On Transforming My Growing Mushrooms Hobby Into A Business
I am Bob Fischer, founder of Lacuna Mushrooms. I officially started the company in 2022, but my work began long before that with an interest in growing indoor mushrooms borne out of the global pandemic. I started out selling fresh mushrooms and, over the course of a year, moved toward products that would allow people to grow their own in their gardens.
Wine caps, Blewits, Oyster Mushrooms – all are underappreciated and underutilized companions to a garden space.
In 2022, I focused my efforts on getting my products into garden centers. I found a great deal of interest while traveling Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio meeting mom-and-pop store owners.
Our flagship product is Myco-Spikes. These are inoculated and specially supplemented wooden dowel pegs that can be used like a seed to “plant” mushrooms in woody garden spaces. Myco-Balls, an innovation in growing Blewits in compost material, followed.
Concerning our retail operation, we are currently supplying six different garden centers with Myco-Spikes. Our total revenue for these products was close to $2,000 for the 2023 season, which ended in September. We have made arrangements to supply eleven more next year stemming from drop in visits and will begin taking orders in March of 2024.
Since the end of the season in September, we have taken major steps to create an online presence. Our products have been listed as out-of-stock, as we currently fall outside of the growing season.
Starting a business is extremely rewarding and extremely daunting. Every time you realize even the smallest success, it fills you with joy.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
For years and years, I was the weird guy people would see walking around the woods with a knife and a basket full of wild mushrooms. Undeterred by the strange looks and the trail users inquiring, “are you sure you can eat that?” I persevered. However, the combined forces of the pandemic forcing people to find new hobbies like mushroom foraging and the organic upward trajectory of the hobby left fewer and fewer mushrooms to be found.
So, with a lot of time on my hands during the pandemic, I shifted my focus to growing my own mushrooms. After loads of research and tirelessly pushing through trial and error, I built a facility in a barn at my house and started my tiny operation.
After selling fresh mushrooms to a couple of local markets in 2022, I found that growing and selling fresh mushrooms was unsustainable for me. I have a demanding full-time job as an Attorney and just had my beautiful newborn son.
I had the production aspect down to a science but couldn't keep up with order delivery. Fortunately, during the same time, I was building knowledge and experimenting heavily with growing mushrooms outdoors – testing which substrates, supplements, and conditions worked best. The shift toward outdoor mushroom-growing products was right there in front of me, and I jumped on it.
Fortunately, the products that I was going to shift to required much of the same equipment and facilities used for growing fresh mushrooms – the result was a relatively easy conversion.
Of course, this shift in my product also came with a different clientele. Instead of fresh produce markets, I was looking toward garden centers and online sales.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
The development of my very first product, Myco-Spikes, took me through the wringer. The idea was simple, but the execution, as with any product, was not.
I ordered 1,000 dowels and divided them up into groups of 50. This would set the stage for many experiments that would follow. Ordinarily, the dowels are soaked or boiled in water and then introduced to the mycelium (which can be thought of as being similar to the roots of a plant) of the mushrooms that you want to spread to the dowels.
The dowels, fully colonized with mushroom mycelium, were to be pushed into mulch beds or, ideally, layered mulch beds. Eventually, that dowel, much like a seed, would produce wine cap mushrooms. What I found was that the product lagged in terms of yield and needed a good supplement. I tried everything from maple syrup to protein powder until I found my formula.
After I had the supplementation dialed in, I moved on to product packaging and labeling – a frontier I had zero experience. I found the right-sized bag and recruited a friend to create a flashy label. I thought I was all set.
After the products sat on the shelves, I noticed they were dying. I realized that they weren't getting air in the packaging – after all, the mycelium is part of a living organism. So, I devised a system to filter air through the bags.
Delighted that I had a shelf-ready product, I visited every garden center in the area. Though the interest in the product was overwhelming, I quickly noticed that displays were needed. This represents another frontier I had zero experience. After finding the right display, I carried on doing direct sales to retailers. The next problem I ran into was production and inventory. Yet, another frontier…you get the point.
Without taking you through the rest of the steps to my process of getting a handle on Myco-Spikes, suffice to say, that I realized that I needed help.
One of my best friends, John, interestingly, independently curated his own interest in the study of mushrooms. After serving in the military and completing a degree in marketing and biology, he was looking for work that inspired him.
Being that I’ve known him since I was 5 years old, and considering his interests and credentials, I thought this was the perfect fit. Set to officially join the team at the start of 2024, I am excitedly looking forward to what he can bring and what the future holds.
Describe the process of launching the business.
Our business has grown by getting our products onto the shelves of garden centers one by one. We do this by making direct contact with each other. First, I took a weekend away and visited all of the garden centers I could find in Pittsburgh, which showed a lot of promise.
I then hired a friend with a flexible work schedule to visit stores in New York and Ohio on two separate trips. She would leave with 25 bags of Myco-Spikes, a retailer information packet containing information about the product and our other products, and a couple of displays.
