We were lucky to catch up with Mike Sasmita recently and have shared our conversation below.

Mike, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.

It’s starting with hobby, and finding something to do. I didn’t think this can be my primary job.

I baked a lot of things back then, i always look for recipes and try a new thing, then post it in Social media. One time, a friend looking for a birthday cake for his husband, and ask me to do it, and she want to pay for it. It was a complete mess. But they actually love it! I felt relieved when i called them the next day and saw their pictures 😀

Mike, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Mika, i own a dessert online shop, called Sweets by Mika. Right now, i team up with my family to make a delicious cakes and other dessert serving the community.

It’s come from hobby, and its become obsession. I took every baking class that I can afford at that time. I was working at the restaurant business as a server. So i use all of my money to take classes. I also learned a lot to serve customer, talk to them, and how to work at the kitchen, the good to worst things that happened at restaurant business.

Right now, we create daily sweets and also custom sweets, birthday, engagement, and some weddings.

I am proud of our skill that improved by making clients order. When we got inquiries, We make a consultation session, so they can tell us about their party idea, and what they really wanted to see on their sweets, then we create the design and back to clients for approval.

There are a lot of ups and downs that we experience, and we still excited to learn new things and we are ready to go even more further.

Last Summer, we make a big decision to move out from New York. It was so hard to say goodbye to lots of clients and business that we already build for almost 10 years in NY.
So we moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to seek bigger opportunities for my kids, also our business.

We are building our business again from the beginning in this new city, learn about this area, this market and demand from Philadelphia that we love..

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Well, the first thing is to understand the clients. We have to be really clear, what can we do for them. We’re trying to make the design in the paper as close as the results.

Second, to remember them, to maintain our business with them. We always try to keep our contact in social media. A lot of our clients ended up becoming friends with us!

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Best source of new clients, of course the word of mouth. People talk. They talk about everything. But they are satisfied with your service, they will come back and bring friends.

Next is Instagram. instagram is still the best platform to get new clients.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: Sweetsbymika
• Facebook: Sweets by Mika
• Youtube: Sweetsbymika

Image Credits
Whiteandfern @haristjio