Three things I learned from Coffee Walla

November of 2012 until January of 2013, I pursued a business idea called Coffee Walla — a coffee delivery service for students and faculty at San Jose State University. Even though the business did not work out as I had it envisioned to, I still learned a lot. Since we are nearing the end of the year, I thought I would share what I learned. Here’s what I learned from Coffee Walla:

1. Scalability

The delivery business is really tough to scale! When I first started Coffee Walla, I thought delivering coffee to people on campus would be a piece of cake.

Turns out, scaling this business would have been a nightmare!

2. Have great margins

There was no money to be made in this business and there certainly were not any margins. A cost of a coffee was anywhere from $4 — $6 and on top of that, Coffee Walla charged an additional $1 — $2 delivery fee. Even breaking even would have been impossible!

3. Don’t be afraid to pivot or stop

Luckily, I detected early on this was not a great idea and realized it would never work. So what did I do? Instead of continuing to pursue the original idea, I decided to pivot by offering coffee delivery to businesses. I went to local businesses in Cupertino and offered them coffee delivery — $99/month. This did not work either.

At this point, I realized that if I had kept on pursuing this idea, the results could have caused a train wreck in many ways.

Bottom line?

Overall, it was a fantastic learning experience. Sure the idea failed, but failure is a form of success as long as you learn from your mistakes.