Today you’re going to hear the story of Cake Server and Jade Ryan.
Jade blew me away. Jade went to university to study structural engineering, became a structural engineer, started and built a side hustle while working full-time, is a mother of two young children and then, while on maternity leave went through the accelerator program ICON offered by Slingshot in partnership with the University of Newcastle and started a company called Cake Server, which you will hear about today. Oh and one more thing, Jade bought her house at 24.
By. Her. Self.
We’ll get deeper into Jade’s and Cake Server’s story. But for now, let’s go back to day one, where this story begins…
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Adam Spencer: You're listening to a DayOne.fm show.
Jade Ryan: What drives you to make bold moves, to build something that didn't exist before, to live, lead, and choose life with intention? Welcome to Perspective X. I'm Pauline Fatowi, and this is not your typical business podcast. Each episode, I get to speak to extraordinary entrepreneurs and leading innovators to unpack what truly fuels their journey. Not just the wins, but the inner work, the overlooked decisions, the mindset shifts, and the personal moments that sparked something bigger. This show is about the ripple effect of choice, the kind of deep accountability that lets us respond to life rather than react to it. Because when you realize everything is temporary, and you are the creator of your own experience, you start to play the game differently. So if you're curious about how people build meaning alongside success, how they evolve through challenges and shape the world with intention, this is your invitation to listen in. Perspective X, where we go beyond the highlight reel and into the moments that changed everything. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker C: You can be the biggest, juiciest, plumpest peach, and there'll still be some guy that doesn't like peaches.
Adam Spencer: Hi, I'm Adam Spencer, and welcome to Day One, the show that goes back to the very beginning to share the untold stories of incredible regional startups and entrepreneurs. Today you're going to hear the story of Cake Server and Jade Ryan.
Speaker C: I'm Jade Ryan. I am the CEO of Cake Server.
Adam Spencer: Jade blew me away. Jade went to university to study structural engineering, became a structural engineer, started and built a side hustle while working full-time, is a mother of two young children, and then while on maternity leave went through the accelerator program ICON offered by Slingshot in partnership with the University of Newcastle and started a company called Cake Server. We'll get deeper into Jade's and Cake Server's story, but for now let's go back to day one where this story begins.
Speaker C: I did engineering and, uh, So it's sort of funny that when I was growing up, you couldn't be a girl in my family. It was like considered a bit bad to be a girl. So that really ground me. So I tried to cut off all things that were girly, anything. And it wasn't until I sort of grew up and realized that I could, you know, just because I was a girl doesn't mean I'm not accomplished and smart and all this stuff and liking things like decorating or art or whatever. Wasn't weak, you're in the kitchen with your apron on. It was actually, you know, very warawading and hard to do, and if everyone could do it, we wouldn't have cake racks. Or nail it.
Adam Spencer: Yeah.
Speaker C: So, yeah, it wasn't until I sort of grew up and didn't try and be things that I wasn't that I realised I could be, you know, accomplished engineer and also I enjoy making cakes. My cake business didn't start until a couple of years ago.
Adam Spencer: Jade went on a business trip to Perth with her structural engineer hat on for a project with the company that she works for. It was to be for a couple of months, which meant leaving her family behind, and because of that, Jade found herself with some free time. And what else do you do with downtime but sink it into YouTube? And that is where Jade learned all about cakers.
Speaker C: Caker, this is a cake decorator. My sister-in-law, her 30th birthday was coming up, so I said, "I wanna make this cake." So I went out and bought all this frosting and stuff, and I didn't wanna spend the money on an electric mixer, so I got a hand mixer. And when I was doing the buttercream, it burnt out in like 5 minutes, and like was smoke everywhere. So I got a hand-crank one that I happened to have in my cupboard, and my brother and my husband were both like hand cranking this hard butter and I didn't know what I was doing. So from there I did it and it looked pretty good and I was pretty proud of it. So it just started building from there and then I started getting people going, "Hey, can you do my birthday cake?" Ah! When it stopped being friends and started being friends of friends, I'm like, "Well, I'm gonna have to be a bit serious about this." And yeah, started doing cakes for people.
Adam Spencer: So is it hard to imagine that this interest, this, love of caking or cake decorating would be the seed that would turn into Cake Server. Jade started to get more serious about this, and you know you're getting serious when you move from birthday cakes for friends to wedding cakes. Oh boy, that's a whole other ball game.
Speaker C: I was able to do that and make some wedding cake and whatnot for people.
Adam Spencer: But as I mentioned, things were getting serious. Jade had been working full-time as an engineer and growing her side hustle for Um, 5 years.
Speaker C: 5 years?
Adam Spencer: Mm-hmm. Was it a full-time business?
Speaker C: Oh no, I still worked full-time as an engineer.
Adam Spencer: And did you have kids at this point?
