Hustle Coffee (aka how not to start a business)

Introduction

The idea for Hustle Coffee started as a hope to make coffee more accessible for everyone. We envisioned people wanted to take the smoke and mirrors out of coffee and learn more about making good coffee at home.

Challenge

The challenge here was to create a business that not only was a distribution point for the best roasters within Vancouver (and further down the line, Canada and maybe the US) but also would allow people to easily try out new coffees, learn about coffee brewing techniques, and acquire the equipment necessary to do all of this. At least to start, the challenge broke down into four parts:

1. Branding — Building a brand that advocated our values of learning, education, and no bullshit coffee.

2. Marketing — Establishing first, what our market was and second, finding an appropriate way to reach said market through advertising.

3. Development — Building a website that allowed us to fulfill our needs of coffee, equipment, and education distribution

4. Distribution — Setting up the supply chain and distribution channels to quickly and effectively get product to customers

Some of these problems were tackled in the wrong order and as such compounded upon themselves, creating the additional challenges.

Approach

The initial approach was based around two basic goals:

1. Build a website.
2. Sell shit.

We wanted to take as lean and as fast of an approach as possible, while minimizing our time spent in development.

Solution

We did just that, built a website and attempted to sell product.

Result

Our entire execution had a number of flaws ranging from lack of planning and preparation, to spending too much time on unnecessary project items.

Website development was rocky as my development process was rusty and priorities were out of place. While I was able to deliver a functioning, well designed, (moderately) comprehensive website that allowed us to easily sell product. However instead of taking the approach of making either a lean or agile site that emphasized getting something out the door as fast as possible, I tried to make the website as good as possible before launching (mistake number one). Furthermore, this segment was erroneously tackled too soon without having a solid foundation of either what our product was, what our market was, and how distribution was going to work.

This all resulted in two primary failures: first, we were unable to effectively sell anything a cause de lacking a launch and marketing plan; second, after signing on our first few customers, we realized the difficulty in effectively ensuring fulfillment happened in a timely and consistent manner.
These failures compounded themselves into forcing us to reconsider not only what our purpose as a company was, but also how we should approach doing business.

After recognizing these failures, we tried to reformulate our approach. Instead of selling to individual customers, we decided to shift towards delivering to businesses and setting them up. However, this pivot was taken without first addressing the underlying issues of a poor direction, no distribution plan, and unconfirmed suppliers.

Ultimately, we have recognized these deficiencies and are trying to think of ways to make sure that we are differentiated from other companies out there that are doing similar things. Our course of action is to shift our focus on Hustle to a side project and hope that in the midst of doing everything else, that some burst of enlightenment hits us and lets us either rework our model or actually figure out how to market to people. An appropriate way of shifting to this new market may be to become drug dealers and sign people up for a free month to get them hooked. Will have to improve product first.