Update #2 - Let me catch you up

Let me catch you up first.

We’re trying to build a ready-to-drink coffee brand in India.

From roasting coffee to canning it, we’re doing everything in-house. We’ve set up a facility to do everything on our own. Owing to lack of certainty, high MOQs (from co-packers), lack of control, and us having no experience in this field, we have gone this way.

Ironically, this has raised stakes, and definitely capital investment for us. We’re bootstrapped and counting on our own scrappy-ness to succeed.

In the past few months, we’ve managed to set up the facility: sourcing raw material, buying canning machinery, and procuring licenses and approvals. Making everything barely functional.

With all this out of the way. We’re onto the juicy stuff.

The Update

Feeling scared. Creating a beverage from scratch is much more difficult than I thought.

I’m feeling so uncertain and confused right now. The first internal trails are done. There are a lot of improvements that need to be made, to the beverage. But because of the number of variables, the entire process is so complex. Don’t know where to start and which one to tweak.

On top of this, there’s a part of me that wants to do everything perfectly. Since what we’re doing here is new and unprecedented, it’s added a layer of anxiety on top of this existing mix of confusion and feeling lost.

Logical me says that don’t worry. Just ship out a good enough product. There is no limit to guesswork and anticipating how people will receive the products. As they say, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Not that our customers are enemies. Far from that fact, still, try to catch my drift.

The only right way would be to launch as quickly and then iterate according to feedback.

We’ve settled down on 3 variants for now.

We’re starting sampling soon. After which we might make some tweaks to the recipes, right before launch.

Until next week,
Suyash