My passion is coffee. I love the taste, the different ways to brew and drink it, and especially the community that comes with it. I have met some very interesting and cool people through my love of coffee. Us coffee folk like to geek out on the talk.
My sister feels exactly the same way, so it was no surprise when we had a flash of an idea: develop an online community around drinking coffee. Not for the intention of business, pleasure, or even dating, but just to talk about coffee and champion all the people involved in serving up the best cup possible.
So we founded Discovering Coffee, an interactive website (and soon to be an app) where you can offer tips about your favorite coffee spots or try out those recommended by fellow coffee lovers. We want to become the Yelp or Trip Advisor of coffee.
This wasn’t the first time my sister and I had worked together—we run a company out of WeWork Sarona called Gossip Media, which helps other new companies expand—but it was the first time we built a startup together that was truly from passion.
Luckily, we live in Israel, a country that quite proudly calls itself the “Startup Nation.” It’s part of the reason why we moved to Tel Aviv from London, where if you didn’t work for a massive multinational corporation straight out of university, you were considered a failure. When I was first exposed to the startup scene in Tel Aviv, it was the reverse—you were a failure if you ended up at a big company.
How did we start out? We didn’t see a get-rich-quick opportunity—those hardly ever work unless you have big-money backing. Originally, it was a fun project that we worked on in our spare time, mostly on the weekends. We were building a community. That was the fun part.
After two months and some good reviews from our fellow coffee fans, we realized this wasn’t just a side project anymore. It was growing into something serious. We found the perfect mapping software and used it to start developing the website. Then we brought in the awesome branding experts at Yopps, who happen to be fellow WeWork members, to design the logo.
We didn’t do it alone. Some of the people who helped us were WeWork members, and some were from the larger community, but what they all had in common was that we knew them personally. They were friends who could give us insight into how we could grow our company. Our network was able to connect us to all the things that we were missing.
The only trouble we’ve run into is finding enough time to work on this project. It’s too soon to think about devoting fewer resources to Gossip Media, so it’s a matter of managing the time we have. But Melanie and I always say that between us, we have 48 hours in a day, so we can do so much more.
The lesson to take from our experience is that you can utilize the startup community around you and build something that you feel passionate about. It can start out as a hobby and develop into something bigger.
There are no rules and no how-to guides. What drives us, and what will drive you, is the pure passion for a project.
Photos: Kaie Bird/Sharing Tables