Follow the customer

For three and a half years I co-owned a milkshake bar in Dhaka, alongside my agency career. I built the brand on our customers’ own content before most brands had a name for it, and when COVID hit, we followed our customers to a second location.

Business

Humble Crumble, Dhaka

My role

Co-owner; led marketing and brand growth

When

Jun 2018 – Oct 2021

Alongside

Roles at 1 Stop Holidays, TRI Digital and Pink Creative

Context

Humble Crumble was a small milkshake bar in Dhaka that I co-founded and helped run from 2018 to 2021. The first site was in a university area, near several universities, so our customers were mostly students. We had a small team, a tight budget, and the same problem every small food business has: you can’t live on first visits. The business works when people come back and bring their friends.

Not to be confused with any other business using the Humble Crumble name.

Challenge

As an owner, marketing questions stop being abstract. A campaign isn’t judged on engagement. It’s judged on whether it paid for itself before the rent was due. We had three challenges in sequence:

• Build trust cheaply. We had no agency budget, and students trust each other far more than they trust adverts.
• Turn first visits into habits. Repeat customers were the business.
• Survive COVID-19. In 2020 students disappeared from campus, people became nervous about cold food and drinks, and we had no proper delivery operation.

My role

Insight

Two insights shaped everything.

First: our customers were better marketers than we were. A student posting their milkshake is a recommendation to their friends. An ad from us is just an ad. So instead of making polished brand content, I built our marketing around our customers’ own posts and photos, which was user-generated content before UGC was a mainstream tactic. It worked like word of mouth because it was word of mouth.

An ad says “trust us”. A customer’s post says “trust me”.

Second: our customers told us where to go next. When we started delivering, the orders showed that about 30% of our customers were coming from one residential area away from the university district.

Creative ideas matter, but so do customer relationships, operating costs and the ability to turn attention into actual sales.

Strategy

1. Let customers tell the story. Customer content was the core of our social media, supported by targeted local campaigns aimed at people who could realistically visit.
2. Community over campaigns. Ongoing engagement with customers, so the brand felt like a place people belonged rather than an advert.
3. Do it in-house. Communications, content and marketing were handled by us, which kept costs down and kept us close to customers.
4. Follow the customers. When COVID hit, we invested in delivery, then used what delivery taught us to choose the second location.

Execution

Making delivery work for a milkshake

Milkshakes don’t travel well, and we had no delivery system. So we invested in the equipment to package drinks properly and deliver them on time. It turned a dine-in student hangout into a business that could reach customers at home.

Opening a second site during COVID-19

Delivery data showed that roughly 30% of our customers were in one residential area. That changed the plan: rather than waiting for students to return, we opened a second location there, in a good spot at a much lower rent than usual because of the pandemic. It moved us from a single student audience to two customer bases: students and families.

It was a decision made under pressure, with tight budgets and plenty of uncertainty. It worked.

Results

• +20%Repeat customer footfallThrough customer-content-led social, local marketing and community engagement
• 2ndLocation opened in 2020, during COVID-19Chosen because about 30% of customers came from that residential area
• +30%Revenue growth during the expansion periodBusiness-level result; many factors beyond marketing
• −25%Annual external marketing spendBy running communications, content and marketing in-house

Self-reported business figures. Revenue growth is a whole-business outcome shared with my co-owner and team; I don’t claim it as a marketing result alone.

Reflection

What this shows

Most marketers learn about commercial reality second-hand. I learned it first-hand. It’s why I judge marketing by what it does for the business, why I trust customer voices over brand voices, and why I’m comfortable letting data change a plan, even one as big as where to open a shop.

What I’d do differently

I’d have started collecting customer data from day one. Delivery is what showed us that 30% of customers lived in one area, and we only learned it because COVID forced us into delivery. A simple postcode or area question at the till, or a basic loyalty scheme, would have revealed the opportunity earlier, and on our terms rather than the pandemic’s. I’d also put a light permission process around customer content, which today is non-negotiable.

Read the essay: Think like the person paying for it →

At a glance

At a glance

Sector: Food and beverage (milkshake bar)
Location: Dhaka, Bangladesh
Audiences: students, then families
Gap closed: first visit → regular customer

About the numbers

Self-reported business figures. Revenue growth was a whole-business result, not attributed to marketing alone.

Skills shown

Commercial judgement · UGC and community marketing · data-led expansion · budget ownership · operations