This One Profession Shows Startups How To Consistently Improve

How to build new products, services and ideas that win.

Published in

The Startup

7 min readJul 10, 2018

Most people lose themselves in their day-to-day, and hope their circumstances change for automatically for them. For early-stage entrepreneurs, that’s deadly. Deadly because you’re a startup, which by definition means that what you’re doing isn’t working. And if you keep doing what’s not working, the outcome cannot be positive.

So how do you escape the day-to-day, how do you change your circumstances and improve structurally?

The answer to this I found in an unexpected place. It’s from someone who’s become very good at this exact thing —constantly improving the outcome of his work. At the same time, it’s the place where you find most answers.

It’s my best friend: a coffee roaster in Rotterdam.

Let me explain…

You see, specialty coffee and startup success share something beautiful: they can be engineered. And not in the software-engineering sense of the word. Their outcome can be engineered. This comes from following and perfecting a certain process.

The engineering process of coffee roasting is something entrepreneurs can learn a lot from, and there are specific steps that can help you focus.

In this piece, I’m going to elaborate on:

How you can improve any part of your business with this one process
How you can dig into the problems that limit your current situation
How to consistently move forward 10X faster than most other people
How to turn your startup into a business

All of this, with the following process:

Want to structurally improve your startup? Here’s how.

Step 1: Understanding

As a first step, my best friend digs into the coffee to get an understanding of where the coffee is at now. This involves asking three questions:

What works?
What wows?
What doesn’t work?

This is because coffee roasters know that if they want to improve their coffee, they first need a clear understanding of their current batch.

For coffee roasting, this entails ‘cupping’, or observing the tastes and smells of the brewed coffee. You can see a picture of what that looks like below:

During this process, there are specific aspects the roasters are looking at:

Body
Sweetness
Acidity
Flavor
Aftertaste

What coffee roasters seem to haven taken to heart is that you cannot improve what you don’t understand. If you want to solve a problem, you need a thorough understanding of it.

I’ve seen so many founders singularly paying attention to the day-by-day operations. Those could be significantly improved with some time assessing what works, what wows and what doesn’t work.

This habit becomes even more valuable once you start to focus on a limited amount of elements to improve. Coffee roasters focus on 5–10 aspects.

For an early-stage startup founder, there aren’t that many things to focus on. You need to 1) build a team that’s passionate to achieve the company’s vision, 2) make something people love, and 3) get, keep and grow customers and the resulting revenue.

With this, you can develop a point of view on the things that need to be improved. You can write this in the following format:

Currently, the thing that currently needs to be improved the most is _______________ (what doesn’t work).

Now that you know what you want to improve, you need to get clear about what actually causes that. For coffee, the tastes that don’t work could be related to air flow, heat distribution, maximum temperature and plenty more.

For entrepreneurs, an example I encounter often is a problematic conversion rate. This could be due to the flow of a website not making sense, a weak value proposition, and many other factors.

With these reasons, you dig deeper into what needs to be improved and how that can be improved. A way to frame this is like his:

This might be due to _______________(reason 1), _______________ (reason 2) and/or _______________ (reason 3).

The thing is that you cannot improve everything at the same time. The basic principle of improvement is that it requires focus. That’s why you need to choose one thing to improve.

It depends per situation which improvement has the highest likelihood to significantly impact the problem. What’s most important is that you come up with a well-supported idea about what causes it, and move to the next step.

When you put all of this together, you get something like this:

Currently, the thing that currently needs to be improved the most is _______________ (what doesn’t work). This might be due to _______________(reason 1), _______________ (reason 2) and/or _______________ (reason 3). Most probably though, the taste will significantly improve if we change the _______________(most probable reason).

Once you have this clear, you can move on to step 2.

Step 2: Hypothesise

This step is primarily about coming up with ideas, envisioning an improved situation and making choices.

With an understanding of the current coffee, my best friend now comes up with potential improvements. The knowledge of the previous step helps enormously here, and so there’s a much better chance of actually improving the overall coffee.

This step consists of two steps. First, my friend comes up with different possibilities. Next, he chooses the one with the highest likelihood to improve the problem.

In its most basic form, it goes like this:

“Given that _______________ (what doesn’t work), which is most likely due to _______________(most probable reason), potential solutions could be _______________(solution 1), _______________(solution 2), and/or _______________(solution 3). For now, I assume this can be improved by _______________(most probable solution)”

Say that your problem is that you don’t have enough customers. You figure that once they end up in your funnel, most of them convert. However, getting people into the funnel is hard: you have a customer acquisition problem. Potential solutions for this could be writing blogs, adding people on LinkedIn, or using paid ads. Depending on the size of your budget and the price of your product, you need to choose which of those you think is the best one to start with.

Now that you have clear what you want to improve, you can move to step 3.

Step 3: Experiment

My best friend seems to understand basic economics better than most entrepreneurs: you want to minimize the risks and costs. For this, he sticks to one rule: one batch is one experiment. Because of this, if his experiment really messes up the coffee, he hasn’t ruined a lot of very precious coffee.

I see so many entrepreneurs spending months or even years building out their 100-features product. They sink all their hard-earned savings into this really risky venture. And eventually, their product doesn’t take off. They’ve basically chosen one way in which they think coffee should be roasted, and put all of their inventory into the roaster.

As you can imagine, the iterative and lean approach works much better, especially in innovative situations.

Hence, this third step is about applying your ideas by taking them into the real world with the least amount of money and effort.

The beauty in this process is that it’s a cycle. Once he’s done with step 3, he returns to step 1 and digs into his coffee again. Here, he determines whether his hypothesis actually matches reality.

With a strong sense of what problem you want to solve, you’ve got a clear road to make a sound decision about what to do next.

Conclusion

The beauty in this approach is that it’s a fundamental way of thinking about progress and problem-solving. Because of this, it can be applied to pretty much anything:

Product development — what should we improve, how can we improve it, does this actually work?
Marketing and sales — what’s blocking our growth, what might solve this, are our ideas correct?
Fundraising — why aren’t we getting investment, what can we do to improve our odds, does this have any effect?

By structurally and critically thinking through your problems, you can become the best version of yourself and build the best business. You can eliminate risk, you can address issues before they become too big, you can move faster than everyone else.

So ask yourself:

Am I solving problems structurally?

Do I want to build a successful startup?

You’ve got this.

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