744: $11k MRR from our 1-Year-Old Side Hustle

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Hey, Nick, thank, thanks so much for having me, and thanks for the introduction.

You bet. I'm glad you reached out. This is a really interesting one. My understanding is even as far as, like, just this year, like, you've got some decent traction. You're posting pretty positive revenue numbers. There's obviously product market fit here. But there comes this moment of realization, "Look, unless we get serious about subscriptions, we're almost just treading water here with the cost of the product, the cost of acquiring a customer, the cost of fulfillment."

So we started the end of 2024. Sold our first bag of coffee on my 40th birthday back November of, uh, 2024, which was a, was a great moment. But, you know, as, as you get super excited about the coffee and a new company and, you know, everything is fresh, everything is new, everything is exciting, you kind of run. Like, we ran. We went after things. Let's sell, sell, sell. And what we didn't do, even though I have an accounting background, is really think about the long-term value of a customer and the cost of acquisition and the cost of product and the cost of shipping and the cost of everything, right?

[laughs] Yeah. It all, it all starts to add up.

We're organic certified. G- the organic path is great. It makes you do a lot of things, but it also costs money and takes time. We're selling a great coffee at the end of the day, but there's so much behind it. Every month, we, we were growing revenue, but we had not been able to get past, like, the break-even point. Like, we're just breaking even. We're barely making money. And what we did is we took a really deep look into our numbers. When you're starting, you don't really know the long-term value of your customer. You have to guess. Right? You don't know how long they're gonna stay. When we started digging into it, what we saw is when somebody becomes a subscriber, that means they like or love our coffee, and they stay on for many, many, many months, on average,