Coffeenect

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  Our process

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Solve social isolation... with coffee!

Social and public communities have largely disappeared during the COVID-19 crisis. Additionally, local businesses who thrived on the connectedness of these communities are suffering. One of the central parts of this social landscape are the local coffee bars. They provide a characteristic, unique atmosphere, when we want to relax, focus, or have a chat. Therefore, we aim at connecting these coffee bars to their customers in a new, creative way. The ultimate goal: bring people together in times of crisis, by helping local businesses to reach their target group in new, creative ways.

Our solution: Coffeenect

Coffeenect solves this in a quite literal way. Coffeenect consists of two essential components. The coffee bike, and the Coffeenect app. The coffee bike enables the coffee bar to deliver fresh coffee to their customers while retaining the social interaction their customers value the most. However, this concept is not the unique part of Coffeenect. Our unique selling point is the Coffeenect app. With the Coffeenect app, customers can see which coffee bike is closeby, and ask the coffee bar to come to their home, or even get a notification when a coffee bike is closeby. Once arrived, they can take their favourite mug outside and select what they want to order. This way, customers have the opportunity to choose what they want to buy on the spot and increase the social connection with the barista. After they’ve chosen, the barista fills in the receipt, after which a QR code is provided. Via the QR code, customers can pay within the app. Even during the waiting time, the customer can be presented with the same hospitality as within the coffee shop (eg. providing free water or a sitting spot). This way, the atmosphere of ordering on the spot, and the convenience of delivery are combined. Additionally, the residue of digital operations take place within the Coffeenect app.

How this is financed

When a coffee bar decides to work with us, they can lease a coffee bike from us, for ‎€80/month. This covers a 5-year depreciation and reparations. To cover additional costs, like servers, salaries, marketing, and accounting, Coffeenect receives ‎‎15% of revenue per sold item. Additionally, we need a starting investment of €50.000. A summary of our total finances can be found in the attachments.

How this is businessed

Our business for now is mainly focused on year 1. Here, we have two customer segments: the coffee bars, and the visitors of those bars. For the coffee bars, we focus on modern coffee bars, which excludes traditional coffeehouses. The reason being, that the modern coffee bars draw a younger, tech-savvy audience. If we focus on the Netherlands, our total available market is 350 coffee bars. When we start in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, the serviceable available market is 15, and the serviceable obtainable market is 10. Ideally, over the long term, the total available market should transition to the serviceable obtainable market.

When applying the same principle to the coffee bar visitors, we have a serviceable obtainable market of 10.000 at the beginning, which should grow to around 1,5 million eventually, when looking only at the Netherlands.

To maintain our relationships with our customers, we want to keep close contact regarding the platform experience, and personal expression for the coffee bars. Promotion of Coffeenect is done via online advertisement, word-of-mouth (since the app is promoted when buying coffee), our website, and via the coffee bikes. Since our key resources are the platform, the coffee bikes and our network of coffee bars, quick scaling is required to maintain the network resource.

To maintain the business, we want to partner with bike manufacturers, developers and investors. Additionally, our key activities would be to focus on communication with coffee bars, acquisition, finance, development, and bike delivery.

What have we done during this hackathon

This weekend, we focused on optimizing the experience, and creating a viable business model. First, we defined the pains and gains of the coffee bar visitors and coffee bars. By asking the visitors their reasoning of going to a coffee bar, we could define several themes through clustering. Important themes were the feeling of being “spoiled”, the social character & dynamics, and the physical atmosphere. These values were used in a brainstorming session, from which the basic principle behind Coffeenect became apparent. This was worked out in a business model canvas, and a customer journey, from which the user flow followed, and finally the app. These were validated with a Google Adwords campaign (results still pending), a questionnaire, and contact with local coffee bars. Because it’s weekend, many coffee bars were hard to reach, so conclusive validation with these bars still has to be done. Results from the questionnaire with end-users were mixed but relatively positive. From contact we’ve had with stakeholders, we can conclude that the idea has potential, but iterations are still required to make it more desirable.

The solution’s impact to the crisis

Our impact to the crisis is two-fold, corresponding with our two customer segments. Although our current focus is on coffee bars, our ultimate goal is to create a platform for local businesses and customers to reach each other in time of need. The simple reason: why should a takeaway service compromise the character of a business, or exclude some other businesses, like coffee bars? For the end-customers, we want to provide unique experiences in times of social isolation.

The necessities in order to continue the project

To realize our concept, our main focuses are testing, development, and finance. We want to sell coffee via the coffee bike ourselves, and use these insights to optimize our app. Simultaneously, we want to build the app into a fully functioning product. To kick start our journey, we need an investment of 50.000 to cover the development costs, build our digital and physical infrastructure, and deliver the coffee bikes to the local bars.

future opportunities

An interesting opportunity is to scale our platform to other catering industries after our solution is proven with coffee bars. We believe this should be done carefully: while scaling our business outside the Netherlands, we can experiment locally with other restaurants, the same way as we start locally with coffee bars. This way, we can create a system of continuous customer validation and logistics improvement. Next to that, we believe that the bike experience between barista and end-customer can be validated during the crisis and reformed after the crisis with additions. A valuable, future (after crisis) addition is the ability to invite neighbours for a cup of coffee or a snack when the coffee bar arrives. This way, social connection can be enhanced, and business can be improved for the coffee bar.

The value of your solution(s) after the crisis

After the crisis is over, we still believe in the value of translating the atmosphere of bars and restaurants to the delivery industry. We believe to provide a differentiating factor from competitors like Takeaway and Deliveroo, to provide consumers with spontaneous social contact, and allow local businesses to express themselves, and build a relationship with the customers.