The Debrief: Coffee Roasting Side Hustle

Welcome to The Debrief. This week we interviewed West, a guy with a coffee roasting side hustle. If you didn’t catch it, feel free to check it out here before diving into this edition.

In this mid-week newsletter, we are going to investigate what we covered in our interview and breakdown the key takeaways and share some actionable advice for you to work on in your business venture.

Each debrief is designed to give you something to work on each week based off the advice given by our featured entrepreneur.

Let’s get into it!

Go West Coffee

Key takeaways:

1. When starting your business, getting the first sale is often difficult. West’s recommendation is to get your initial sales from friends and family. This will help you get the ball rolling and will allow you to receive feedback to adjust your product or service to better fit the needs of your future customers.
   
   You can also use these sales to build up some traction through social media and ask them to write a testimonial or a review which can help give future customers the confidence to purchase from you.

2. Before starting a side hustle, you should do plenty of research to determine if there’s a demand for the product or service you’re offering. Some businesses require some funding and while the business idea may be great in your mind, you don’t want to spend hundreds or thousands on equipment or a product which won’t return you a profit - or sell fast enough to sustain a consistent source of income.

3. Your product should be of high quality but don’t be afraid if it’s not perfect. You can make plenty of adjustments as the business grows to increase the quality. Just getting something out there is more important than spending months or years perfecting something without generating a single sale.

This is my evaluation of a coffee roasting side hustle. In the graphs below, I’ve graded the business on its time requirements, entry requirements, scalability potential, and demand potential to give a final score on the rank metre.

My thoughts:

I’m a coffee lover and I do enjoy tasting different coffee flavours, so this business idea really excites me from that perspective. However, when I really started to think about the business model, there are some red flags which stick out to me and I’d like to highlight these.

Firstly, the time requirements. If you’re a complete beginner at coffee roasting, there is a definite learning curve before you can create a product that’s worthy enough to sell. From there, you need to allocate the time to roast, package, and sell the product. I would say that selling through a farmer’s market would be your best bet initially, but you need to take into account the time required to work on the stalls. Are you willing to spend entire days working a stall?

Entry requirements are relatively low once you’ve bought the equipment. However, since it’s a food product, you may need certain certificates and licenses to sell the product. This can be a long process, depending on the country you’re located in.

I may have scored harshly on the demand side of things. Coffee is a very popular drink but there are so many different options out there and the competition is super high. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll sell product but with so many other brands out there, is it a race to the bottom?

Scalability is very much linked by all the above. If you’re spending long days selling your product, you only have so many spare hours to roast coffee to replenish your stock. If you can keep your stock at a good level you can scale as far as the demand allows you, but that’s a big if.

While West and other coffee roasters are seeing great results with their coffee roasting business, it is probably not something I’d advise any aspiring side hustler to just start with the hopes of quitting the day job. Roasting, selling, and scaling this business will take a great effort but it’s not impossible. Using farmer’s markets is a great platform to generate repeat local customers allowing you to invest in the equipment to roast larger batches of coffee. However, the key to long-term success in this business would be to get your product in several retail locations and earn (somewhat) passively from those sales.

Do you agree with me? I’d love to know your thoughts, just reply to this email!

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👇️ Now it’s your turn to answer a question:

Thank you all,

See you on Sunday! 👋