Speaker C: Yes.
Adam Spencer: Jade was working her ass off. Where did she find time to do all this cake decorating?
Speaker C: Basically after work until 10 o'clock at night.
Jade Ryan: Really?
Speaker C: Yeah, you'd rent it out in the afternoon until 10 o'clock at night, then get up early the next morning, you know, cake through until someone picked up the cake or had to drop it off.
Adam Spencer: So, Jade has been doing this for some time, over 5 years in fact, and in startup land people talk about domain experience or expertise. That is understanding the market you operate in, and Jade had developed that over time and had become acutely aware through her own experience too of a problem that needed a solution in the industry.
Speaker C: The idea come from— so when I was doing my Clever Girl Cakes, people were having trouble with the costing. A lot of people have trouble with the price shock of, "Wait, how much is this going to cost me?" So I was trying to work out a way of, without having to explain to every customer, like, the prices of cake, you know, and they'd ask me a lot of questions and I'd come back to them with different prices, which is fair enough, everyone knows, but they started feeling a little uncomfortable and I was spending a lot of time quoting and re-quoting and that's just where profits go to die because I don't get to charge for the re-drawing up of designs and stuff, that's all just nowhere money. And I think it's a problem that a lot of cakers have, is that they do a lot of quoting online and people hear the price and then they disappear. And it's still taken them time to do that and to interact with that. And that's, you know, just part of life. It's like everyone that does a quoting business Part of life, but it's also the part of life that, you know, how many quotes do I have to do before I get actual jobs out of it?
Adam Spencer: The idea or problem is now firmly in Jade's mind, and her husband Greg Ryan, who is also one of the co-founders of Cake Server, the idea is there. Now it's time for the fun part, the fuzzy part, the ideation phase, figuring out what the solution is and is it even possible to build a business out of this.
Speaker C: So I was actually on a trip down to Kuma, where my in-laws live, and we were driving along trying to keep each other awake. Me and my husband were talking about ways of being able to automate it and get it online. It sort of started with an Excel spreadsheet that I could just change things, and then my husband's like, "Oh, we can automate it, and we can do it all online, and we can use, you know, we can use 3D technology," and he was really keen on it. I'm like, "Oh, fuck that." 'Dude, I'm doing like 3 cakes max a week. You can't do an— this is gonna cost thousands and thousands of dollars. You can't do this.' He's like, 'No, no, it'll be alright. We can do this.' And I'm like, 'I really think this is a lot more into it than you think.' And, you know, it might have just been driving for 6 hours that have got us to this point, but about a week later I turn up around to him and said, 'What if we did it for everybody?' He's like, 'What do you mean?' I was like, 'Well, what if instead of just for me, we set it up so everyone, all the cakers could use this, and we could set it up, and that way maybe for spending that money it could help.' I mean, how long would it take before it became a— it would repay itself?
Adam Spencer: Yeah.
Speaker C: For me, it would take years, but for— if we had everybody, it wouldn't, you know, it would start being useful almost straight away.
Adam Spencer: They're on to something good here, but neither Jade or Greg have the technical expertise to build the platform that they had begun to envision.
Speaker C: And then we got all our information together and we went to Ben, our friend, and we pitched to him because we knew that we were going to need someone who knew how to do websites.
Adam Spencer: Introducing Ben Norman, Cakeserver's technical co-founder.
Speaker C: Ben's our IT guy.
Jade Ryan: Yeah.
Speaker C: He works in creative industries. He's won awards for app design and stuff. Wow. So we're like, well, we've been friends with him for 10 years, so we pitched to him and come up with the idea, and he made some cupcakes, got it all, you know, did a proper pitch with the slideshow and everything, and he came back to us a week later and said, "Okay, well, let's have a look at a co-founder agreement." His sister's a lawyer, so she had a look at it and we all agreed.
Adam Spencer: The A-team is now together. Jade, Greg, and Ben. Things were moving steadily along, but perhaps not as fast as the founders would have liked. Greg, who works for the University of Newcastle, had heard about this thing called Slingshot, but before that chapter in this story begins, something much more important happened. The team, who were just taking it nice and slowly, got an injection of support from their friends at the Newcastle University's Integrated Innovation Network, Siobhan, Ciarán, and Richard Berry.
Speaker C: Yeah, it lit a firecracker up our ass. I guess we were sort of taking it slow, doing, you know, getting things as we were going, and we plan on doing a, let's get this completely, you know, as we want it and When we were there, they were like, sometimes you just need to get it close enough and go forward and get things out there, 'cause you don't build word of mouth by just talking about it. Some people, you need to see it to believe it.
Jade Ryan: Yeah.
Speaker C: And yeah, so that really sort of pushed us forward, and like, we weren't expecting to get where we were for another 6 months.
