Quick context, you guys: I run a coffee shop. It’s called Friends, I’ve been running it since 2025, and it actually came from an idea from my brother, he’s a huge coffee connoisseur, he brought me the idea, he was very excited, and I was like why not, let’s do it. And yesterday I was actually there, it was 4PM, brought my laptop, did some work, and I asked for a latte. I actually like lattes. I’m usually more of a dark roast, black coffee kind of guy, but sometimes black coffee feels way too serious and you want something a little pretty, (fun fact I drink pink drinks, they actually make you more masculine) so, I was sitting there drinking it and thinking, “damn, this actually tastes really fucking good.”
And then I remembered how brutal it was to actually get the coffee right, because when you guys open a coffee shop, the coffee is one of the main things people are coming back for, and people who drink coffee all the time can absolutely tell the difference between one shop and another. I’m not sure if you guys drink coffee all the time, but once you do, you unlock this weird sixth sense where you take one sip and immediately know whether the coffee is good. And the annoying part is that, when you’re opening the shop, one of the biggest problems is: you don’t really know who to trust to bring you coffee that is actually good. In our case, we literally had to ask people who knew other people who had coffee shops, and they basically just give you recommendations, they tell you stuff like: **“**yeah, these guys are good, and eventually you just pull the trigger and kind of gamble.
Because, obviously before a coffee shop can sell coffee, well it needs coffee beans. They’re the the raw ingredient behind the drink. You grind them, put them into the machine, add some water, and that is what becomes the espresso, latte, cappuccino, whatever the customer ordered.
And 99% of coffee shops don’t do this themselves, because roasting coffee is basically its own job. You need equipment/knowledge/time, and most people opening a coffee shop are just trying to run the damn shop. So every coffee shop owner essentially asks the same question: “Which roaster am I going to buy my coffee from?”
There might be ten, twenty, fifty companies around them selling coffee beans, but they don’t know which one is the best, because all they do is ask around, get recommendations, and basically just hope for the best.
And this is like opening Pandora’s box, they just gamble and see what comes out of the box. And this has consequences, because Imagine people are trying the shop for the first time, they order a coffee, and it tastes like shit. Well, that sucks, because those first customers might never come back. And if customers don’t come back, well, you guys already know what that means.
And not only that, even if the coffee shop is doing great, coffee beans are not something they buy once. They sell coffee every single day, which means the beans keep running out, which means the shop has to keep buying more of them again and again.
These are companies whose whole business is roasting coffee beans and selling them to coffee shops. Those companies are called coffee roasters. And one coffee shop for them is a shit ton of money because if that shop likes the beans, they don’t buy once. They keep ordering all the time.
So right now what do we have? Well we now have both sides that already need each other:
Coffee shop: “I need good beans every week.”
Coffee roaster: “I need coffee shops that keep buying my beans every week.”
We sell the coffee shop access to good roasters so they don’t have to ask around and gamble. And we sell the roaster access to coffee shops that are looking for beans and can keep buying from them every week.
(Because both sides are paying for different things)
For the coffee shop: