* "Versand innerhalb einer Woche nach Röstung" -- but how long after I order?
I'm a spoiled Amazon Prime customer, and I can buy specialty coffee locally
at a cafe, and so-so fresh roasted coffee at one of several roasters in my
city of ~300k.
* The mandatory subscription is more of a hassle for me. I like to buy fresh
groceries (and coffee) when I need them. One more thing to worry about when
I go traveling: how many weeks of coffee can my mailbox fit?
On the other hand, subscriptions are great for offices, but which company
orders specialty grade coffee? I wouldn't waste it on the typical fully
automatic Jura.
* It doesn't say "specialty coffee" on the page, just "frisch geröstet" and
"großartig" (everybody can claim that). I was very confused at first, but
spent some time to look closer only because you explicitly said so in the
submission title. Since there are several roasters in my city, "fresh" is
where I start at, it's not interesting by itself.
I don't think you should completely rebrand the beans. Bonanza Coffee is
well-known among your target audience, whereas you are some new guys that
I don't know if I can trust yet. I'd try to build more on the credibility
of the established roasters. A Bonanza bag in the hero image would have been
an instant signal.
* The espresso in the hero image has zero crema. Not every coffee gives lots of
crema, but for the title image I'd pick one that does, and extract it properly:
* As others have already stated, the registration step is too early in the
order flow. I don't want to register before I know that a) I want your stuff,
b) the product is on stock and c) I'm okay with all the terms and conditions.
Maybe the one coffee that I wanted is sold out, maybe you ship with Hermes or
require Paypal. I'd like to know as much of this as possible before handing
out my data.
1. Yeah, we should make that clearer. We ship every Thursday, I think that's only mentioned in the FAQ currently.
2. You can actually pause your account on your profile page. We're still adding features there, but will add a section explaining the possibilities on the home page soon. We're also not primarily targeting offices, but optimize for ordering coffee to your home.
3. Good catch about the specialty coffee. I'm not sure "Spezialitätenkaffee" is a thing in German though. We tried to use it in a blog post, but people didn't really seem to understand what it's about when asked. Will try to sprinkle it in anyway, I wasn't aware that it's not mentioned on the homepage.
The branding is tricky, indeed. It's probably easier to catch the attention of enthusiasts with the original bags – I do think though that the amount of people that know the specific roasteries is not super big, especially outside of Berlin. On the other side, we really believe that consistency and ubiquity of our brand is important. We might explore that a bit more when adding more roasters.
4. It's a cup of filter coffee :) Maybe it would help to have a Chemex standing next to it to make it clearer. Or instead, a nice flat white with latte art.
5. Yeah, that was a common feedback. We'll experiment with that.
6. They are! And they're great people.
Thanks again! We got some really good feedback on HN today, much appreciated.
I hope they provide roast-on dates, otherwise you can basically assume it isn't fresh. With fast logistics and shipping you can get 1-week old roasted coffee from roaster to subscription service to doorstep though (Craft Coffee does this).
Yep, all our packages have the roasting date on the label. The German post delivers over night in the vicinity of Berlin and in 1-2days elsewhere in Germany. We usually send the coffee out on the same day it arrives from the roasters.
Their website is disturbing close to the excellent North America premium coffee service I use, Craft Coffee (@craftcoffee ; https://www.craftcoffee.com/). Maybe it's just me, or maybe it's just the red logo and brown vac bags, but this kind of smacks of that crappy "just different enough to not be infringement" move.
Besides that (and Germans need coffee too!), getting premium coffee delivered is such an amazing thing. I now live in a smaller Canadian city and my fresh roasted, premium coffee options have declined. I've been enjoying Craft Coffee for several months now and not only is the product excellent (I do regular reviews on Twitter, @quinndupont), they are a really great group of people who are always willing to reach out and help or just take suggestions. A start up that actually listens and cares; it's the main reason why I like to support new businesses.
[Edit: one of the best things about Craft Coffee is that they source their fresh-roasted beans from all over North America, so you get the cream of the crop from roasters you'd never be able to enjoy otherwise; you get three different roasters each month.]
And, if you happen to sign up for Craft Coffee (I totally recommend it!), they offer a 15% off coupon code. Look around for a friend's code (they get a free month if you sign up), or (trying not to spam here...) use mine: quinn1922.
I fail to see any sort of a similarities. If you are referring to them both selling coffee, and having brown bags and the same sort of colour scheme. Then well every single company in the world is a copy of another one.
A) I actually thought they ARE the german sibling of craftcoffee, but thanks for the clarification. They indeed look like a copy, but I don't mind that as long it doesn't lack in the execution and quality.
B) Since you seem to be a coffee expert: What sort of coffee has a very low acidic profile, whilst having being strong and aromatic?
