People who are into specialty coffee want to drink their coffee somewhere between two and six weeks from the roast date, and that's a logistical challenge that, at the time, not  many companies were trying to tackle.

The goal was not just catering to the guys who've already figured out that our products are out there. How do we get the guys who are just curious about this and help them enter the market? There was an education piece to it. Later supply of equipment to grind and brew whole coffee beans opened up a new avenue of growth.

I just don't believe that for a small e-commerce startup there's any need to build software anymore. The software is out there and the guys who've built it know what they're doing a lot better than you do.

I thought of payment more as a hygiene factor than a differentiating factor. What I mean by that is that I thought that the payment options needed to be good enough to convince people to shop, but I didn't believe that offering more variety or more functionality was going to drive more business beyond that. We decided to work with Payfast. We still use Payfast, which is a local business and I think they've done a phenomenal job. 

I've always thought about marketing and advertising as being something where you need to be careful about undervaluing your time. Rather than trying to chase after every trend and every social media platform, I've always thought about it in the context of what can I build in terms of advertising and marketing platforms that is relatively automated, that doesn't require a huge amount of effort every week to make it work.

Customer experience is one of those all-important differentiating factors in a world where you have big established e-commerce players that probably can sell a lot of the stuff that you sell. How do you differentiate from them? Well, you've got to deliver a better customer experience. It's not the only part, but customer service is obviously a big part of that.

A big gross margin doesn’t necessarily mean your business will be profitable.
In e-commerce, you have to consider how much of the gross margin will go to delivering the product.

Weight-to-value ratio must be low enough for logistics costs to make sense. A bag of specialty coffee has a relatively high value and is also light, small and not fragile.

Importing distribution is a complex business. A big part of our business, therefore, is actually having relationships with specialist importers who bring these things in. Some of them are coffee specific and some of them work within a catering perspective and bring in stuff that’s coffee specific but also kitchenware, etc.

There is our official returns policy that is clearly outlined in the footer on the website. You can click on it and you can read it and it includes 30 days, any return, etc. But then there are the unofficial policies that we need to remember to do the right thing by our customers.