Why We Stopped Saying “Snobbery”
And our love affair with coffee
Sip — A third wave coffee finderator for iOS. Download it now!
Trent, the co-founder of Sip, and I have been developing the idea of a third wave coffee shop app for close to a year and a half. We love coffee and believe it should be easy to find good coffee wherever you go. If you love coffee you know exactly how this normally goes. You are either scouring Yelp, or you’re asking the internet where good coffee is. In our world of technology, we both agreed there should be a better alternative.
An app that supports and encourages the vibrant community of incredible people who love and pour their passion into coffee.
The two major features of the app will be:
- The ability to quickly find third wave coffee shops wherever you are and,
- filter the coffee shops by brew method, location, atmosphere, food, espresso machine and more.
We wanted to give you the ability to nit-pick and find exactly what you’re looking for. If you wanted to find a shop in San Francisco that uses Slayer espresso machines, serves Chemex, has a buzzing atmosphere with vegan food options you can. The power is yours. And as a result of being able to search and find exactly what your heart desires we coined the slogan:
Sip — enabling your snobbery.
It was catchy, we liked the sound of it, and it represented the ability to filter and find great coffee wherever you are.
But… it hadn’t occurred to us the other implications of the word “snobbery;” implications we didn’t agree with or support. I first realized it when a friend familiar with the project emailed me directly. The line that really struck me was “as we [baristas] try really, really hard to NOT be called a snob in regards to coffee.”
Over the next few a week’s a few others expressed dissatisfaction with the word “snob” which only confirmed our realizations.
So we’re cutting it.
The coffee community is an incredibly passionate and knowledgeable group of people. Their love for coffee often goes well beyond just drinking it. They strive for conversation and openness. Coffee is about relationships around a shared appreciation for a craft. It’s not inclusive vs. exclusive; it’s friendship rather than strangers. Finding good coffee is not just about looking for the best coffee shops. It’s about looking for shared experiences, it’s about who's sitting across from you.
So, coffee aficionados, please accept our apology. The last thing we wanted to do was enable an antithetical trait we didn’t believe in the first place.
Sip — Great Coffee Just a Tap Away
And yes. We’re still using “finderator.” We like it. Deal with it.
Keep drinking great coffee,
Thanks for reading!
If you hate snobs and love great coffee, we’d love it if you hit that heart button. You can also download the app on iOS now!
