For this week’s installment of the Startup Files, we got the opportunity to sync up with the folks from Coffitivity. Last Monday we featured Coffitivity, a workday creativity tool that streams the ambient sounds of a coffee shop to your desktop or device. They were featured in Time’s 50 Best Websites of 2013.
Check out our interview with these guys, who have made a pretty awesome tool, and it looks like this is just the beginning for the Coffitivity Brand.
How did you come up with this idea?
The idea was a “right place, right time” kind of scenario. My business partner Justin Kauszler and I both work in academia at Virginia Commonwealth University and as such, we tend to read a good amount of nerdy research and white papers. I stumbled across one citing a moderate level of ambient noise as conducive to creativity and I told Justin about it. To be honest, we really thought nothing of the paper at first – it was just good information to bank. Not too long afterwards, we spent a week or so rebranding CycleStay, our first (now on hold indefinitely) startup, and happened to be getting epic work done in and out of several local Richmond coffee shops. When Justin got back to his day job after a long weekend of coffee shop grinding, he knew that something was missing from his work environment. Recalling the paper I read, he knew the problem had something to do with sound and ambience. At that point, he decided that if he couldn’t go to the coffee shop, he’d have to bring the coffee shop to him.
Why did you decide to dedicate yourself to this idea, and launch a business? When did you launch it?
The idea popped up around mid January of this year and it took a month to build. We launched officially on March 4th. Funny enough, when Justin bounced the idea of Coffitivity off of me, I told him it was a terrible idea. Even so, he was committed to making the project happen so I was on board. Justin mostly saw this as a great opportunity to dive into coding. Neither one of us was a technical co-founder at the beginning of this project, but Justin leaned on some great resources like our developer friends, Code Academy, and Lynda.com to learn how to build the site. This was really just one huge experiment for us. We designed a product we knew we’d use (we knocked out the audio first, so we actually used the Coffitivity recording to design and build Coffitivity) and we’ve found that there are a million people across the world who connect with coffee shops the same way we do. Improving the way we work and create awesome things is something that resonates with tons of people. We feel like we’ve built into a tool that tackles that pretty effectively and that makes a great business in our eyes.
Do you plan to launch different sound environments?
Absolutely. We’ve got a couple different tracks in the back pocket that will be coming to the site as soon as some of the functionality of track selection is flushed out. We’re also working on a few angles to get raw audio from different countries. Imagine being able to hang out in a little French or Italian café from the comfort of your home or office!
How do you plan to bring in money with Coffitivity?
We’ve got a few ideas on that front. Right now the site is free and we plan to keep most aspects of that consistent. We do, however, plan to charge for some of the new premium features we’ve got coming out pretty soon.
Any exciting updates to anticipate in the future?
Yes, yes, yes. We’ve got iOS AND OSX apps on the way and we’re excited about both. The Mac app sits in the menu bar and stays out of the way unless you need it and the iOS app will allow you to mix your Coffitivity in with your iTunes playlists. Best of all, you’ll be able to use both apps offline! We’ve also got some e-commerce coming to the site. We’re exploring some interesting partnerships, so hopefully you’ll see some merch and items for sale from us here pretty soon.
What are your must have apps?
The usual suspects – Twitter, Facebook, Google Maps. I also use Path, Pinterest, and Facebook Pages every day. Internally to the team, we use Hangouts for discussions and Asana for project management and Snapchat and Vine for fun. Probably a no-brainer, but the Beta Coffitivity app gets some solid use too.
Apple or Android?
I’m an apple guy, as is our designer, Nicole, and Tommy, our second developer. Justin for whatever reason is still on Android. Haha.
What do you enjoy most about your day-to-day work life?
I’d have to say I/we love the fact that it doesn’t feel like work. We really enjoy interacting with each other as a team and as friends and on top of that, we really believe in what we’re building. That makes for the best work environment anyone could ask for.
When your company “makes it” what’s one thing about the startup life that you will NOT miss.
I think we’re all in a place where we won’t miss needing to work other jobs to pay the bills. We all certainly love our day jobs, but it’ll be nice to work them on our own terms.
Check out Coffitivity on all of their Social Outlets!