzy we got to show them. We got ta, show people eggs for the first time inside out, so we cook, like 200 eggs lugging. This huge cooler to maker faire people were actually scared.
A couple of kids we’re, like my mom, tells me not to eat food like this. Okay, okay, but you know we got a story on NPR and then things started. Picking up. This was the egg that we made.
We took the yolk out and we deep freighted with some breadcrumbs yum, yum cholesterol bomb and then afterwards, you know of people started asking us about how to make things. How did how do we make that? Where else you can go on our blog they’re, like yeah, but that’s really complicated. So then we made a kit right there. It’S the Ember kit, and with that, actually we looked for with that.
A lot of people bought it like probably around the ballpark of 200. We actually wanted everybody to have it and not. Everybody is a maker, so that led us to hack stellarator. We went, I know for 111 days accelerator program and we how I knew about it, was from actually Mitch Altman.
I was sitting in a cafe with my husband and he was sitting there too, and he was being interviewed by make magazine about being a maker, and I was like what the hell is a maker. Like is the army? Do people do this for a living? How do you do this for a living? Please help me. So I mean we had no money. We had just gone out of college.
I was out of college. Abe was just out of his ph.d program. So then we found accelerated program that would pay.
You 15 k to go to China for 111 days, and so then, when we were there, we visited factories, we got burned out. We went to Thailand on vacation and met our co-founder, and then we put it on Kickstarter and we became the number one most funded. Kickstarter in the food category, ever we embrace almost 600 k. Thank you. We raised almost 600 k in 30 days and we are very late in delivering, which is what I’m very sorry for, but we’ve been very open in our process and nobody hates us.
You know this is we’ve been doing for the past year. This is my co-founder BAM. He is a Thai national and me and my husband, this is us going around the airport and then here’s some pre production unit and the pre production unit. I showed you, we have a cm in China and then here’s a test na Miku making some delicious perfectly cooked sticks.
You can see the stake from corner to corner. It’S perfectly medium-rare is really delicious. Thank you. .