Adam Spencer: With the support from the team at the i2N, the Cake Server team pushed onward with their idea, and the next step was giving their to-be business another boost. Initially, Greg was only looking for funding opportunities, and that's where Slingshot enters the picture.
Speaker C: I think Greg was looking up ways of us to get funding.
Adam Spencer: Mm-hmm.
Speaker C: Yeah, he was looking up different ideas. He'd also heard about it the year before.
Adam Spencer: Okay.
Speaker C: So it was something he knew about from the year before, so we thought we'd have a go. This is Grayson, my 8-month-old baby. He joined me in I2N when we were doing the Slingshot program.
Adam Spencer: That's perfect.
Speaker C: He said, "Hi." He knows when he's being talked about. We didn't think we'd get into Slingshot, to be honest. It was sort of a suck it and see situation. We thought, "You know what? It's an idea. Let's go for it." And, yeah, we sort of— we went in. Siobhan actually held Grey while we went in and did the pitch, because he was only 7 weeks old at that stage. And we went in and Grey got up and did the pitch, and yeah, 2 weeks later we were in Slingshot.
Adam Spencer: What was that experience like for you?
Speaker C: Intense. So very, very intense. A 10-week program. We got lucky this year, they decided to squish it all into 10 weeks instead of 12. I really feel like it crammed probably a year or two of us learning on our own into that 10 weeks. It was a really supportive group, um, and just being with other, like, startups, we sort of see the good things they were doing and also the bad things they were doing and able to either, you know, sort of have a look at investing in some of the things that they were doing No, it was a big push for the end because we wanted to be on demo night. We wanted to be able to show people what we could do.
Adam Spencer: Cake Server is live now. The website is up, but there is still a lot of work to do. It is really early days for the Cake Server team.
Speaker C: It's only been up since like the 18th of December. I really think it is trust and that we're doing the right thing by our bakers. We're doing the right thing by our customers. And that there is, that we, you know, know what we're doing, I guess. It's sort of a bit of a pitfall whenever you go automated, people forget that there's a person on the other side of it. But that's also good for, like, I've talked to other, like, people that have bought cakes where they've gotten the price and they've gone, "Oh, I feel bad about saying no." Mm-hmm. 'Even though I really can't afford it.' And so I'm giving them that option to be able to change their mind. It's important that they are able to see the cost of it. There is a very good chance that we're being cost compared because of it, and good. If we start being the place that people go to to see what a cake will cost, to then, like, be used as a standard. It'd be better if they were using our site, but if it starts this way, then we're still building that level of standard. We're becoming the Cake Server standard, and then it goes from there.
Adam Spencer: Jade just alluded to the larger mission Cake Server has and the bigger why. The reason they exist beyond providing the specific service their platform offers, which gives them a power that a lot of businesses miss the mark on. So basically you're saying that all these people that are on your platform need to have all of these things. It's almost like, you know, it's the Cake Server seal of approval. So consumers, you know, there's more trust there between the consumer and—
Speaker C: That's what we're trying to develop. And I guess it got put very well by someone. We're trying to professionalize a cottage industry. We're trying to make this industry where there's all these small players, everyone's like, they're usually sole traders, they've got their own business, it's their little baby. There's not, like, if you think wedding cakes or birthday cakes, there's no one that's sort of, like in America you've got your base Bake Boss and, and, um, whatnot. But in Australia there's not too many, "This is the person to go to," or there's not a big chain that you say, "Yes, that's where I get my birthday cake from." It's actually all very small suppliers, and people even on the other side of things, the consumers, they are wondering, you know, "Who do I go to to get a good cake? Am I getting ripped off?" Because they, you know, I didn't know how much cakes cost until I started making them. You're like, "Oh geez, you know, why does this cost so much? Are they trying to rip me off?" And they don't know that, but I feel that we've currently doing a survey for all the— so we've put it out to people in Australia, all the cakers, to help us with cake pricing. So we're finding there's a lot of divide between regional and the city pricings. So we've sent it out and we're collecting, we're still collecting data now to just basically get, try and make sure that we're on the right path for the cost of cakes. I know that for Newcastle, I'm like within 5% of costing.
Jade Ryan: Yep.
Speaker C: But with like the difference between that and Sydney and Tamworth is crazy. So we're doing, we're basically geo-pricing to make sure that we know what people who are professional are charging, to give the consumer a bit more confidence that we're not just, "Here's a number out of thin air." There's actually a basis for what we've done.
Adam Spencer: Cake Server is on the right track, but they have come up against some pushback from the industry, which could be just another sign that they're on the right track.
Speaker C: Well, there's some misgivings about it. Some people think, 'cause I'm putting a estimate price up there. So with cakers, you've got everyone from self-taught home bakers to people who have gone to France and done pastry chefing and have been, you know, professionally taught. So you've got a range, and the people that have, you know, made their entire career and they're a 5-star chef and everything—
Adam Spencer: Right.