C) To use the service you need to own a EUR 1000+ coffee machine, which only rich people have, or am I wrong?
B.) Try Indian coffees. They are very low acidic profile. Specifically Monsoon Medley or Mysore Mystic from Josuma Coffee Company. Josuma's espresso is very good too.
You might find a place that ships it online but if you can't, email me and I can pick it up for you at a local coffee shop. If you're in the Bay Area, the coffee shop is in Oakland.
a) I don't believe they are associated with Craft Coffee, but I'm just a pleased customer, with no inside information. They looks very, very similar, but with just enough difference to suggest that they are separate. Craft Coffee only supplies NA, so, I guess I'm happy to see similar companies for the Germans, and the Brits, etc.
b) I wouldn't call myself an expert, but I'd suggest you look at more of the "newer" West coast style of roasts. Look for "medium" roast beans; the old "full city" (or darker) will give you the strength, but little else. Growing location will not have as much of an impact on those qualities as the roast (different regions tend to have different aromatics, but if you aren't picky about berries versus vegetal versus leather, then ignore the growing source). As for the combination of all of those qualities, it might be tricky: "strong" usually comes at the expense of "aromatic", and "acidity" may be present no matter (although, for my palette, "bitterness" is MUCH more important than acidity--some acidity can be quite nice). The basic tips to get quality coffee are: (medium roast) beans between 3 days and 2 weeks old, use more coffee than you would think is correct (best is to weigh your beans & water), have your water temp at about 95c (not boiling), and make the amount of time between grind and brew as short as possible (ideally <10seconds).
c) Certainly not! My daily brew method is an Aeropress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroPress) available on Amazon or better cafes for <$40 (including all the filters and everything). It only makes a cup at a time, but if you are drinking solo this works (and it takes <2 min start-to-finish to brew). Alternatively, try a "pour over", which is really just a holder for a coffee filter, which you can pick up for $5 practically anywhere (most people think of it as "camping style" but they are totally wrong!). Or, French press (<$40), which won't have the aromatics of the other two methods, but will make a nice strong cup. Also, consider splurging on a good (burr) grinder (~$100), it is WAY more important than your "machine".
See also the UK service Pact: https://www.pactcoffee.com/ This is just another "me too" business, scoop a few beans into a brown paper bag and post it out with a huge margin.
FWIW: Craft Coffee is pricey, but not ridiculously so (considering the price that premium coffee fetches anyway). And, I'm actually pretty amazed at the whole process, not at all a "scoop a few beans into a brown paper bag and post" situation. Each month they ship different coffee sourced from all over North America, and tailored (to some extent) on your preferred brewing method and your ratings history. They only ship super-fresh coffee, so you they must coordinate with the roaster to day-of fedex the coffee to them, where they must scramble to 1-2 day fulfill orders and then get them in the mail. You can get your coffee delivered to your doorstep within 7-10 days of the ROAST date. Crazy fast.
(again: just happy customer, not trying to astro-turf here)
Reminds me of Pact (www.pactcoffee.com) which is a subscription-based-specialty-coffee-delivery company serving the UK (or at least London). I've used them and liked the service. I see how people that are really serious about their coffee could use a service like this.
There's also sonntagmorgen.com, who have been in this space since 2007. I know the founder and he's a really great guy, pulled this of while he was studying. Also, over Christmas, they always offer a coffee "Advent Calendar" with a small bag of a different type of coffee for every day up to the 24th.
That's always a small christmas highlight for me, and I enjoy it much more than the chocolate stuff that other calendars tend to offer.
I tend to consume a lot of coffee and I'm always happy to find new deliverers with new coffees, so I'll give this a try. Best of luck!
Looks great. This is a kind of "stole my idea" sites that I'm very happy to see.
When I lived in the UK, I ordered coffee from hasbean[0], which is totally great. It's still available from Germany, but delivery cost and time makes it less appealing.
Was looking for something similar when I moved to Berlin, but couldn't find anything like that so far[1].
It does seem a bit pricey at a first glance (although it includes postage, right?), and selection is a bit limited... Couldn't work out the frequency and whether or not it's a subscription or you just order online when you want? my German + Google translate are not enough to figure this out.
Keep at it and hope you enjoy the Burgers at BBI near your office :)
[0] hasbean.co.uk
[1] I'm currently ordering online from solvino.de and they offer quite a wide selection from a nice roasters in Hamburg.
A small suggestion: let people choose the coffee first, and only register or pay later. I think it will be a more engaging experience.
I would encourage to remove registration completely or make it optional and let people pay by credit card / paypal for a quick and easy ordering experience.
Thanks, that's great feedback! In the beginning we thought, that the German word for subscription has a negative connotation, so we tried to rather call it "continuous delivery". But I agree, it's a lot better to just be really clear about everything. We're working on improving the messaging in that regard.
