How a Solo Founder Built a SaaS by Selling to Coffee Shops

**Fexingo** (0:01)
So, there are roughly 37,000 independent coffee shops in the United States. And until about three years ago, almost none of them had software built specifically for how they actually operate.

**Luna** (0:14)
Wait, they're all just using Square or a clunky old POS.

**Fexingo** (0:18)
Mostly, yeah. Square works for payments, but coffee shops have quirks that generic POS systems ignore.
Subscription roasting schedules, single origin inventory tracking, pour over timers that sync with the register. A former barista named Mike Tran noticed this gap and built RoastLog.

**Luna** (0:37)
RoastLog? Okay, I've heard of it. Isn't that the one that started as a spreadsheet?

**Fexingo** (0:43)
Exactly. Mike was working at a third wave shop in Portland, and he kept a Google Sheet to track when they'd run out of Ethiopian Yergachev and which roaster was late on delivery.
He showed it to three other shop owners at a latte art competition. And all three said, I would pay for that. So he built a very basic web app over six weekends.

**Luna** (1:05)
And that turned into 800 paying locations in two years?

**Fexingo** (1:09)
812 as of last month. The key insight was that he didn't try to build a full point of sale system. He just solved the inventory and scheduling pain point really well.
Shops that already had square or toast could bolt RoastLog on top. The average shop pays $79 a month.

**Luna** (1:29)
So that's about $64,000 a month in recurring revenue for a solo founder. Not bad. But how did he find the first 100 customers without a sales team?

**Fexingo** (1:40)
Instagram mostly.
Mike started posting short videos showing exactly how much coffee shops waste because of poor inventory tracking. One video, him weighing the unused beans thrown out at a shop at closing, got 200,000 views. Shop owners started DMing him asking for the tool.

**Luna** (1:59)
That's the classic show the pain, not the product approach. But did he have to turn down feature requests? I imagine every shop wants something slightly different.

**Fexingo** (2:10)
He applied the 80-20 rule ruthlessly. He told me that in the first year, he got over 400 feature requests. He built only the ones that at least 20 different shops asked for.
Everything else, he said no to. That kept the product lean and the codebase manageable for one developer.

**Luna** (2:30)
I wonder though, is there a ceiling? 800 shops is great, but the total addressable market is maybe 10,000 shops that would pay for this.
Can you build a lasting business on that?

**Fexingo** (2:42)
Mike's plan is to eventually expand to bakeries and cafes that also serve food. But he's in no rush.
At 64,000 a month with near zero churn, shops that use RoastLog tend to stay because switching costs are high once you've logged six months of roasting schedules. He's already profitable and working on the product full time.

**Luna** (3:02)
That's the dream, right? A solo founder, profitable, no investors, serving a niche he actually understands.

**Fexingo** (3:10)
And it's a reminder that you don't need a billion-dollar market.
A thousand customers paying $79 a month is a million-dollar annual recurring revenue business. That's a life-changing outcome for one person.

**Luna** (3:24)
One thing that strikes me is how much of his success came from being a barista first. He knew the language, the pain points, the seasonal rhythms. A generic SaaS founder would have built something entirely different.

**Fexingo** (3:38)
That's actually the pattern we see over and over on this show.
The best vertical SaaS products come from people who worked in the industry, not from MBAs who did market research. Mike didn't ask, what software do coffee shops need? He asked, what annoyed me every single shift?

**Luna** (3:57)
And then he built The Fix himself. It sounds simple, but most people stop at the complaint.

**Fexingo** (4:03)
If these conversations are useful for what you're building or running, listener support is what keeps this show ad-free and independent. You can help out at buymeacoffee.com/fexingo.
No pressure, but it does make a difference.

**Luna** (4:18)
Yeah, we really appreciate it. Okay, so back to Mike's story. He told me that one of the hardest moments was when a shop with 10 locations asked for a custom integration with their apparel system.

**Fexingo** (4:30)
And he said no, right?

**Luna** (4:32)
He did. It would have taken him three months to build, and only one customer wanted it.
He offered them a workaround using Zapier instead. They were a bit frustrated, but they stayed, and he kept the product focused.

**Fexingo** (4:46)
That discipline is rare.
Most solo founders get distracted by a big customer's request and end up building a feature that helps no one else. Mike's rule of 20 requests minimum kept him honest.