Newsletter #6: Knowledge is Power

Moving forward with our brand development, we realize that while the intricacy of our technology of our company is significant, consumers just want their experience to be made easier.

Using and testing our technology led us to an epiphany. Like many tech companies, we built a tool (internet search, touch screen, graphical interface), but it doesn’t translate to revenue. The tool is not something that people want to buy. Google isn’t charging people for the search services. Apple doesn’t brag about their superior touch screen, and Netflix doesn’t let on how much they care about their imagery and content selection algorithm. Productizing the tech makes it easy to understand and solves problems that are worth paying for. 

Science: 

Another lesson learned from the roaster community is that they don’t have a great sense for how much caffeine is in their beans. There is great care taken to report flavors, however only a general sense for how much caffeine is in each coffee. So, what? It means that we will have to test coffee for caffeine in the lab as a part of the product.

We also had the pleasure of connecting with Thomas Merritt, PhD. of Laurentian University. He’s a popular writer on the subject of the science of coffee, and has agreed to collaborate. His article is a great intro to our mission, and we’re proud to call him a customer. 

Tech to Products: 

In last month’s newsletter, we mentioned that our products have been perceived as complicated. We think it’s pretty simple and we’ve taken great care to use the most trusted science to make the process as easy as possible, however we do respect that there should be an easier entry point. A couple of focus groups later, we discovered that it takes some trust to have someone build you an expensive custom coffee. We thought about that for about a month. We interviewed customers and roasters, to better understand what is more palatable, and we think we’ve now found it with a new product line that uses our technology in concert with local roasters to select the best coffee for our customers.

What’s next?