GG

Hospitality is the oldest profession.

With a smile 😁😁😁 whenever possible. Because while we may forget, it is easier to mess with the customers' emotions by smiling at them. In fact... if you have to pick 1/10 of customers to smile at, it should probably be the ones who complain about things. That's what I do 😘😋😛

There is no shame in good game.

Blaise Recovery

Four days running: two meals within first six hours of waking, then a halfway-decent workout. Sprint speed is up; resolution of haptic data from extremities is waay up; blood pressure is down; signal-to-noise ratio of sensory nervous system in conscious memory is way, way, way, down. Happy to be getting some work-life balance, but not sure how long this lasts, or whether the opportunity cost (getting more work done) will be severe. Meanwhile... doing weights in one's bedroom requires much mopping. Such is work / life.

Confidence, Security, Hospitality

Oh yes team... if you ask someone to leave, whether or not they paid for their FnB, and if they don't cooperate, feel free to call the cops.

Whether your judgment on that is good or not, I will just have to deal with later. But you should act as if you own the place: after all you already have access to just about everything.

‪#‎justwaitforit‬

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Overpromising is asking for trouble. We won't boast of five-star service until we've been properly assessed. Such qualities are only achievable by the individual ambitions of staff. I reckon we would score in the ballpark of one- or two-star qualities at this point. And for the time being, I can only encourage everyone to raise their aspirations or dawdle in mediocrity.

#Economic Threat Watchlist# So, my people. While we bicker among ourselves and neglect the sleepy customers who walk in without knowing what they want... the real enemy is at the gates, threatening to bankrupt us. Enjoy the slide deck. :)

Useful > Cool

Shall we be good at commercial products, or shall we be good at artisanal products? That's the wrong question, folks. The question is how do you get good at ALL of it. Product over brand. Struggle, struggle, struggle. We're not going for originality here - we're not about cool, we're about useful. We're not building a hipster coffee shop. We're building a distribution network for hipster products. #staywiththetimespeople #canorcannot #doordie #yesdyingisok #canah #toomanyhashtagsisit

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We founded this business with foreknowledge of several industries that have come before. We considered first the third-wave coffee movement (its focus is quality, via supply-chain management), which itself evolved as an extension of the second-wave coffee industry spearheaded by Starbucks (its focus is convenience, via predictability). Moreover we reflected on the macro-trends of emerging markets (distribution channels) for artisanal and fashionable goods of all kinds (Etsy, Fab, et al), and for goods in general (Walmart, Amazon, Uber, et al), and we proposed to move within these currents.

Starbucks has consistently avoided aggressive cannibalisation of its classic coffee offerings. Whenever it tries to serve "better," coffee, the public's reviews are underwhelming. It's not hard to see how one can build a product that exceeds Starbucks' in terms of utility - but it remains an open question as to whether such products would be bankable. Now the point of startups is to determine the viability of any hypothetical business model. And that's where we find ourselves today.

If this is proven to be viable (where unit economics evolve around the unit of "outlets"), then most business growth potential won't come from the operations which solved the 0-to-1 problem... because the broader business model to be proven is not about whether you can run a bloody cafe that's dominant in the local neighbourhood, it's about whether you can displace Starbucks as the dominant brand for convenience... particularly, in the minds of an entire generation of cell-phone powered kids who have been empowered to more frequently think of themselves as hipsters, or as having hipster inclinations.