Work In Progress
Single-origin Colombian coffee + data services. Sold $3.7K, ran 3 months profitable, closed by choice.
Work In Progress
A premium single-origin Colombian coffee brand built on the West Side of Chicago, paired with data services for the cafés that bought our beans. Sold $3,700 of coffee in three months. Came in ~$1,200 ahead. Closed it down because day-job overwork won.
Work In Progress was a real, profitable business that we wound down because we ran out of slack — not because the unit economics broke. The honest version is the case study.
What it was
Two data strategists (me and Kevin — same university, same fraternity, both in analytics, lived three blocks apart, same birthday) decided to become coffee roasters.
The wedge: roasting is the high-leverage middle of the coffee value chain. You source from upstream farms, you sell to downstream cafés and direct-to-consumer customers, and you control the part that actually determines what the coffee tastes like in someone's mug. For two operators who knew how to build brands and run data, that was the right place to plant.
We sourced beans through direct relationships in Colombia after I spent a few months living in Medellín. The product was 12-oz bags of single-origin coffee — our Alma Nueva Blend carried blueberry, raisin, and citrus notes. The brand was hand-illustrated, optimistic, and deliberately personal: scribbled mug, red sketch loops, "We're Work In Progress. Always will be."
How we ran it
| Surface | What it did |
|---|---|
| Shopify store | Direct-to-consumer sales — 12-oz bags at $19.99 |
| Sonofresco programmable roaster | 60 lbs / 8-hour day capacity, run out of a Chicago kitchen |
| Direct sourcing | Single-origin from Colombian micro-farms, not commodity beans |
| Brand identity | Hand-illustrated mug logo, optimistic copy, personal voice — the kind of brand a person made, not an agency |
| Data services for wholesale partners | Customer segmentation, sales-feed transparency, ad-placement help for the cafés that bought our beans — our actual unfair advantage |
| Minority Supplier Certification | In progress, would have unlocked a wholesale client pipeline |
The data services were the part that made us not-just-another-roaster. We were data strategists by day. So when a café bought wholesale beans from us, they also got real customer-segmentation analysis and a live data feed of our sales — proof of the brand they were carrying. None of the other small roasters we competed with could do that.
The numbers, honestly
The story we told investors was the curve. The story that actually played out was three months of disciplined operation.
| Reality | |
|---|---|
| Coffee sold | $3,700 |
| Cost | $2,500 |
| Net | ~$1,200 ahead |
| Months operated | 3 |
| Ads run | $0 |
We were profitable from month one with zero paid acquisition. Every dollar of revenue came from word-of-mouth, the brand, and our network. That's the strongest signal you can ask for from a coffee business at this stage — and it's worth more than the pitch-deck projections it sat next to.
Why we closed it
Two co-founders, two demanding day jobs (Accenture, Google), and a brand that deserved more attention than nights and weekends could give it. The math we couldn't beat wasn't on the P&L — it was on the calendar.
The plan had been to use the pitch deck to raise $30K–$40K in convertible notes, acquire a roastery storefront at 3719 W North Ave, hire an operations manager, and let the business breathe on its own. We never closed the round. We never opened the door. We made the call to wind down rather than half-run it.
That's the lesson. Profitable doesn't mean sustainable. Sustainable means the calendar agrees with the spreadsheet.
What I'd do differently
- Hire the ops manager first, raise around them. We waited for the round to hire the human who would have made the round unnecessary. Backwards.
- Sell the data services as a wedge into roasting, not the other way around. The wholesale conversation with cafés was always easier when we led with the dashboard.
- Plan the founder hours like a budget. Two ten-hour-a-week founders is not a 20-hour startup. It's a five-hour startup with overhead.
What I kept
The brand. The relationships. The Colombian farm contacts. The Sonofresco roaster. The clear-eyed sense of what "profitable but the wrong shape" feels like — which is now a thing I can sniff out in someone else's deck inside five minutes.