191–200 of 394 posts
I had a batch of this and can confirm – not only did it taste like pour-over, it tasted like one of the best pour-overs I'd ever had. I was shocked. It just happens to come in powder form. (I'm your typical SF tech coffee geek, like a lot of us I'll seek out the good stuff.) Sell on Amazon already! :)
I work in the coffee industry and saw Sudden pop up last year so was interested in the technique and hacked it out. Freeze dried coffee is already what Folgers does and sell you. This is the more artisanal version of that since the big brands have big factories that can pump out plenty of instant coffee grounds. So this is a ramped up volume play on existing techniques perfected by the doomsday preppers. Youtube sear…
Downvote me to hell, but I think people drink too much coffee (and caffeinated drinks), it's just not necessary and is an addictive substance. I think it's a toxic substance honestly, tires the adrenals and heart out. Anyone else on here who abstains from caffeine?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Happy to answer whatever questions we can disclose! Thanks for starting the thread. It's somewhere in the middle to be honest. We did not invent freeze dried coffee - it's been around for over a century. However, it is quite difficult to make it work at-scale in a way that's profitable/sustainable, and that still tastes good. I have a pretty extensive background in operations, manufacturing, & tech and I had to pull…
Who is your target? If people want good tasting coffee, like a connoisseur, one would like the option of selecting the type of bean, where it is sourced from, how it's roasted, how it's ground, how it's brewed etc. People even vehemently oppose and stand by brewing methods, which to an ordinary person who doesn't care about coffee, wouldn't care about. And if someone is buying instant coffee anyways, I doubt they car…
Michael: What do you think of when you hear the name, "Sudden Coffee"? George Michael: Coffee dressing, I think. But for some reason I don't want to drink it. Jokes aside, best wishes. Got a trial subscription for $?
Do the machines that brew these accumulate mold like keurig machines?
Do you mean the equipment we use to brew and dehydrate the coffee? We use CIP process for all the equipment - there's definitely no mold growing in any of our equipment. For brewing - just add the powder to water or milk, no need for brewing
I work in the coffee industry and saw Sudden pop up last year so was interested in the technique and hacked it out. Freeze dried coffee is already what Folgers does and sell you. This is the more artisanal version of that since the big brands have big factories that can pump out plenty of instant coffee grounds. So this is a ramped up volume play on existing techniques perfected by the doomsday preppers. Youtube sear…
none of the things you just mentioned are easy or cheap, so i feel like minimizing the "what they're doing" part is a bit strange, or maybe that's just how i read your text. most businesses when analyzed on paper like this are very simple, or are re-packaging existing ideas. that's not something i would put against a business idea. having said that, the primary reason i pound cold brew instead of making 2 or 3 aeropr…
There's a lot of value add that Sudden is bringing to the table. Most obvious being sourcing, second being operations, third being logistics of getting the boxes to you, then lastly fourth--and most important--is marketing.
Coffee for the most part is bullshit, much like the wine industry. A small part of the audience want to hobnob about taste. For some reason everyone complains about Starbucks coffee or McDonalds coffee and somehow suddenly everyone knows what coffee gruel tastes like. The rest of the audience will just take what you craft and pour in milk and sugar to their liking, aka Philz.
Along with having so many people in the industry, cutting through the signal to convince you to remember the brand, to get you to try it, and to get you to believe it's superior is almost all the work.
On the global scale it's the equivalent of coffee farmers in Yunnan, China spending millions of dollars to convince you that Chinese coffee is just as good if not better than coffee from elsewhere like how wine people try to convince you something grown out of Napa or Champagne isn't good.
And to be fair the last time someone did this was some folks in South America using the marketing idea of a guy in a poncho and hat with his mule, and that worked really well.
So it's to say the challenge is process and marketing. Both are hard. But hard is good. Most people shy away from hard work to min-max their way through life.
Coffee people tend for the most part admire and adore hard work. It's the reason why they insist on doing things the long way, hard way, right way.
And that in turn is what makes this exciting.
But to flip it back, identifying the context of this was my aim.
1. Instant coffee is already a CPG thing you can buy off the shelf.
2. Then the preppers came up with the freeze drying.
3. And now someone is mechanizing it.
And it's going to be hard.
And whether that's going to be a better thing or not, well, maybe it wouldn't matter.
Techies could be drinking Ensure or Slimfast but instead they choose diarrhea-inducing Soylent because marketing is all that matters.
PS. Hard also means they're locked out of a lot of things. This won't be mainstream, there's no economies of scale for margins to give to retailers to have it be on shelves. And if and when they do upgrade to industrial scale they lose the hipster cache. Tough calls to be made, but either way hard is always more fun.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Downvote me to hell, but I think people drink too much coffee (and caffeinated drinks), it's just not necessary and is an addictive substance. I think it's a toxic substance honestly, tires the adrenals and heart out. Anyone else on here who abstains from caffeine?
I think you're making a great point - coffee is the legal drug at the moment. Personally, I drink coffee for the flavor, not for the caffeine. I'm a big fan of high-quality decaf coffee and it's something we're looking to do with Sudden.
> On the flight back to Helsinki I was desperate for caffeine and ordered a coffee
Denial is a common sign of addiction :)
At least for me personally, mediocre but extremely inexpensive coffee > "great tasting" $2-3/cup coffee. Not to mention, it being "instant" to me, means even at this price it will still be inferior to high-end bulk coffee.
I already thought Keurig pods were expensive (and they don't make great coffee either so I avoid them), this makes those look reasonable.
Maybe I'm just not your target market. The product itself sounds like it may be great, just IMO not worth the cost, and I have no idea what your target market would be, but it seems it would be an extremely small subset of coffee drinkers (I could be wrong)
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Automatic recurring billing is a "dark pattern" from back before anyone made up that term. The only reason it makes more money than one-time purchase or an honest subscription (where customers have to explicitly pay to resubscribe every month or year) is that people will forget or get frustrated when it's time to cancel. Do you want to run that sort of business? "Fun" fact: I bought a used car, only to discover that…
If I wanted to start a scammy business running on recurring subscription I wouldn't have gone into all the trouble of developing new instant coffee ;) Obviously, we want to build a product that we and our subscribers love and choose to keep subscribing. Right now we have a lot of them. The biggest thing with the subscription is clear CAC vs. LTV. With our current model this equation works and we can profitably acquir…
> The biggest thing with the subscription is clear [Customer Acquisition Cost] vs. [Long Term Value].
i.e. "recurring billing results in more people failing to cancel, because they either forget or are deterred by our 'customer retention program.'"
> With our current model this equation works and we can profitably acquire new customers.
i.e. "we wouldn't be able to profit and grow without doing this."
It seems like you genuinely care about good coffee, but what's the desired end-state? If it's "great instant coffee at $1/cup with no auto-billing," that makes sense. If it involves negative option billing, it's shameful.