It is pricey, but it's also really great coffee, that is imported and roasted in small batches with lots of love :) The compensation is passed through to the producer, so everybody gets a fair amount of money – the prices the farmers get are a multiple of the normal fair trade prices, and decoupled from the world market prices because of the higher quality.
I do enjoy the burgers, whenever I can handle standing in line for a while, haha :)
Thanks for clarifying. Yes, I heard that people in Germany are scared of long 'Abos' that they can't cancel.
It makes any subscription-based business harder to build here. Even if you offer complete flexibility to cancel any time, people are worried there must be a 'catch'.
(Also to other descendant posters:) Not sure if this is your friend, but recently I tried out a sample from Moyee Coffee, shipping from and to The Netherlands: http://www.moyeecoffee.com/.
I will definitely look into this more when I'm back from holiday. Has anyone else found that getting good coffee in Germany is quite difficult? Or is it just that my city (Leipzig) is a bit of a coffee desert?
Anyways. Best wishes, and you will probably find a customer in me!
Since cooking and foodstuff seems to be right on topic here at HN, can someone give me a short overview what the differences (practically drinking) between Darjeeling and Assam are?
Beside the obvious geographical difference, of course.
Darjeeling is more aromatic and (for a fermented black tea) tastes quite close to a green tea. Assam tastes stronger and is more astringent on the mouth when drunk without milk.
I always imagined that the difference in flavours reflected the different geographies - delicate growth in the Darjeeling hills versus robust growth in the warmer Assam plains. It might also be differences in the way the teas are fermented.
The explanations inspired me to find out more how to make a good espresso. And I found this site, which has some nice articles. http://www.home-barista.com/
I stumbled on the link yesterday and decided not to get the subscription. I'm basically okay with having stuff sent to me in regular distances. I also like to try new stuff!
What I dislike is making a subscription to something that I haven't tried yet. So in case I dislike the product, I have to remember to cancel it in order to not get any more of the product that I dislike. That adds a lot of burden in advance to ordering it.
Furthermore, on the page "Jetzt starten" I'd like to select the product(s) first, before entering my personal information.
In the end of last year I created something like what your doing here (www.hotcoffeeclub.com), also with customers in Germany and also posted it to HN just as you did (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6818369), not sure if you saw it at the time.
About 8 months in I've definitely learned a bunch and I ultimately decided to stop doing it couple of months ago (the website is not run by me anymore). If you'd like to have a chat my email is on my profile.
1. Find something people need to buy regularly anyways
2. Buy a 20$ one page design from themeforrest and modify it
3. Let people subscribe to the service to send them the item on a regular basis
4. Hope that enough people are too lazy to just buy things like normal people would do
5. Repeat the whole business model with every item you normally buy when you do your groceries, like: blacksocks (overpriced socks), mymusli (overpriced cerials) etc.
What's wrong with this? If they're delivering coffee German's can't get otherwise, at a fair price for the connivence then it works for everyone. People complain on HN about startups with vague, long term, lofty business models but this is the opposite.
Coffee is different to socks because people that like good coffee won't buy it from anywhere.
I love coffee with a passion! When buying coffee, i usually want to choose the quality/origin, the darkness of the roast and the grind (whole bean or freshly fine-ground).
If i go to $healthfoodstore around the corner i have a variety of high quality, dark roasted whole bean espresso from different regions. I would be tempted to say that the store's prices are almost always lower than your offering and i can smell the 250g bag of bliss before i spend 12eu on it.
How do you compete with that? (given that you consider people with my level of coffee-affection your target audience)
Fresh roasted needs to be more than "roasted sometime before we ship it" for me to make a difference.
Offer a subscription, where you put a coffee roaster in my kitchen. Every week you send me $amount of high-quality, well sourced green coffee beans from different regions. I put some of them them in my KBRoaster(tm), push the "dark roast" button, kitchen starts smelling like heaven and only 7 minutes later i enjoy my fresh cup of fresh roasted, fresh ground espresso, directly from a farm on the volcanoes of the guatemalan central highlands! Thanks for the little bag with fermented cacao beans you put into this weeks package together with a note that espresso and pure cacao go well together.
If you roast it at your place and ship it dark to me, my kitchen does not smell like heaven in the morning.
Lastly, the grinding process is (imo) where most of the freshness gets lost.[0] Fresh ground is way more important than fresh roasted. Freshl-roasted is only a selling point if you show me that you are actually fresher than $healthfoodstore. Example: provide very fast delivery for the region around your roaster, offering "it's still warm when it arrives" quality.
