Launch HN: Bottomless (YC W19) – Coffee Restocked with a Smart Scale
Bottomless automatically re-stocks coffee using a smart scale. Users leave their coffee on the scale, then we detect the perfect time to trigger re-orders. We ship the scale for free when customers buy their first bag.
We met in college, and bonded over talking about businesses we could build together. You could say we've kept in touch since then: we're now married. Bottomless was born out of our frustration managing our household stock levels. We always seemed to be running out of one thing or another.
When we thought about it, we realized that restocking was a universal problem.
But if this was such a big problem, why was there no great solution? Subscriptions should be a solution, but they don’t work well for items that aren’t used on a set schedule. It seemed that if we could capture data on usage and stock levels in a passive way, we could solve the problem. Thus, Bottomless, the concept, was born.
The market for stuff people repeatedly buy is enormous. (We'll leave an exact estimate up to the reader's imagination.) We decided that to start we'd establish a beachhead with a single market. We landed on selling premium coffee because it's cheap to ship and has good margins. It also is much better shipped straight from the roaster than bought at the grocery store.
In the beginning, we built the simplest thing possible to test if the concept would work. We hacked together a scale prototype, made five of them and got them into the hands of friends. We bought coffee from roaster websites with our customers’ addresses to bootstrap supply.
The goal was to test if people would leave their coffee on a scale, and if we could reorder at the right time. It turns out they would and we could!
Since then, it's been a matter of making larger batches of scales. We bought a few 3D printers and acquired quite a few burned fingers from soldering.
We've benefited from a few technological tailwinds. For one, smartphone supply chain has driven down the cost of components quite a bit. We've been able to build hardware that works for this business model out of super cheap WiFi modules and LiPos. Also, the level of open source software for ML is quite powerful and well-documented.
We're aware that we are just scratching the surface of re-ordering hardware. We'd be interested to hear ideas that the community might have about this space!
260 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadIt turns out, leaving your coffee on a scale is intuitive for most people. This actually works as a way to do re-ordering without the user having to think of it at all. It's like a Dash button that presses itself.
For what it's worth, Amazon recently discontinued Dash buttons. :)
The thing I would add is this product works particularly well at our office. It’s one less task to delegate. At home I can mentally keep tabs on how supplies are diminishing but in an office environment there are more chaotic variables that I don’t have visibility into the effect resource consumption.
Also protip: tare (reset to zero) the scale with an airtight container like a “coffee gator” and store the beans on the scale in that.
Maybe you should market towards offices more? (Your website reads as very consumer-focused to me right now.)
We work with offices now! We have 2lb and 5lb bags on the platform.
Madcap is also excellent, as well as Tandem, Wild Gift, Ritual...
On the other side, if you're not aware, you might take some flack for working with Four Barrel, since they've had fairly public issues with their founder sexually harassing folks, and then further shadyness: https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/Four-Barrel-...
Re: Four Barrel - copied from above:
We have been told by Four Barrel that they are now employee owned and that the former owner is no longer involved.
My email is available at my account. If you know for certain that the above is not true, please reach out.
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts!
You can conduct an at-home experiment yourself by finding a local roaster, asking when their roast days are and if you can get some coffee from that batch before it's allowed to rest. Seal and freeze a portion while keeping the rest in a normal valve-release bag and compare after a week or two.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Coffee-Technology-Michael-Sivetz/dp/0... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Coffee-Roasters-Companion-Scott-2014-...
However
"Bottomless was born out of our frustration managing our household stock levels. We always seemed to be running out of one thing or another."
is infomercial level actor marketing.
We are new to marketing, so this is helpful.
[0] http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/pre/pre04.htm (pp 63-64, 67)
I HATE managing 'subscription' services; it's more work than just reordering manually, (looking at you, Soylent and Amazon) and Amazon Dash buttons didn't help because the item you paired it to is never still around when you press the button.
I wouldn't want to deal with all of this overhead for just restocking one supply (coffee) but I certainly see the value if many products were covered.
Best of luck!
Interesting you mentioned Soylent. Part of the motivation for Bottomless was our Soylent subscription. We have enough piled up to survive Armageddon.
I'm curious about your comment on the overhead. The scale takes 60 seconds to set up, and lasts for over a year on a charge. I definitely understand that any set-up sometimes feels like too much!