She would try to make contact with the owner/buyer and would get their contact information if they were interested. She would leave them with a sample or two and a business card. I made follow-up calls and added store owners to a database that will be used to make contacts at the beginning of the growing season in March of 2024.
The garden center retail aspect of our business does not project to be the primary money-maker. Instead, the growth of online commerce will be the main driver. However, the presence of our products on the shelves at garden centers has given us the perfect opportunity to test the market and how to present them in a way that converts to sales.
The business is entirely bootstrapped. We are getting to the point where we will need to incur increased costs, i.e. marketing, personnel, and software, and will need to look toward alternative forms of financing.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
At this stage, we work for every customer that we attract and retain both in the context of retail and ecommerce.
Our retail efforts consist of visiting retailers in person, educating them about our products, and providing literature geared toward retailers. If they are interested, we collect their contact information. When our growing season kicks off in March of next year, we will reach out to them individually concerning our products, new products, and display options.
Growing our ecommerce platform has been a work in progress. Efforts have been made to increase our social media presence through regular postings on Instagram. Recently, we have created a Pinterest account and have plans to create postings for that medium as well.
The results from this have not been organic growth. Ad boosting has driven a great deal of traffic to our blogs, which we feel is a good investment toward getting people to come to us for information about how they can grow mushrooms using the products.
In one month, and with an expenditure of roughly $200, we have attracted about 100 followers. We plan to continue to do this until we reach 250 followers, which will command some (albeit a small amount) of respect when approaching other businesses for marketing opportunities.
As a way to retain these customers, we are working toward creating a robust subscriber program.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Our business is not profitable….yet. To build up a bank of retailers interested in our products, we had to expend a lot of resources (both time and money) to get face-to-face with retailers.
In terms of ecommerce, we have spent plenty of resources trying to become relevant in the eyes of Google and social media platforms so that we can direct the traffic we need to our website.
We continue to try to build our domain authority to expose our products to wider audiences through larger blogs and literature. However, our response has unanimously been some version of “we can’t link to you, your domain authority is too low, and Google will flag us.”
After a handful of these responses, the goal has become to create quality content by providing education about growing mushrooms through our blog. We are working to build ourselves up as a trusted resource producing our insightful blog content so that others are comfortable enough to link to us.
Once we have an outlet to share what we have learned, with the support of major linking sources, we feel that our online commerce will balloon. On the retail end, we continue to respond to the needs of the garden centers and have begun developing products that are uniquely tailored to their operations.
We are set to launch a new product on January 1, 2023 – Oyster mushroom indoor grow kits.
We hope to market this product to people interested in using the mushrooms culinarily by working with reasonably well-known chefs. We plan to give the boxes to the chefs in exchange for some coverage on their social media feeds.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
The biggest mistake I made was underestimating what it takes to run a business. My confidence in doing so was illegitimately inflated by my experience as a business law Attorney. I learned very quickly that a business lawyer, though having specialized knowledge of narrow aspects of running a business, needs to be imbued with knowledge that translates to running a successful business.
Building a following on social media is hard. I did not know this. Marketing a product and pushing a brand through content creation is somewhat of a full-time job. This aspect of business, particularly one doing business online, should not be overlooked. Copious amounts of time need to be directed toward building a presence online for a business that is just starting out. As many of us know, small businesses are woefully handicapped in terms of directing traffic and need to work to overcome the burden of domain authority, social media standing, and SEO.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
My favorite marketing tool is Pinterest, it attracts users who are looking for DIY project ideas – this is a demographic that falls squarely within our wheelhouse and generates quality leads.
The tools we use for marketing, SEO, and website design are currently in a trial and error period, so I can’t comment on their effectiveness as against other tools at this stage.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Without a doubt, the most influential book that I have come across is Paul Stamets’ Mycelium Running. Paul is an expert in the field, focusing this work on mushroom cultivation and myco-remediation.
While foraging for wild mushrooms, which initially fueled my interest in mushrooms, I always consulted any video produced by Adam Haritan of Learn Your Land. Adam Haritan is an extremely knowledgeable resident of my state of Pennsylvania who produces videos on identifying wild mushrooms. His videos were always my first step in building confidence to eat a previously unknown mushroom, followed by various other sources to verify, of course.
Milkwood, an Australian company, is a source of education on mushroom cultivation and permaculture. This resource aligns closely with our mission and our product. Their courses are a fantastic introduction to outdoor mushroom cultivation.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Without having a great success story at this stage of business, it is difficult to give you advice that you can rely on. However, I can share that starting a business is extremely rewarding and extremely daunting. Every time you realize even the smallest success, it fills you with joy. On the flip side, every time you see the smallest failure, you have to fend off thoughts of doom and gloom. Perseverance has been the thread that has held this all together. I hope in a year’s time, I can share my success story.
Where can we go to learn more?
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