How a Solo Founder Built a SaaS Selling to Coffee Roasters

**Lucas** (0:01)
So, you walk into a specialty coffee shop, right? The barista pulls a shot, you see the roast date on the bag.
Maybe it was three days ago. That freshness is the whole selling point. But behind that bag, there's a tiny roastery running on Google Sheets or, if they're really fancy, a QuickBooks work around.

**Luna** (0:20)
I've definitely seen roasters with notebooks. Actual paper.
Especially the ones doing farmers' markets.

**Lucas** (0:28)
Exactly. And that's the gap our guest today saw.
Ryan Miller is a solo software developer who built BeanCount, a batch tracking and inventory SaaS for micro-roasteries. He's not a coffee guy, never worked in a roastery. But he found a vertical where the pain was real, the competitors were either too expensive or too generic, and the customers were desperate enough to pay.

**Luna** (0:52)
How did he even find that niche? I mean, coffee roasters aren't exactly a huge market. There are maybe a few thousand in the US total.

**Lucas** (1:02)
That's the interesting part.
Ryan was freelancing as a web developer, building sites for local businesses. One of his clients was a small roastery in Portland. They complained about tracking roast profiles and green coffee inventory. He built a quick internal tool for them and then thought, wait, this might be a product.

**Luna** (1:22)
So it was accidental product discovery. He didn't set out to build a SaaS.

**Lucas** (1:28)
Right. But he did what smart solo founders do. He validated before building. He called ten other roasteries.
Five said they'd pay for something better than spreadsheets. Three said, how much? He set up a landing page with a mockup and a preorder button at $29 a month.

**Luna** (1:48)
And how many preorders did he get?

**Lucas** (1:51)
Seven in two weeks. That's seven customers before he wrote a line of production code. That's the kind of signal you want.
He built the MVP in about three months, launched to those seven, and then started iterating.

**Luna** (2:05)
I want to get into the product itself. What does BeanCount actually do that a spreadsheet doesn't?

**Lucas** (2:11)
So for a micro-roastery, the core workflow is you receive green beans from a farm, you log the origin, the lot number, the moisture content, then you roast a batch, you record the profile, the temperature curve, the yield, then you package, label with a roast date and sell. BeanCount ties all that together in one place.
It generates roast reports, tracks inventory of green and roasted coffee, and even prints labels with the correct date.

**Luna** (2:39)
And the spreadsheet solution, you'd have multiple tabs, manual entry, and if you mistyped a lot number, you'd lose traceability.

**Lucas** (2:48)
Exactly.
And the existing competitors were either Cropster, which is powerful but costs $80 to $150 a month, and is overkill for a three-bag operation, or generic inventory software that has no concept of a roast profile. Ryan positioned BeanCount right in the middle, $39 a month for the pro plan, simple enough to set up in an afternoon.

**Luna** (3:12)
Did he have to change pricing early on? $29 to $39 is a jump.

**Lucas** (3:18)
He did, and this is one of my favorite parts of the story. After about six months, he had 40 customers but was barely covering costs. He ran an experiment.
He doubled the price for new signups to $49, and offered existing customers a grandfathered rate. Conversion actually improved.

**Luna** (3:39)
Because the higher price signaled more value?

**Lucas** (3:43)
That's his theory.
Roasters are business owners. They see a cheap tool and assume it's not serious. To $49, it felt like a real investment. He settled on $39 as a sweet spot after a few more tests. Now his ARR is about $120,000, all from 180 customers.

**Luna** (4:04)
180 customers at $39 a month is about $84,000 a year on subscriptions. But he's at $120,000 ARR, so there must be upgrades or annual plans.

**Lucas** (4:18)
Right. He has a $79 plan with multi-location support for roasters with multiple cafes.
And about 30 percent of customers pay annually, which he incentivizes with two months free. So the average revenue per user is higher.

**Luna** (4:34)
And he's still solo? No co-founder, no employees?

**Lucas** (4:39)
Still solo.
He does all the development, support, marketing. He outsources design and has a part-time VA for customer onboarding. But the code base, the server, the roadmap, it's all him. He says the hardest part isn't the coding, it's the context switching.

**Luna** (4:57)
I can imagine you're debugging a batch tracking bug at 10 a.m., then at 11, you're writing a blog post about Roast Profiles. Then at noon, you're on a Zoom call walking a roaster through setting up their inventory.