I don't understand how this sort of thing would work with many food types. Looking at the product as is, I already don't want a random scale laying around. Never mind 10 scales for 10 different products. Then if you forget to put something on a scale, the product isn't ordered. It all seems quite annoying and chaotic. Also the scale is large and ugly, and something I don't want to maintain. I.e. what if it loses battery or wifi etc. Then imagine multiple of these scales lying around. I like my kitchen looking super clean and tidy and the idea of tons of these scales around the place immediately turns me off the idea.
Maybe some day later down the line :)
My email is in my bio, happy to show you what was initially built out and lessons learned! Could be useful for you.
Specifically:
Toilet Paper
Diapers
Diaper Wipes
Paper Towels
Cat Litter
Laundry Detergent
Sanitary Napkins / Tampons
Auto-coffee refill is something I can avoid. Diaper stockout -- the horror!
Your list are all products we're planning to address eventually. The real question is: what do we do next?
My guess is that rice is one of the last products that automatic restocking makes economic sense for.
If you want to build a profitable business sooner rather than later. Figure out which 3 would give you the best marginal profit and choose the one you think you can execute best on.
? Why not add a RFID reader (relatively cheap) to the scale and then add tags on the coffee bags to be able to log the consumption for multiple types?
You could even be able to identify the weight of multiple objects (tracking what's on the scale and how the weight changes when it's removed and when it's put back) on a bigger(longer?) scale.
And you could sell kits with tags that people could slap on their own containers and register multiple custom items.
I agree, "autonomous dash button" is a nice way to present it, but if it was capable of detecting what's on it, it would become more or less a "sentient dash button", way better ;)
The reason for the current format is that we want the scales to blend into your normal life. The scale is the size of one coffee bag so you just put it where you'd normally put your bag.
it quickly becomes a hassle to stow it all away everytime so you end up chucking it all in one "space"
We stopped ordering from four barrel because of these reasons and I'd recommend you'd consider not carrying their coffee either.
We have been told by Four Barrel that they are now employee owned and that the former owner is no longer involved.
My email is available at my account. If you know for certain that the above is not true, please reach out.
You‘re actively trying to get other people to boycott them, which would eventually put them out of business. It‘s the first time I’ve heard about them and I don‘t care one way or the other but be honest. There‘s no „openness to believing“ the „potentially complicit“ here, your post is a complete contradiction.
Their website doesn't seem to say anything about their ownership more than "locally owned", and at this point, they've burned a lot of their credibility when it comes to doing the right thing. If they've actually gotten rid of folks and they're a employee-owned company now, then I have no problems with buying from them and supporting folks.
I'm mostly just admitting that I haven't heard anything definitive either way in the last few months, and since the company doesn't seem to be making it easy to tell if they've changed things, it's likely that folks in the coffee community still think poorly of them.
For me, it would be really nice for your service to work out something like "You make 60g of coffee on Saturdays and Sundays, and then 30g's on Wednesday" and then work out when I'll be running out, and maybe order me a new bag to come in on Friday because it knows I'll likely run out on Saturday.
This doesn't seem super hard to do, but does seem like something that's important to work out, since there's a lot of products that people don't use on with regular daily amount.
This actually mirrors a lot of our customers, so it's important for our system to take this consumption pattern into account.
After a few orders, the system will learn that you make 120g on weekends with sporadic weekday consumption.
The one other thing that springs to mind is having some way to mark vacations or other disruptions to schedule? Also potentially a way to mark that you refilled some other way? Often when I'm on a trip, I'll bring home some coffee from a local roaster, so having a way to feed that into the system would be nice.
We do have a setting for turning off automatic re-ordering to handle vacations or unexpected bounties of coffee.
I don't necessarily have ideas about how to improve or expand your service - however since you are in Seattle and utilize Open Source software, I encourage you to hack on some of those projects with the community at our next OpenSource hackathon in Licton Springs. https://lovelicton.com/images/events/2019/hackathon.jpg (our next one is April 29th).
Thanks for starting an awesome Seattle company!
~Timothy
We believe companies should find a way to give back to the open source software they use. We're actively thinking over how best to do this. Thanks for the links!
Taste really good and would love to use your service if you include them :)
I'd totally sign up today, but why only a dark roast option? Add light roast and I'm 100% in.
Just click the "Shop All Coffee" link.
Even reading through the options of roasters in this comment thread is overwhelming.
Let me know what you like and I can make a recommendation.