Speaker C: They have a reputation and a name to be able to charge a lot more, and they should. They've got, you know, people come to them and ask them to make cakes.
Jade Ryan: Yeah.
Speaker C: People that are sort of, you know, just sort of starting out, a lot of people have trouble justifying their prices, especially when you can go to, like, a super— supermarket and be like, "Oh, I can buy a $7 cake." And I have said before to someone who's like, "Oh, I can get it from It's like, I don't care, I don't care what it is. I'm like, well then, you know, I can just go to Woolworths and pick you up something. He's like, no, no, no, I don't like, you know, I'd like it to be something nice. It's like, okay, so you do care what it is. Okay, cool. And I thought that might have been a bit cheeky, but it was like, people do care what they're getting and they do want a quality product. They don't want to go to a big chain, especially for something special like their wedding.
Adam Spencer: Yeah.
Speaker C: The reason why people get upset about it is because they're worried that by me putting a price up there, people will underbid and try and cut each other out and basically make everyone work for nothing. So with the way I've done it is we've made it so that way people can't underprice less than 20%. We've done it based on a livable wage.
Adam Spencer: Mm-hmm.
Speaker C: All my pricing is basically done on a livable wage.
Adam Spencer: What does the future look like for Cake Server?
Speaker C: Oh, the future, well, first of all, we're putting unicorn cakes up there, so from that whole, the kids really love it, sort of looking at going into birthday cakes, just to sort of tap into that market. Basically, people might be willing to try for birthday cake before they try for their wedding cake. But this sort of technology, once we get it up and running, we can apply it to so many different things. Like build it online and get it built now. There are people that are doing it with 3D printing. Not this building, more you have your own stuff and you go do it. Ah!
Adam Spencer: Ah! Ah!
Speaker C: But we really wanted to sort of do that with go into 3D printing and also advanced manufacturing.
Adam Spencer: Right.
Speaker C: So we have talked to some people in the advanced manufacturing industry regarding— so it was sort of a little dip a toe situation where you've got cake toppers. So you get like words and everything scribed out in an acrylic.
Adam Spencer: I asked Jade what advice would she have given to her past self, knowing what she knows now?
Speaker C: You should have come up with this idea before you decided to have a second kid. [LAUGHTER] I guess what I would say is spend more on daycare. We don't have a lot of family up this way, so Grey was with me the whole time, and Rory was with me every other day. So, we ended up getting one day in daycare just so I could do all the things that we needed to do and still somewhat get some sleep. But I'd probably look at getting more daycare and asking for more help.
Adam Spencer: And just to finish off this episode, at the beginning of the show, Jade shared a quote about plump peaches and I absolutely love the quote. So, here it is in full, the audiograph for you. I think we as founders really need to remember this, basically that you can't win every battle and not everyone is going to believe in you and your idea. That doesn't mean give up though. That means find another way.
Speaker C: It's actually by Peter Fontys. It's, "You can be the biggest, juiciest, plumpest peach and there'll still be some guy that doesn't like peaches." So it's— with Cake Server, a lot of people have been— cakers have been really adamant that they don't like the idea and some have been, "Yes!" It's like, we are not going to appeal to everyone and we've got to accept that. And it's not a dig at us, it's just, it's not for everybody. You've got to sort of hold on to that because you can sometimes get disheartened when people don't like your idea or don't like anything about you and you're like, okay, well, that happens sometimes.
Adam Spencer: Thank you for listening to the story of Cake, Server, and Jade Ryan. I hope you enjoyed it. Everything that was mentioned in the episode today is on the show notes page on welcometodayone.com. Next time on Welcome to Day One, Andrew Mears from Switch10. We are absolutely going to have a much more decentralized energy service. So in the past we've had these large power stations, you know, a few, relative few, and these are gigawatt scale. Now what we're seeing is a growth of many, many smaller systems. Ratings and reviews help to keep us going and they help more people discover our stories. You can rate the show on most podcast platforms by going to Ratedayone.com. That's Ratedayone.com to leave a rating on the podcast. And thank you for giving this episode of Welcome to Day One your attention. This episode was created by me, Adam Spencer, interviews conducted by me, Adam Spencer, and a big thank you to Jade Ryan from Cake Server for taking the time to be involved. And a thank you to Newcastle University's Integrated Innovation Network for partnering with Welcome to Day One to bring you this story. Without partners like these, our small team wouldn't be able to continue to create these episodes for you. The script was written by me, Adam Spencer. Music by Lee Rosavere. Full attribution on our website at welcometodayone.com. This episode was produced by me, Adam Spencer, and edited by Natalie Holland. Thank you and see you next time.
