Heads Down... doing the work.
Q1 2025 - Status Update on the Barista Bot project.
We're in the “begun” stage of building Barista Bot, past the beginning, but nowhere close to being done.
Months can fly by before you even know it, you look up and realize, Whoa!?! It’s March and I haven’t posted since May of last year!! Aghast at yourself for the inattention given to this part of the project… that is updating people who are following along. So, with that admission, I wanted to give a small update on where we are in this startup journey.
New Substack — If you can’t tell I’ve reorganized my Substack to prioritize my writing with Begin the work, as I’ve jumped out of corporate with the launch of my consulting firm, Begin the work, LLC. I’ll use that space for writing on Entrepreneurship and Product Management, and this space for updates specific to Barista Bot.
Project Status: Being out of the Corporate life, I will have more time to devote to this project, which is a huge win. Over the past 9 months, in the margins of a demanding 9-5 job, I can attest to some progress, but not as far as I’d hoped to be. It’s during these messy middles, when things slow down, obstacles spring up, and the project gets bogged down, that I remind myself forward progress, no matter how slight is still forward progress—we are still building. Pixel by pixel, line by line, and page by page.
Recap & Funding Decision: With our initial funding from i2E’s Bridge2 program, we were able to build a functional proof of concept (POC), launch it in one coffee shop, and fix a handful of bugs so it can run with little to no maintenance or training (Machine Learning via Dialogue Flow by Google requires training upon any new variable being introduced).
This POC has been invaluable to our mission to make ordering more conversational and fun as our customers get to—Text their ☕️ order like they text a friend.
We’ve identified a handful of ways we can improve the application, both on the customer side of things and the coffee shop/barista side of receiving and making the order. The issues are surmountable, but also has us at a crossroads:
Should we optimize the current code base to improve the application to support one store (tmrw.coffee)? Or,
Should we pursue funding to raise a Seed Round and re-platform the code with optimizations and features to support many brands, locations, and customers.
After a lot of feet dragging, advice soliciting, and mentor bothering… I’m settled on option #2, and have begun seeking out potential partners to raise a $1MM Round of funding, which will transition our current convertible debt note from Plains Ventures of 2% of equity. By taking on a strategic partner, we will be able to achieve the next level of growth and deliver the first text-based ordering app to the Square POS’s Marketplace—This is the way.
If you are interested in a conversation — we are looking to partner with four individual investors, Angels, or funds at $250,000 a piece to help us close this round of financing.
Fast-casual Restaurant and Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) experience is a plus.
If you have a background in building and exiting a SaaS business, we’d love to have you a part of this investment round.
Interested? Email - sam@beginthework.com
Technical Update: In this season, we aren’t just sitting on our laurels waiting for Angels to fall from the sky and deliver us a bundle of cash. We are doing some things in the background, and by “we,” I mean ChatGPT and me.
Onboarding is about to get a full refresh! When we first launched the Marketing site (https://baristabot.app) and we utilized a very simple onboarding flow. Now, we are implimenting a full user admin section, to support our customers and mutiple locations that offer Barista Bot. Including signup flow, reset password, account dashboard, order history, store locations, and shortcut (Emoji) orders.
I’ve always been a poor man’s developer, first hacking WordPress sites to get the layout and features I needed, then leaning towards straight HTML/CSS websites that I can update and tweak on a moment’s notice. Recently, I’ve built two React websites with ChatGPT 4.0 as my copilot, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. ChatGPT having a copilot developer like ChatGPT allows me to build full-stack applications, including database functions, authentication, and security features. We are building this infrastructure on Google Firebase, utilizing many of the features within the Google Cloud ecosystem. I couldn’t be happier with the result! As we look to launch this new onboarding in the next 30 days, I’m pumped to give our current users access to their previous orders and an onboarding experience that is elegant and fun—matching the Barista Bot aesthetic and mood.
Thanks for continuing alog with us, as we build out more features and add more functionality to the Barista Bot platform.
Sam DuRegger
Founder, Espresso + Milk, LLC