“We Just Need A Bowl!”
“Put your product into your customers' hands as early and often as possible”
It’s a sentiment that’s hammered into the collective mind of startup people, and for the most part, we know to do it. What happens next is an oft-overlooked part of that story, though, and that’s what this post is about. What does it look like the week after you put a reimagined product into a new vertical for the first time?
For us, that’s the story of Gregory’s Coffee in NYC. It’s actually not a story about products or markets (although there are a few lessons on those fronts) - it’s a story about people. It’s a story about how special it is to build something with a group of people that care about building. I promise I’ll get to the titular bowl eventually.
The Truck: A Thomas Lyp Story
We were scheduled to install our first full-time coffee machine in New York on February 19th. At 8:33 that morning, after taking a red eye from San Diego to NYC, we got a call from our logistics partner saying that they were not, in fact, going to be delivering our machine that day. There were already so many unknowns surrounding the upcoming week and we certainly didn’t want to start off on our back foot with a key customer.
Without blinking an eye, Thomas, our on-site hardware engineer, said: “Let’s rent a truck. Let’s figure out where the machine is and go pick it up.” I couldn’t help but smile; in the beginning, we used to personally hand-deliver all of our machines in Penske Trucks. We called around, found a location that had available trucks, and Thomas drove that damned truck around Manhattan for the next three days. It set the tone for the week: bring it. There wasn’t going to be a challenge that we weren’t going to overcome, and I’m not sure we would have gotten there if Thomas didn’t drive the truck.
The Stare: An Arian Rivera Story
Not everyone loves change. This is particularly true for those who work day-in and day-out in the hospitality world. They labor so that we can start our day with a wonderful cup of coffee, unwind during happy hour, or enjoy a first date that seems like it might actually go somewhere. But newness can mean confusion or annoying new workflows, and not everyone likes that.
What’s amazing about our product is also what makes it challenging: it’s innovative in the truest sense of the word - a machine that can make any drink at the touch of a button. The morning after we installed the machine, Laura, one of the shift managers at Gregorys, gave our group the vilest of death stares (okay, I’m exaggerating, but it wasn’t a great glance). She didn’t want this machine ruining her flow.
But over the next few days, Arian Rivera, our field service technician, calmed her fears and helped the entire staff realize that our product was actually, in fact, going to make their jobs easier. Three days after the infamous stare, Laura offered to star in a video showing off the dispenser.
The Menu: A Jason Niklas and Darin Carrigg Story
When we made the choice to develop machines that could dispense anything - not just cocktails - we had to prepare for a new level of drink customizations. Modern coffee shops, like Gregorys, are the epitome of custom orders. You can change types and amounts of syrups, milks, ice, caffeine - it’s endless! On Gregorys menu, you can build a ridiculous number of different drinks. Over the course of two days and hundreds of test orders, Darin and Jason were able to perfect our system that parses orders, and now we can scale that to the other 100+ Gregorys locations, instantly.
The Bowl: A Derek Dema-ala Story
After we installed the machine, we quickly realized that our Fancy New Passive Drain System (trademark pending) was getting clogged. We had engineered a system that, without any electronics, took liquid from splashes and spills and automatically moved it to the closest floor drain. It was fancy, and we were proud of it. But as we brainstormed (overly complex) ways to fix this, Derek, our on-site mechanical engineer, took a look around at all the other equipment in the shop, and exclaimed, “We just need a bowl!”
Every other piece of equipment just had a normal drain that got dumped and cleaned out at the end of the night. We had definitely fallen victim to the danger-of-cool-things when we designed our fancy drain. A bowl was a great idea, but we needed it to be custom-made to fit into our machine. Somehow, some way, Derek found someone in NYC to 3D print us a bowl that’ll be in every machine moving forward. Amazingly, Derek had been the one to originally design the fancy drain system. The fact that he threw away his own idea and made us better in a matter of minutes blew my mind.
Okay, so that was technically four stories.
The thing about the week after is that there was a week after that. And more weeks after that one. And in the beautiful chaos, there were tons of opportunities to learn new things that brought us closer to the altar of product-market fit. In that chaos, there was one constant: a group of genuine people ready for the world to bring it.
