Mid-Day Squares Made the Founders Part of the Product

Make the product before the company

I wrote about Mid-Day Squares in a July 6, 2021 First 1000 issue with a case contribution from Amil Naik. The source says Nick Saltarelli and Lezlie Karls were already eating the first version of the plant-based chocolate bar in their Montreal home before they had a company around it.

Jake Karls joined as the marketing co-founder only three weeks before launch, after Nick spent months convincing him. That detail matters because the first marketing system was not a campaign. It was three people turning the making of the product into something other people could watch.

A physical product gives you fewer chances to hide. The recipe, packaging, production bottleneck, and customer reaction all show up in the same story.

Charge a little for the first bite

Mid-Day Squares offered sample bars through its website for 25 cents. The source says thousands of bars reached customers within a few weeks. The small charge was meant to create a bit of commitment instead of treating every sample as free advertising.

That is a useful test for a consumer product. A free sample can measure curiosity. A paid sample can tell you whether someone values the promise enough to take a tiny action. The source does not provide a conversion or repeat-purchase denominator, so the claim stays at the level of an early experiment.

The question is not whether 25 cents is the right price. It is whether the first transaction asks for a small but real commitment.

Do the delivery yourself

The founders delivered nearby orders themselves after spending the day making the bars. They added personalized messages, Polaroid photos, and enough personality that customers posted the deliveries, reviews, and reactions to Instagram.

The source says the company reached 10,000 followers a few months after the Instagram launch. That number is historical and source-reported. The mechanism is more useful: direct delivery created product feedback, a memorable customer moment, and material for the next person to discover.

Manual delivery is not a distribution strategy forever. It is a way to learn what people repeat when the founder is standing at the door.

Scale the constraint you found

Within two months, demand was running ahead of the condo operation. The source frames the early constraint as eight bars an hour, then describes later production reaching 90,000 bars a day as the company expanded. Those are historical snapshots, not a forecast.

The team added staff, retail distribution, funding, and automated production while dealing with ingredient shortages, mold, broken equipment, and the pandemic. The messy part belongs in the story because it shows what the original demand signal forced the company to confront.

The founder move is to scale the bottleneck that blocks a real customer promise, not the part of the business that looks impressive in a deck.

The founder-led distribution checklist

If I were launching a physical product, I would ask:

1. What can customers try before the whole company exists?
2. Would a small payment create a better signal than a free sample?
3. What part of delivery creates a story customers want to share?
4. Which operational limit is blocking the next real order?
5. What evidence tells you the founder should stop doing the task personally?

Sources and original research

• Original First 1000 case: 🍫 Mid-Day Squares: Not Your Average Chocolate , July 6, 2021

Adapted from the Mid-Day Squares: Not Your Average Chocolate case in Ali Abouelatta’s First 1000 issue with a case contribution by Amil Naik, published July 6, 2021. The historical product, sampling, audience, production, and revenue claims are source-reported; no current Mid-Day Squares metrics or new consumer study is claimed.