Compiled Coffee

It's been such a long journey to actually launch my business. It's been months in the making and its finally a reality. To summarize my goal for selling roasted coffee online: I wanted to do something I enjoyed doing which was roasting green coffee, tasting it and sharing it with others. That wasn't enough though since there's already hundreds of businesses/people doing this online. My goal is to bring the experience of buying coffee online to the digital age. I want to build slack bots, phone apps, APIs, and pretty much everything technical I can create to that experience.

The reason it's been months since I first got my coffee roaster was because:

• I was learning the ins and outs of the roaster
• I took forever trying to figure out the ecommerce platform to use. Should I go open source? Build my own? Go with a managed service like Shopify.

At first the obvious answer was bringing in an open source solution like Spree, write k8s deployment definitions and deploy it to kubernetes. This took a long time because while doing so I was also experimenting with different plugins I'd like to create or reuse. I needed to build the whole design myself and learn the ruby templating engine.

I eventually decided that to actually get the site out to people I had to go with Shopify because it was just a lot easier to get started with. Thats the route I took and if I wouldn't of gone with a managed ecommerce provider then I still would've been trying to figure out the spree and its inner workings.

Soon I'm going to have to move over to an open source solution since there's so many technical things I want to add. But this'll work for now.

If you guys want to buy some fresh roasted coffee, check out the website:

https://compiled.coffee

You can use the coupon code INDIEHACKERS for a 50% discount

I did a bunch of research to buy my first coffee roaster.
I didn't want to go too big but also didn't want to start small because if the business was actually successful I would need to buy immediately a bigger machine. I decided to buy a 3kg machine which came out to a total of around $6,000 shipped.

To anyone who knows about these machines, this is really cheap. A 3kg machine in the US is probably around $15,000. I got mine from China from an actually pretty reputable company.

The machine arrived this week. So far I've done a couple of roasts on it with some coffee beans I bought online and it's been good.

I can't wait to start selling coffee online.

So I've been drinking coffee since I was just graduating from high school. Ever since it's become just a daily routine to get my morning cup of coffee.

In the beginning it wasn't anything "special". I didn't care for quality that much. My go to roast was medium roast. I could taste the "burned" coffee so I would stay away from places like Starbucks.

I was eventually fascinated with how coffee was grown, processed and roasted. I got myself a small hand stovetop roaster and for several years would just roast my own coffee at home paying attention to roast "profiles" and how different origins would have distinct hints of flavors. This would become my morning coffee.

All this time I was actually working as a professional software engineer drinking the supermarket coffee they would buy for the office during the day. I started paying attention to how people would praise or criticise the coffee someone brewed that morning. Some people like the "roasty, burned" taste of coffee and some other people preferred the lighter roasts.

Since I could remember I always wanted to start my own business. On my drive to work I would try and think of new business ideas I wanted for a tech startup. I thought of really cool saas product ideas but as soon as I looked them up on Google they already existed. I eventually landed on starting my own coffee roasting business. I again searched it and this space was saturated. Oh well, I actually enjoy roasting coffee and the science of roasting coffee really excites me. Me being a software engineer decided I wanted to start a coffee roasting business but with a "tech" spin on things.