Launch HN: Bottomless (YC W19) – Coffee Restocked with a Smart Scale

My initial reaction to this post was very dismissive. I was ready to jump into the comments and nod along with everyone else shitting all over it.

But, I don't want to be like CmdrTaco and the iPod, or whoever thought an rsync bash script could replace Dropbox.

If you prove this out with coffee, and work on making it for all "constant" foods in the home, this would be awesome.

Milk, butter, cheese, eggs, soda, cereal, apples, tortilla chips, baby food, etc. A whole section in the fridge or pantry that a user could arrange how they like, and use the app to set restock thresholds. Smart logic on your end to bundle items in as few shipments as possible (i.e. send the butter restock a week before you really need to, because other items are queued up now) and this becomes a magic grocery delivery service where—not only do you not need to go to the store—you don't even need to think about placing an order!

Good luck on this, and probably a good decision to target coffee snobs first.

thank you! keep in touch, we might end up solving this problem for all your pantry needs!

I'm glad you get it. Thanks for the kind words.

Hey, these aren’t mutually exclusive.

I think the business case with the same idea and tech, but a lot better market cap, would be providing a restocking service to businesses who are using tens of thousands of dollars of consumable shop supplies than the small audience of people who are willing to buy coffee from a subscription for $3/mo.

To make the pain point that I'm familiar with on a daily basis crystal clear to you: I'm an engineer at a small, shop that makes industrial automation equipment. Each machine contains (in addition to bill-of-materials listed components, an array of stuff we consider "shop supplies".

Some components I'd inventory include a lot of items from the McMaster Carr, Grainger, Bolt Bin, and Digikey catalogs. We have racks of pneumatic fittings, electrical conduit connectors, dowel pins, electrical connectors, extrusion hardware, labels, and all manner of other industrial Lego. There's a large area with hundreds of drawers holding alloy cap screws in socket, button, and flat-head in metric and SAE from #4-40/M3 to 1/2-18/M10 in quarter inch/5mm increments. Every tool and die shop, industrial facility maintenance department, auto mechanic, construction contractor, and so on has a similar set of drawers, shelves, and ULine bins that contains stuff like this.

Each item only runs a nickel to a couple dollars each, so it's hardly worth adding to a spreadsheet, checking out of inventory, and cutting a purchase order for a replacement, but our little 20-man shop probably goes through $150,000 worth of these consumables each year in the process of building $10M worth of machines. Keep our fabricators supplied with the components they need, and stop our expensive engineers from spending $50 in time every week or two purchasing these components, and I'd be more than happy to pay for the value it would provide. Which is a lot more than the value that would be provided by keeping my home kitchen stocked with coffee.

Also, from my point of view, the equipment to use to measure this stuff is not ESP8266 modules and a soldering iron, it's an off-the-shelf PLC, some DIN rail and screw terminals, and some load cells or maybe strain gauges if you really want to optimize costs. Get a volume of equipment sold before trying to roll your own full-stack hardware supply chain...but that's beside the point.