The lesson is, with no secret sauce, you're competing against everyone else with a home equity loan and some desire. Any secret sauce would have helped. Not l

The lesson is, with no secret sauce, you're competing against everyone else with a home equity loan and some desire. Any secret sauce would have helped. Not literally caramel flavoring syrup but anything at all that makes the business special or unique. Fund all your capex off kickstarter. Hybrid model "hacking" the local zoning codes by putting software devs in the back room and having meetings with amazing coffee in the front. Offer non-traditional food, maybe coffee and gyros or coffee and bbq. Organic and healthy is massively oversold, how about molecular gastronomy coffee that tastes like watermelons or stinky cheese, or is florescent orange. A lot of cash based local retail is only in business long term because of money laundering, you can't compete with a guy stuffing $25K/month of weed growing cash into his register when you're not growing $25K/month of weed, so I'm not saying you have to do something illegal, but if the numbers don't work out if you do everything legally, that's because the successful competition is doing it illegally, so you'd be a fool to compete solely legally, and in some cities that means you simply cannot compete in cash based walk in retail unless you're willing to grow weed on the side, find another city, find another market, learn some gardening skills, but if your competitor has an extra $10K of cash revenue that you don't, you can forget about it. A job looking fun cool and trendy means you'll have the local divorced dentist or ER doctor funding it as a hobby to be cool and meet people. Again you can't compete unless you have a similar funding source. You can't sell coffee if a local NBA player thinks financing his mom's coffee shop or antique store or froyo shop would be oh so trendy and cool. Very few NFL players or CEOs think that their wives should operate a septic tank pumping business as want-raprenuers to keep them out of trouble, therefore you can make great piles of money going into exactly that kind of work. "We're gonna be just like everyone else" is in good times and bad, and the bad times are really, really bad and business lifespan is extremely short, so with a strategy like that, they're doomed like every other cookie cutter that fails.