What is Find Me Coffee?
Find Me Coffee does exactly that, it is
an app for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone and Kindle and a website. We helping coffee lovers find nearby coffee shops & coffee deals, all
around the world.
We are also excited about our new feature launching this month which is a
Cafe Products and Services directory which will let product and service suppliers to the cafe industry create a listing page similar to our coffee shop listings to allow consumers to find which shops carry their product and help coffee shops to to contact these companies to carry new products.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
Raymond Williamson and Scott Magnan are both from Toronto Canada. We have been technology developers, marketers and innovators for over twenty years but mostly in the background and developing cool things for other people.
Where are you based?
Our head office is in Toronto, Ontario and we also have a second office in Vancouver, BC.
What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?
The start-up environment in Toronto is amazing. There are so many great ideas and idea people here that it’s intoxicating.
How did you come up with the idea for Find Me Coffee?
That’s a funny story. It was an accident, sort of. We were in the process of taking all of our knowledge and expertise in building modular scalable directories and creating a platform that we call Grexen – (Latin for Flock). We were creating a demonstration website that would showcase our features, functions and our SEO and on-line marketing skills. We called that Demo
www.FindMeCoffee.com. 3 months after we launched the demo we started to get great feedback and excellent traffic so we did a little research on the possible viability of doing this for ourselves and decided to go for it.
What problem does Find Me Coffee solve?
In my career I have traveled a lot. It was not uncommon to be on the road in different cities for days at a time. I think that I’ve visited almost every major and medium sized city in Canada and USA and
Europe. When I travel even in a city close to where I am I often need a place to sit down collect my thoughts, take some notes and get ready for an upcoming meeting.
So the problem we solve is to give the consumer easy access to a warm friendly place and to allow them to find the one that suits their taste. From the Coffee Shop or Café’s perspective we are a channel to share their story with people who might be interested enough visit.
What’s your secret sauce?
Our secret sauce is the simple way that a user can get access to so much information quickly. One touch for location, one touch for details one touch for directions. One touch to share your experience
with the world.
Are you bootstrapped or funded?
We are boot strapped. We run a modestly successful development shop with a great team. We made a decision that we would get to the point where we had enough revenue to be self-sustaining before we went looking for financial partners. We’re almost at that stage now so we’re planning to start engaging with potential investors this year.
What are some milestones you’ve achieved?
We think that we’ve launched a great product. We get great feedback and we’re getting lots of organic, crowd sourced locations and contributions to
www.findmecoffee.com every day. We’ve got APPs for IOS, Android, Kindle, and Windows 8 Mobile.
What’s your next milestone?
Our next milestone is to get our products locator service and our deals launched and self sustaining and to generate enough revenue to keep moving forward.
What’s one challenge you’ve overcome in the start-up process?
The biggest challenge that we’ve overcome in the process is getting the creative just right. The world is seeing version 3 of our look and feel. We’ve been pretty picky so far about getting the UI as easy as possible and we’re tweaking it daily.
What’s next for Find Me Coffee?
We have a pretty extensive laundry list of things that we want to accomplish. Our primary goal is be the deepest source of information for consumers, coffee shop owners and suppliers to the industry. Our Goal is to add tools that will enable people to explore the wonderful world of the second most popular beverage in the world (second only to water!). Now that we’ve got finding shops working so well we want to improve the user experience by sharing deals, reviews, and specific product locators.
Our newest features will include a product locator tool. This will let consumers find specific products within coffee shops and it will let coffee shop owners reach out to companies to add products to their store that they didn’t even know about. Eventually when we have enough data consumers will be able to find for example, coffee shops with Organic Ethiopian Fair Trade coffee that is slow poured. But that is still a ways off.
We’ve been piloting a local deals service that will let coffee shops share their daily specials, promotions, BoGo’s etcetera. Our most recent deal in Vancouver with the Take Five Cafe chain delivered a 10 fold increase in traffic to their listing, just by utilizing our deal service.
Both of these will go into Beta in January with full roll out in time for Coffee Fest New York.
All of these features are going to be in full release on the website then on the mobile APP in both English and Spanish. With the goal of 4-6 languages by year end.
>>>Read the Full Interview by Kyle, Content Director and Co-Founder of
Nibletz.com
Posted on: 2013-01-29 12:00 AM 
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