Startup Coffee

Ok, this is starting to get fun. Closing in on 10 orders, slowly but surely. Frankly, haven't even started marketing yet. Still optimizing site settings, trying to get products approved for Facebook and Instagram listings, and trying to redo all the product imagery before the weekend.

Pretty amazing to get four sales so quickly and I haven’t really optimized anything or begun marketing. My next tasks are the boring ones of: optimizing the product detail pages, crafting the About page, optimizing all product images, tweaking SEO settings, and polishing post-purchase emails.

Launched very quietly in the evening.

Launch, in the context of a Shopify e-commerce store simply involves removing the password on the site, thus making it visible to the entire world.

After "launch", I sent aTwitter DM to my friend and told him the news. He ordered $72 worth of coffee (and a tshirt!). FIRST SALE! WOOT!

Finally, after all this time, I decided to forge ahead.

I reached out to the coffee dropshipper who had completely forgotten about me by this point. Started the process of gathering documents and doing all the setup work to buy physical products at wholesale (sales tax-free) pricing to then sell and ship them via interstate commerce to retail customers across the US.

January 30, 2020, the WHO declares that this little COVID thing might in fact be a global pandemic.

All the fun marketing experiments I had planned for 2020 were scrapped because most of them revolved around in-person community conferences, events and travel.

Okay, so I did some Googling and discovered that there were companies offering coffee dropshipping services. They were large roasting companies, not the small, mom-and-pop small-batch specialty roasters I was hoping to find. But, still. They did exist. I requested more info from each (6 in total) and received info back from 2 (many of the others had stopped offering this service). I even ordered some sample from one of the dropshipping roasters who happened to be near me.

Okay, so I had this very simple idea that there should be coffee specifically for for startup founders. I registered this and a bunch of other domain names around founders and startups and coffee thinking I could reserve my favorites now and pick which one to use later.

I reached out to a few friends working on SaaS that helped coffee roasters and asked them their opinions on if it was even feasible to drop ship coffee from a small, specialty roaster, and if not, how much capital investment was required if i wanted to pursue becoming a roaster on my own.

The answer was "No" that drop shipping coffee (at the time) was a non-starter for small roasters because it was so unpredictable and process intensive, and frankly, they had enough problems of their own just running their own businesses let alone also catering to a new kind of customer (the drop shipping client who may or may not ever send them any business). And LOLOMG the capital and training it can take to start/become a roaster is frightening.

So, great, I own these names. Maybe they'll be useful in the future.

Womp-wommmmmp.