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As a failed solopreneur myself, I appreciate the candor of this article. But I think the author skipped over the two most important reasons he failed! #1. Ther

As a failed solopreneur myself, I appreciate the candor of this article. But I think the author skipped over the two most important reasons he failed! #1. There was no need for the service. Don't make up things you like or want. Deliver on things that customers are hankering for. He skipped this step. #2. Don't become a software company! Unless your business is software, stay out of the software business. This person built lovely software for... delivering coffee? That's expensive, not necessary, and puts you in the software development and maintenance business forever.

justsomehnguy 4y ago
Yep. The most amusing one is "Unfortunately, we didn’t figure out how to deal with slowdowns". Come on, you would see it if you just get to any other coffee point and sit for a day looking at how it works. Like, you know, the old, pre-Google way. Or use that Google to find out the challenges in running a coffee point. It's not like they were the first one ever doing that.
jaclaz 4y ago
>#2. Don't become a software company! Unless your business is software, stay out of the software business. This person built lovely software for... delivering coffee? That's expensive, not necessary, and puts you in the software development and maintenance business forever. The shared experience seems to lead to the opposite, making money brewing and delivering coffee doesn't work, but the software can be re-purposed and re-sold (hopefully with some margin), so maybe it was a software company with a side-activity useful for field testing since the beginning. But, honest question, aren't the resources used (and connected costs) too much? 6 or 7 programmers/engineers (including the post author) for three months (a part of them 24/7) to build the app and site? Maybe it is ready to scale and what not, but it sounds (to me) like a pretty simple kind of software.
- mannyv 4y ago
  In general, it takes about 3 months to make a decent mobile app. That assumes you have a graphics person, a decent backend person, and a decent mobile developer. And a design. You can probably skip the backend person and just use firebase or app sync. If you're doing order processing you need that backend/integration person. The less platform integration you do the faster it'll go. If you use react native or flutter you can get that down to maybe 2 months for the three big platforms (web/iOS/android). Their app is really nice, and they had an app on the barista side, so more people and more time. They also had an admin dashboard = more time. Three months is actually pretty good for everything they built. That means they had a designer on-staff, pretty good developers, and a product manager who could communicate. And it's true, their end-to-end system might actually be worth something.
sharemywin 4y ago
And #3 delivery sucks...and food/drink delivery sucks even more.
Kon-Peki 4y ago
I remember reading the Starbucks book by Howard Shultz many years ago. In it, he talks about how Starbucks grew by offering a "superior experience". That is pretty instructive here. Coffee is, by itself, not a luxury item. Not even the best coffee in the world. It's just liquid in a cup. If you want to sell premium coffee, you have to create a premium experience. If you're doing it online, you need a website/app that feels premium - whatever that means!
dublinben 4y ago
No kidding. There's no mention of any prior industry experience by anyone on their team. They seem to be a digital agency with an expensive coffee habit. They signed an expensive lease for office space before having any paying customers or other market validation of any kind? They started with their chosen solution (pre-made gourmet coffee delivered in 15 minutes) before demonstrating that this was a problem their customers even had. Office managers and event planners all have a coffee budget, but rarely need anything with such immediacy. Their job is predicting demand and planning ahead so there's always coffee available, but it never has to be ordered at a moment's notice. There's no mention of talking to these potential buyers before investing in sunk costs like real estate, equipment, a bespoke software platform (!), payroll, etc. They set their prices way too low. By anchoring to the cost of a takeaway coffee from a cafe, instead of to an on-demand delivered hot food/beverage (much more expensive!) they weren't able to cover their much higher overhead. Their insufficient margins lead them to be understaffed and unable to absorb any unplanned absences. Any amount of experience managing employees at this pay scale would have made it obvious that you can't expect military precision and perfectly consistent output. >Don't become a software company! They had six software engineers on staff! For a coffee delivery company! The (10+ year old) company that services my office employs zero software engineers. Their website is outsourced to a local web dev. They seemed to have no financial projections whatsoever showing that this was a sustainable business at any level.

justsomehnguy 4y ago

Yep. The most amusing one is "Unfortunately, we didn’t figure out how to deal with slowdowns". Come on, you would see it if you just get to any other coffee point and sit for a day looking at how it works. Like, you know, the old, pre-Google way. Or use that Google to find out the challenges in running a coffee point. It's not like they were the first one ever doing that.

jaclaz 4y ago

>#2. Don't become a software company! Unless your business is software, stay out of the software business. This person built lovely software for... delivering coffee? That's expensive, not necessary, and puts you in the software development and maintenance business forever. The shared experience seems to lead to the opposite, making money brewing and delivering coffee doesn't work, but the software can be re-purposed and re-sold (hopefully with some margin), so maybe it was a software company with a side-activity useful for field testing since the beginning. But, honest question, aren't the resources used (and connected costs) too much? 6 or 7 programmers/engineers (including the post author) for three months (a part of them 24/7) to build the app and site? Maybe it is ready to scale and what not, but it sounds (to me) like a pretty simple kind of software.

mannyv 4y ago
In general, it takes about 3 months to make a decent mobile app. That assumes you have a graphics person, a decent backend person, and a decent mobile developer. And a design. You can probably skip the backend person and just use firebase or app sync. If you're doing order processing you need that backend/integration person. The less platform integration you do the faster it'll go. If you use react native or flutter you can get that down to maybe 2 months for the three big platforms (web/iOS/android). Their app is really nice, and they had an app on the barista side, so more people and more time. They also had an admin dashboard = more time. Three months is actually pretty good for everything they built. That means they had a designer on-staff, pretty good developers, and a product manager who could communicate. And it's true, their end-to-end system might actually be worth something.

sharemywin 4y ago

And #3 delivery sucks...and food/drink delivery sucks even more.

Kon-Peki 4y ago

I remember reading the Starbucks book by Howard Shultz many years ago. In it, he talks about how Starbucks grew by offering a "superior experience". That is pretty instructive here. Coffee is, by itself, not a luxury item. Not even the best coffee in the world. It's just liquid in a cup. If you want to sell premium coffee, you have to create a premium experience. If you're doing it online, you need a website/app that feels premium - whatever that means!

dublinben 4y ago

No kidding. There's no mention of any prior industry experience by anyone on their team. They seem to be a digital agency with an expensive coffee habit. They signed an expensive lease for office space before having any paying customers or other market validation of any kind? They started with their chosen solution (pre-made gourmet coffee delivered in 15 minutes) before demonstrating that this was a problem their customers even had. Office managers and event planners all have a coffee budget, but rarely need anything with such immediacy. Their job is predicting demand and planning ahead so there's always coffee available, but it never has to be ordered at a moment's notice. There's no mention of talking to these potential buyers before investing in sunk costs like real estate, equipment, a bespoke software platform (!), payroll, etc. They set their prices way too low. By anchoring to the cost of a takeaway coffee from a cafe, instead of to an on-demand delivered hot food/beverage (much more expensive!) they weren't able to cover their much higher overhead. Their insufficient margins lead them to be understaffed and unable to absorb any unplanned absences. Any amount of experience managing employees at this pay scale would have made it obvious that you can't expect military precision and perfectly consistent output. >Don't become a software company! They had six software engineers on staff! For a coffee delivery company! The (10+ year old) company that services my office employs zero software engineers. Their website is outsourced to a local web dev. They seemed to have no financial projections whatsoever showing that this was a sustainable business at any level.