Building In Public: Podcast, New Hardware, and 🤯 Data.

Hello, Community!

Brenden and I are super excited to kick off a raw, unfiltered, and radically authentic initiative we're calling "Building in Public"!

This series, pulls back the curtain on our day-to-day and invites the community in to collaborate, share ideas, offer inspiration, and identify ways that together we can harness community and technology to advance our collective prosperity.

Why? Because we realize that to change paradigms and transform an industry, you have to build trust. It's hard to trust what you can't see. 

Building In Public Podcast

This isn’t your typical startup podcast. No flashy editing, no perfect sound bites—just raw, honest conversations about what it really takes to scale a mission-driven business. This episode let's you be a fly on the wall as my brother and I brainstorm on how to best reach risk-averse shop owners that can benefit from our approach. 

• Listen to the Podcast
• Watch on YouTube 
• See the pilot episode that dives into WHY joe made the pivot to a coffee shop OS.

Our question for this episode: "How do we reach beyond early adopters to the more risk averse owners so we can help them too?"

At this moment in time, we are coming to the end of our 2.5 year journey to evolve joe from mobile ordering to a complete OS for coffee shops built on ideals of community, reciprocity, and a customer-focus to grow the pie for everyone.

The result: the average shop doing $30K/mo in sales is adding $50K+ in their first year of growth and saving $38K or more in software fees and loyalty costs. That makes a total of around $90K in added profit in Year 1 alone.

So, we're over the moon about the impact! It's create more value than we anticipated when we made the hard choice 2.5 years ago to pause our previous business model of mobile ordering and evolve to build a community-driven operating system for coffee shops. 

Now, we're working to shift gears from just building product and growing through referrals (we've grown 200% YoY!) to beginning to reach out to shops and begin investing in growth for the first time in a long time.

We're seeing that many owners (early adopters) resonate with what we're doing right away.  But to achieve our goal of transforming the industry, we need to reach everyone. And owners that may be more risk averse are getting stuck in a state of non-decision: they want to make the move, but they get hung up on all the little reasons things could go wrong and it keeps them from taking action. 

Behind The Scenes: Numbers, Hardware, and Community

In the last 4 months, we've been sharpening our axe and getting ready to ramp up our growth. Before we dive into WHAT we're doing to bring that to life, let's shine a light on WHY we're ramping up.

Why we're making this leap now? The DATA!

For 2.5 years we have patiently and methodically rolled out feature after feature to build all the essential tools you would expect from a conventional POS like Square and Toast, but re-imagined on our principals of shared benefit, community, and customer-centricity. 

Now, we have hundreds of shops that have been running on the complete Operating System including the POS for over 12 months. Every single cohort of shops has grown a minimum of 25%. On average we're over 30% growth and many shops are growing upwards of 70% in their first year. 

It's the kind of impact that holds the promise of truly being able to revolutionize the industry in favor of small businesses. 

Cohort Data: 

This chart looks at growth through the last 8 months with each line representing a quarterly cohort of shops and their average growth.  Shops like Asensio Coffee in our earliest cohorts have now doubled their business in the last 2 years.

Growth Attribution Data

When we double-clicked into where the growth is coming from, we see that  every single shop that remained on our OS for 12 months ore more, every single shop grew AT LEAST 20% my month 12 driven by 3 factors: 

1. Universal Loyalty - here's one of the first paradigm shifts. In order to give independent shops the SAME benefits from their tech that large chains like Starbucks get from theirs, we need the same scale of data. With over 2 million customer profiles ordering through our system, we are able to make predictions on how to engage your customers with the right message and incentive when they are most likely to consume coffee (average Amercians consumes 3+ times per day!) to keep your business top of mind. 
   
   
2. Marketplace - For the benefits that corporate giants get from their app experience, we have to give customers an experience that is relevant for them everywhere they go. Otherwise, they just won't use the app that much. By integrating our marketplace cohesively into your rewards program, we bring customers in your door when they are too far away from their community coffee shop. 
   