If i go to $healthfoodstore around the corner i have a variety of high quality, dark roasted espresso from different regions. I would be tempted to say that the store's prices are almost always lower than your offering
Good point. The coffee they sell is much more upmarket than what you can get at
$healthfoodstore, but the site doesn't make it clear. The beans they use are more
expensive, and they are probably roasted more carefully. Grocery store brands
typically use an industrial high-volume and high-temperature roasting process,
instead of small batches and lower temperatures. If you need 2 tons, would
you rather do 100 batches of 20kgs for 20 minutes each, or one large batch in
only 10 minutes?
Phoenix Coffee Roasters are transparent about their costs [0], they
pay up to 4 times of the regular exchange price for green beans:
We purchased this coffee for USD 10,60 /kg through Nordic Approach. At the same time the stock exchange price for green coffee was 2,50 EUR/kg, for Faire Trade certificated coffee 3,00 EUR/kg. Our production costs (taxes, transportation, packaging, etc.) mount up to 7,50 EUR/kg roasted coffee. Our overall costs are 15,80 EUR/kg, plus labour costs and VAT. (These beans sell for 35.30 EUR/kg)
Maybe a line like "coffee from Germany's best roasters" would make some people interested.
I put some of them them in my KBRoaster(tm), push the "dark roast" button, kitchen starts smelling like heaven and only 7 minutes later i enjoy my fresh cup of fresh roasted, fresh ground espresso
Have you done this before? Your kitchen will smell like hell and your fire
alarm might go off ;-) Also, you should wait a few days for the beans to
release all the CO2 from roasting.
Roasted coffee has an optimal typical shelf life of 2 weeks
Citation needed :-) I'd say it's best between the second and eight week.
Hi Spindritf, sorry, we don't have an English site yet, as we currently only deliver within Germany. I'd be glad to help you with any questions though, just ask here or send me an email to hannes@kaffeebitte.com.
You guys would do _great_ in Sweden. We consume loads of coffee and there is a large following of coffee - we even have a national time for coffee and bakeries called 'fika'. :-)
There are people in Germany who are more comfortable with English, you know ;) Maybe you could detect the user's system language and switch to English for any other system language than German?
I've been a customer of Green Cup Coffee. Do you know them? I have no subscription (don't think they offer that) and just order whenever I need some new coffee though.
Yeah, I know them! Their roast is quite different from what our roasters usually do. You should give us a try :) You can cancel your subscription anytime without notice. You'll get 20% off your first three packs with the code 'hackernews'.
40 EUR/kg nothing unusual for "specialty coffee" as understood by the SCAA. Specialty means the best possible quality, without any defects in smell or taste.
We offer coffees from a couple of German specialty roasters (currently Bonanza/Berlin and JB/Schwabhausen with a couple more coming soon), so we have a much greater variety.
Apart from that, our focus really lies on convenience for the customer. That means letterbox-friendly packages, outstanding customer support and additional value through recommendations. For example, we can advise you a coffee based on your brew method.
We are a Coffee Circle customer at our startup and your only real differentiation from CC are the letterbox-friendly packages. I assume this means 350g or less? Nevertheless, good idea, but it will be expensive for you ;)
* "Versand innerhalb einer Woche nach Röstung" -- but how long after I order? I'm a spoiled Amazon Prime customer, and I can buy specialty coffee locally at a cafe, and so-so fresh roasted coffee at one of several roasters in my city of ~300k.
* The mandatory subscription is more of a hassle for me. I like to buy fresh groceries (and coffee) when I need them. One more thing to worry about when I go traveling: how many weeks of coffee can my mailbox fit?
On the other hand, subscriptions are great for offices, but which company orders specialty grade coffee? I wouldn't waste it on the typical fully automatic Jura.
* It doesn't say "specialty coffee" on the page, just "frisch geröstet" and "großartig" (everybody can claim that). I was very confused at first, but spent some time to look closer only because you explicitly said so in the submission title. Since there are several roasters in my city, "fresh" is where I start at, it's not interesting by itself.
I don't think you should completely rebrand the beans. Bonanza Coffee is well-known among your target audience, whereas you are some new guys that I don't know if I can trust yet. I'd try to build more on the credibility of the established roasters. A Bonanza bag in the hero image would have been an instant signal.
* The espresso in the hero image has zero crema. Not every coffee gives lots of crema, but for the title image I'd pick one that does, and extract it properly:
http://www.home-barista.com/knockbox/lets-see-your-tiger-str...
* As others have already stated, the registration step is too early in the order flow. I don't want to register before I know that a) I want your stuff, b) the product is on stock and c) I'm okay with all the terms and conditions. Maybe the one coffee that I wanted is sold out, maybe you ship with Hermes or require Paypal. I'd like to know as much of this as possible before handing out my data.
* Phoenix Coffee from Dresden is pretty good