It's no secret that the past two years have been interesting on many fronts. In this article, I would like to provide some clarification on the name change from Meal.com to Gauc.com that we made a year ago.

Big plans

At the end of 2019, I (Mitchel, the CEO of Guac) had big plans. I bought the Meal.com domain name for an astronomical $1 million after I sold one of my dutch businesses (Foodie). I took my family (my wife and 3 children) to California to build Meal.com into the next “unicorn” company.

A unicorn is a company valued at $1 billion. In this process I wanted to raise investment to make a growth spurt, to help many millions of people to make healthy eating easy and fun.

I arrived in the United States on a tourist visa, hoping to get a work/investment visa within 3 months so I could continue pursuing my dream.

The virus

Unfortunately it turned out differently. I didn't get my visa in time and had to leave the country. We rented a garage box for all the things we had already bought, and thought we would return in a few months.

Back in Europe (Gran Canaria) I continued with all the paperwork for my visa. This involved writing an extensive business plan, many conversations with lawyers, etc.

And then it happened…

The virus entered our world. Travel became difficult.

And the United States stopped immigration more or less.

In addition, my own “view of the world” also changed within a few short weeks.

What is really important?

A billion dollar company vs. my family.

Investments became harder to raise. I pitched my idea 25 times to different investors only to get a “NO” back for 25 times.

And that while I still had a considerable “debt” on the domain name meal.com (which I wanted to pay off through investments).

You don't buy such a domain name in one go.

I paid $175,000 upfront and a $5,000 fee per month. The remainder had to be paid after 2 years. When the virus was running full storm worldwide I only had 1 year left…

Time was running out.

Make choices

I saw how the world changed quickly… And I had to make a choice what to do with my remaining money that I obtained during the sale of my company in 2019.

Did I invest this in the installment of the meal.com domain?

Or would I invest it in a piece of land to settle down with my family.

I chose my family.

We bought an estate in the mountains of Gran Canaria of 80,000 m2.

Here we have built a community where we now live together with 4 families. We have our own vegetable garden. Our own water source. I had a large community center built with 80 m2 of solar panels.

To be completely self-sufficient.

This was a big project, and it took my focus off building meal.com.

My idea was that I couldn't build an online software platform in full abundance (meal.com) if I didn't have a stable base myself.

Slowly I also started to realize that I would never be able to pay off the domain name meal.com again.

In the meantime, I just kept building with my team (4 FTE), because I believe 1000% in our goal to make healthy eating easy and fun for millions of people worldwide.

The name change

And so I looked for a solution. And that was a new domain name.

I wanted a short, snappy, punchy domain name that embraces the vibe and energy of what I'm building with my team.

And while showering it came.

Guac.

(Almost) everyone loves guacamole.

We can develop fun, playful marketing. And as time went on with the new domain name, we found that the branding with guac suited us better than the generic meal.com.

So all is well in our guac world.

Conclusion

I had to make a difficult decision to let go of the meal.com domain name (and with it hundreds of thousands of dollars I had already invested). But crazy times call for crazy decisions.

Over the past two years we have continued to build our platform (in the next article I will provide a complete overview of what has changed). And all this while I started and completed a large personal project myself (our community).

Right now I am completely self-sufficient, extremely agile, and full of energy for the next phase of Guac.com.

My team and I are even more driven than ever to bring health back to our society. Because it's more important now than ever.