Recap of Taco Thursday @ 535
Plus events at the Studio later this week
A couple weeks ago one of our studio members (Kevin) asked to give away free tacos for everyone at our last Off The Record event. He made 200+ tortillas from scratch with the help of a few 535 members, and they were a hit. You guys ate every single one of them.
Today, Kevin is taking over the newsletter to share more about his new project August and why he spent a full day cooking hundreds of free tacos.
At the end of the newsletter, we have links to a few events happening at the studio later this week.
Hey everyone, Kevin here.
I’ve been at 535 for a few months building a new platform called August.
Born out of a frustration with the low-quality products that seemed to dominate my physical spaces, August is a place to celebrate extraordinary products and the people who build them.
Initially, my suspicion was that the products we use everyday were getting worse with every passing year. But I’m not sure that’s true anymore.
Sure, there are lots of low-quality products built with cheap materials out there. They might appear on the front page of Amazon, your local Walmart store, or in your social media ads.
But if you spend the time to thoroughly explore any industry, you’ll also find builders making products that are truly extraordinary. Some of these products use innovative materials, some are designed with incredible attention to detail, and some are designed to last a lifetime.
The trouble is finding them. And that’s why August exists.
Commerce platforms use a very narrow set of filters to display products, and “extraordinary” is not one of them. Amazon shows you a product’s price, how quickly it ships, and a star rating. There is no way to identify or discover products with lifetime warranties, those made without plastics, or those crafted by hand.
Admittedly, the term “extraordinary” is broad and hard to quantify, but just like a great painting, a talented athlete, or a beautiful face, you know an extraordinary product when you see one.
To shine a light on the extraordinary products and builders that often get overlooked, August will be running a few different experiments:
Our first is to build libraries of popular “Buy It For Life” products and those that don’t contain any plastics.
Our second is to highlight extraordinary products with detailed YouTube reviews.
Moving forward, you may see things like builder interviews, factory tours, and maybe even some extraordinary products of our own.
Ok, so what does any of this have to do with free tacos?
Free Tacos
One of the extraordinary products I recently reviewed was this tortilla press from Masienda.
To put it to the test, I asked Fahd and Melody if I could make a bunch of free tacos for an Off The Record event. The only catch was that to claim a free taco, you needed to subscribe to August’s YouTube channel.
They said yes, so I got to work making a bunch of tacos along with a few 535 members.
The event went great, August got lots of new subscribers, and attendees got all the homemade tacos they could eat. I’ll call that a win.
Now, are free taco events a scalable marketing strategy? Probably not.
But are they fun? Absolutely. We even had a Mariachi band.
So as August grows, we’ll be trying more fun events and activations to top this one. To stay up to date with all I’m working on, you can subscribe to August’s YouTube channel or join our email list.
Events
Roundtable #2: Ambition: Does Canada have enough of it?
Back by popular demand, Anna Lisa will be hosting another roundtable discussion. This series is for meaningful, long-form discussion about topics that matter. This time we’ll be talking about ambition:
Is it important to be ambitious?
What fosters/limits ambition for startups/businesses?
Does Canada have an ambition gap?
Details:
📅 Thu Sep 5, 5:30pm
🎟 https://lu.ma/mbqfgxte (waitlist only)
Nikita Bier Watch Party
Nikita Bier is known as the guy that can make apps grow really fast. Or, the guy that successfully sold the same teen polling app for millions of dollars twice. He recently did an interview on Lenny’s Podcast. We’ll watch the episode together and discuss.
📅 Fri Sep 6, noon
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