Breast milk freeze-dryer Nourishy on the challenges of being first to market

Getting the first-mover advantage is the dream in startup land, but being first to market also brings its own unique set of challenges. 

For Cass Wingrove, founder of Australia’s first breast milk freeze-drying service, Nourishy, being first to market has come with its share of pros and cons.

A year ago, I was pregnant with my third child, and chatting with my sister about the logistical challenges of breastfeeding a baby while travelling. 

A few years earlier, I’d experienced these challenges firsthand, when I’d travelled to South Africa for a wedding and had to pump breastmilk for my baby, with the added pressure of having to transport and safely store this liquid gold. Breastfeeding can be a wonderful thing, but it can also be hard to align with modern life — especially when it comes to travelling or returning to work. 

My sister told me she’d heard that freeze-drying breast milk was an option in some countries. 

I was intrigued.

After that conversation, we went on a deep dive into the options available around the globe, before connecting with Milkify, a breast milk freeze-drying service that had already helped thousands of families in the US, had starred on the US version of Shark Tank, and had been awarded ‘startup of the year’. I knew we were onto something.

A few short months later, we launched Nourishy — Australia’s first national breast milk freeze-drying service. But while being first to market brings plenty of benefits — most obviously a lack of competitors — it also brings some very specific challenges. 

Understanding the market

While we were lucky to be partnering with a business that had already proven successful in the US, we knew the Australian market would present different challenges and opportunities. Coming to the market first meant educating our customer base, and understanding their decision-making process and most pressing concerns. 

To do this, we invested heavily in customer research, asking breastfeeding families about their biggest challenges, and the barriers they might have with a service like ours. Having such a niche market and zero competitors meant we couldn’t benchmark against other businesses or learn from their strategies. So we had to work out the right pricing, packaging, logistics and process from scratch, to ensure we were bringing our customers a quality solution, that was easy to use, and most importantly, safe. Safety was the number one concern of the parents we surveyed. 

This is then reflected in the way we’re marketing the business — we’re working with a social media expert to help us educate our customers and allay concerns via our social content, we’ve created our website with the concerns of our customers front of mind, and we’re looking at partnerships with lactation consultants, midwives and other professionals who are already connected with breastfeeding mums. 

Complexities of compliance

Navigating the compliance issues and legalities involved in a business based on breast milk — which is classed as a human tissue — has been a complex beast. 

Being first to market means we can’t point to other service providers already dealing with breast milk on mass, so we’ve had to jump through plenty of legal hoops. Having experts to rely on has been a lifesaver on this front — for example our freezer is manufactured by Cuddon and we rely on their team for advice. This has been really helpful in reassuring the powers that be that this process is completely safe and secure. 

Robust logistics have also been a big piece of the puzzle. We need to be able to assure our customers that their milk will reach us safely, securely, and in the right time frame. This has meant choosing a trackable, express option, which comes at a higher cost, and has an inevitable impact on the pricing of our service. 

Preparing to scale

As any startup knows, speed is of the essence. But we’ve been conscious that doing things quickly isn’t going to serve us well as the business scales. While it’s tempting to just make it up as we go, we’re trying to embed systems and processes that will be helpful in the long run as we hire new people and fulfil larger numbers of orders. 

It means things might take longer than just ‘getting it done’ on the day, but we know our future selves will thank us for taking the time to document processes and consider the best possible way to do things day-to-day.

Going all in

The biggest challenge has been confronting the fear of jumping into a startup with both feet. Our very specific freeze-drying needs meant relocating our family of five from Sydney to Brisbane, to be onsite where the freeze-drying facility is based. 

My husband and I have both left secure, well-paid jobs, in the pursuit of this dream. It’s got the potential to become all-consuming, so we’ve had to set really clear boundaries around our work and family lives. 

Whenever we feel overwhelmed by the enormity of what we’re doing, we remind ourselves that the fear of failure is real, but the fear of seeing someone else succeed with this same idea is even more terrifying. 

And the silver lining is we’ve learnt we make a great team in business (as well as in life), and each brings specific strengths to the business. As they say, with great risk comes (potentially) great reward, and we’re all in. 

Cass Wingrove is the founder of Nourishy.