Launch HN: Cloosiv (YC S19) – Order ahead from local coffee shops

As someone who worked at Square, my impression at the time was that the problem was lower than expected engagement with the order functionality at existing locations, which made it hard to show the value proposition (I didn't work on Order but it was a small company). I'm not sure failing to be a flagship product caused the problem, Square has other products (e.g. Caviar, which people often don't know belongs to Square) that have succeeded. This despite Order having a decent UX and some interesting features like arrival prediction.

Yes. Well maybe.

Here is a brain dump:

I used a popular app in Sydney. Sydney loves it's coffee and coffee shops and people don't mind shelling out $5 for coffee, queuing for it but the coffee has to be good.

A lot of people will go to the same coffee shop every day, near where they work, or perhaps on one of the train stations on their way. So if just that coffee shop has the app supported it that might be all they need. A single coffee shop could have it's own app and be all good, in theory. Although people often need marketing and re-marketing to remember about the app. So seeing an ad for Cloosiv on the train, then seeing the sign at their local will help them adopt it. A free first coffee helps as well!

To use the app, you have to know what coffee shop you are going to in advance - so there is an element of habit by the users. If you are in a strange area and don't know where to get a coffee you'd probably walk in, by which time you probably are better of queuing although maybe the app is still faster. Unless you are using the app for discovery. If I am in a dense area I can find a coffee shop easily. But if all the coffee shops are listed and I am in a area with few shops it could be a useful way to find my nearest. But you'd need a lot of saturation for that - a bit like Uber has nowadays but not at the beginning.

Another aspect is the move towards bringing your own cup. This is awesome for the environment, assuming people aren't throwing away the permanent cups! Usually there is a small discount for BYO cup.

Hopefully it should cater for that, but to do so would require them waiting for you to appear before making your coffee - negating the speed benefit but there are other benefits such as loyalty points, not needing your wallet and so on.

Perhaps OT but how did you arrive at

>over 220M cups purchased daily at coffee shops, cafes, bakeries and diners. Starbucks is the largest chain, but they only process 2.5% of those daily sales.

220M is quite a lot for a single day, representing about 1 cup per day for roughly 80-90% of adults in the US. I could believe this if the statistic were "brewed" and included coffee bought in bulk from supermarkets/other suppliers and brewed at home or the office. Even if this metric is using "cup" as a unit of volume and not a single sale (since a venti coffee at starbucks is many cups) it still seems very high to me.

I guess this question is at least somewhat relevant since it's how you're pitching your app to investors and represents the size of the addressable market.

One other question: how do you plan to address competition from non-specialized food-ordering apps? My understanding is that food delivery/takeout and other order-ahead services often include exclusivity deals, and I could see many cafes and diners opting to choose a non-optimized ordering experience that allows them to sell and deliver food over one that primarily focuses on coffee.

Good questions all around! What's surprising is that the 220M figure only accounts for daily purchases. Americans actually drink over 400M cups of coffee every day. A cup is definitely an odd metric to measure by, it's just the simplest term to define a coffee or espresso-based drink.

To clarify, this is measuring the U.S.-only, the global market is obviously much larger. I know it may seem high, but it's a lot easier to put into perspective that the average American over 18 years old drinks 2 cups of coffee per day.

In terms of competition, because coffee is just now warming up to the concept of pick-up, and the majority of the order-ahead market is delivery-focused, we are at an advantage for optimizing that pick up experience and gaining traction from there. We partner with shops that offer every mobile ordering service, we partner with others that only want one - it'll certainly be something we keep an eye on as we grow.