Recap of E3 & Bridge2 Announcement!
From E3 participant to being one of five companies accepted into the inaugural Bridge2 pre-accelerator cohort.
In our first monthly update, I thought I’d spend some time recapping the E3 program we completed in August and the journey into the inaugural Bridge2 cohort, which began October 17th.
Starting this past Spring, I began looking for an opportunity to pursue the expansion of the barista bot project, which was a smashing success during the Pandemic, as an ordering device for customers at Woodshed Coffee & Tea in North OKC. Being aware of i2E’s influence and impact in the entrepreneurial space in Oklahoma, I responded to their public call for applicants for their Spring/Summer E3 Program.
E3 | Evaluates opportunities, Equips entrepreneurs with the tools they need to launch, and Empowers them to create high-growth companies.
After a few interviews, our project was accepted into the program, with the goal of better understanding the market opportunity, customer discovery, and value propositions. I began the E3 program with the posture of learning — wanting to escape my initial bias and see if the idea was worth pursuing.1
The E3 program schedule was intense, as the cohort gathered after work once a week for four weeks to learn about customer discovery, sales cycles, value propositions, defining risk, personas, competitive analysis, market fit, growth strategies, and revenue projections. Culminating in a Customer Discovery packet, Customer Research Report, and a 55-page Pitch Deck. 😮
After our final presentation, we were asked about interest in the Bridge2 pre-accelerator, as i2E was finishing the setup and approval for its inaugural program for High-Growth startups. I was interested and soon after was invited to fill out yet another extensive application with many questions answerable via the deliverables from the E3 program! 🥹
The process continued with a few rounds of interviews and one lengthy presentation on “How VC Funding Works,” one of the better presentations on the topic, coming from Justin Wilson, President and Managing Director of Plains Ventures.
There are no complaints on my part with the process, it was due diligence to the extreme, with many opportunities for the companies applying and the i2E team to walk away. Accepting VC money is not for the faint of heart, and while no one in the cohort has gotten to that point yet, it pays to take your time with the decision and ask all the questions you have to ask. When the invite finally came to join the inaugural Bridge2 cohort, I was emphatically in, as it was a way to pursue the concept one phase further — honing in on the pitch, building a prototype, and an invitation to the Bridge2 Demo Day in January.
So, here it is… our big announcement.
We are stoked that Barista Bot has been selected as one of five companies in the inaugural cohort for i2E’s Bridge2 pre-accelerator program. We’ll be building for the next few months as we prepare for the Bridge2 Demo Day on January 24, 2024.
Onward,
Sam
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Sam DuRegger
Founder, Barista Bot
hi@baristabot.app
During the Pandemic, the project was an integration from Twilio Studio into a Slack Channel, allowing customers to quickly order drinks via text without the face-to-face interaction generally associated with coffee shop ordering. The impetus for the project was a lack of customer adoption of the mobile ordering application provided by our POS vendor, Square. This lack of adoption was compounded by the avoidance of lines and our barista’s discomfort with face-to-face ordering (even through a mask). The barista bot was built over a weekend to meet our customers where they already were — their native text messaging app — while giving our baristas access to the orders via an Order Ahead Slack Channel.
Though not wholly end-to-end, this ordering channel was quickly adopted by our customers, and we began running 70% of orders through this channel through the end of 2020. We shut down the Barista Bot 1.0 because it lacked full POS integration, creating pain for our baristas, as they had to wait for the person to get to the shop so they could enter the order into the POS to accept payment. We knew we had stumbled onto something our customers loved, but the cost to build did not make sense for one shop to carry — it needed scale and growth opportunities to make business sense.