We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kristen Bachmeier a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Kristen thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

My business partner, Sean, and I discovered our love for trying new restaurants in 2017. We found ourselves wanting to uncover local “mom & pop” eateries for a few reasons. First, the food and menu is typically fresher and tastes better. Second, they offer a unique dining experience you’d be hard-pressed to find in a chain restaurant. Finally, we loved the idea of supporting local business owners in our community.

We were eating at our favorite local deli one night, and it dawned on us that these were the best sandwiches we had ever eaten. We both ordered turkey clubs with a side of chips, and we couldn’t stop obsessing over the perfection of these sandwiches. The crisp lettuce. The fresh tomato. The perfectly toasted bread. The overloading of meat. The perfectly cooked bacon. (It was a really, really great sandwich.)

More so than the food, we looked around and noticed that all of the other customers were regulars, who likely heard about this deli the same way we did: word of mouth.

We got to talking a bit more, and we realized that there is no online resource to find strictly mom & pop restaurants. And that’s where the idea of Mom & Pop Eats was born.

The idea was and is very exciting to us because we go out of our way to find locally owned restuarants to support. This goes for when we are at home and when we are traveling. We wanted to create an easy-to-use online space for local restaurant owners to sign up and market their restaurants. Our offering is different from larger restaurant directories you might have heard of in that we will only allow locally owned restaurants to participate.

The most exciting part about it all is that we have the opportunity to help support local business owners, while also giving people like us a tool to seek out new and exciting restuarants to try.

Kristen, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Mom & Pop Eats was founded by me, Kristen Bachmeier, and my business partner, Sean Cromie. My background is in digital marketing, and I’ve spent most of my career so far helping small-medium sized businesses grow their digital footprint. Sean’s professional background is in the medical field, and he also has knowledge of the information technology field. While we have different professional backgrounds, there is one passion we have in common: food.

Mom & Pop Eats is an online directory built exclusively for mom & pop/local restaurants. We discovered a need for this when we realized that there is virtually no easy way to find these places online. We’re all familiar with the search engines and other larger directories, but those tend to skew to show results for bigger-named eateries. Mom & Pop Eats aims to provide a simple tool for local restaurant owners to promote their business, while also connecting patrons to new and exciting restaurants they might not have tried before and/or did not even know they existed.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

One lesson that we had to unlearn was the idea of perfection. Deciding to start and grow a small online business was easy. However, the idea of perfection forced us to stall because we were constantly finding new things to tweak. With both of us having full-time jobs, we could only dedicate so much time per week to get things done. The idea of perfection started an endless loop of revisions, only to be missing valuable time to begin marketing the product.

We wanted the product to be flawless upon launch, but we’ve learned that it’s sometimes better to launch with a product that works functionally, learn from it, and adjust. If we were to give any advice to small business owners and creatives, it would be that perfection can sometimes be a myth. Trust your instincts. If you believe in your idea and want others to believe it too, do what you can to make your product or service work and worry about the minor details later.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Our social presence for Mom & Pop Eats has been a slow burn. We launched our Instagram and Facebook in 2021. With my background in digital marketing, I was prepared for a slow and steady climb of followers. 2 years in, we have around 673 followers on Instagram and 287 followers on Facebook.

Here is some advice we would give to anyone just starting to grow their social media presence.

First, take good photos. In our case, food is something that people can very easily connect with. It was more challenging than we thought to get good photos of food, especially in dimly-lit restaurants (which is more common than you think). We use an iPhone 13 Pro Max and it does an amazing job of taking high-quality photos.

Second, do your hashtag research. Hashtags are more relevant and useful on Instagram. If you navigate to the “Explore” page on Instagram, you can search by hashtag. We highly suggest seeing how many accounts are following those hashtags and incorporating them into your strategy accordingly.

Third, play nice with others in your space. In our case, we have a few other foodie pages in our area. Rather than think of them as competitors, we interact with and engage with their content, which prompts them to do the same and give us more exposure. It’s also worth noting that this type of partnership and collaboration can exist offline, and a good place to start is by playing nice on social media.

Fourth, get comfortable with video. If Instagram Reels and TikTok have taught us anything, it’s that users engage with video content. We are still learning about videos and how to strategize around them, and we highly recommend that other small business owners do the same.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://app.momandpopeats.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/momandpopeats/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mompopeats
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mom-and-pop-eats/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/momandpopeat