   
3. Customer & Barista Centric - It's amazing how much better baristas can connect with customers and create great coffee experiences when you free them up from data entry. We take a coffee-specific, customer-centric approach to the ordering experience to give local an advantage. Customers have access to favorites, recent orders, cash card balances, promos, rewards, and more across app, kiosk, POS. Then, we bake it directly into barista workflows so they lighten their workload so they can handle 2x as many orders without adding to their workload. 

Here's a look at the real growth from the very first shop to pilot our Point-of-Sale product as part of the complete OS for coffee. They launched in January of '22 with our proof-of-concept and we now have 3 full years of data. Before launching, they were very consistently a $25K-$30K/mo business and had been established for 10+ years. 

Impact: 

Universal Loyalty (In-Person Loyalty + In Person + App Ordering) contributed $17K/ mo in month 1 (immediately added growth) and grew to $45K by month 35 with a steady month over month increase every month. Most notably, beginning in September as we reached the end of our "Proof of Concept" phase and kicked off our Beta in 2023.

That's a net increase of nearly $30,000 in new monthly sales that came simply from replacing Square with Joe and embracing a new paradigm for payments and loyalty. Plus, sales from customers that discovered this shop via the app tripled from about $1K per month just for being part of the network to over $3K per month. 

As we now shift gears to focus on launching shops city by city, this number will unlock a new layer of growth for our partners. We expect this to eventually match or exceed the impact we make through loyalty and app. This number may also be understated as we convert customers from "app discovery" to "loyalty customers" of a shop once they buy a store cash card or enter the in-person loyalty experience. 

Ramping Up...

We have a lot moving and shaking at Joe that we've began to kick off in the last 3 months. Here are the stories we're most excited about: 

1.) Next-Gen Hardware! 

We've purchased our first 100 terminals. This is the first wave of a new lineup of hardware spanning terminals, kiosk, handhelds as well as payment modalities for tap, geo-triggered loyalty, and more. All coming in the next 3-6 months. 

We're investing first in our current POS partners and upgrading to the new terminal. We have a limited supply for new shop launches that are a fit and meet some minimum criteria on connectivity, volume, and shop type. Over time, this will expand. 

Current Offers

• Current Partners: Free upgrade to the next gen terminal for current partners (Existing POS partners and Mobile Only qualify). Email success@joe.coffee to claim your terminal while supplies last! 
  
  
• New shops in Greater Seattle & select markets:  Free Terminal for shops that mean minimum criterial on volume, connectivity, and shop type. This is available only in select markets including Greater Seattle / Tacoma. Email Thrive@joe.coffee to see if you qualify. 

Here's Brenden opening our first shipment! 🎉

Getting 100 terminals up 3 floors to our shipping room with just the two of us was... let's call it... a fun challenge. 

Syed at DownPour Coffee was the very first partner to upgrade from the previous generation of hardware to the new Terminal experience. Doesn't he look like a proud coffee tech dad here? 

2.) Industry Nights

As part of our mission, it's essential we build real community in every market. We kicked off our Industry Night series in Tacoma in December and followed up with another in January featuring a latte art throwdown, giveaways, music and food. Sharing space with coffee pros was a revitalizing experience and carried us through the holidays. Checkout the recap below.

3.) Kiosk is ALMOST ready!

We're putting the final touches on our Kiosk experience which is designed to complement coffee workflows in some unique ways and works seamlessly with our coffee-specific order management screen which is proving to free up baristas in some exciting new ways.  Consider this a teaser for our next update.... 

Let's Stay Connected! 

Share your feedback, ideas and thoughts on this concept of "Building In Public", share what pain points you want to partner with Joe to solve, and overall, let us know how your doing in comments on our post in the "Coffee Business Owners Group" on Facebook.  Or drop us a DM on Instagram!