I am Michael Joshua, founder at TheGivers Coffee. Our solution is to provide quick, healthy and affordable coffee drinks to campus students to keep them active, woke, and energetic as they study to achieve their career aspirations.
Beyond just selling coffee, we are building a community of coffee lovers that share their positive stories as a tool to conquer depression among young people because coffee is an element of positivity. We started out as an idea in February 2021, looking out how we can present coffee in a better way that is quick, affordable, and healthy to young people (Our target market).
In April 2021, we put out our first MVP to students at University of Uyo, Nigeria. We had a little setback as there were lots of pivoting and iterations to do. Everyone wanted different things at the same time. Although these are things we could handle, we didn’t have required funds at our disposal.
By June 2021, I joined Buildr, a community product by Talemia that supports early stage African founders to transform their ideas into viable businesses. They had one singular one – to take founders on a journey from 0 to 1.
Talemia has a weekly fast paced knowledge session on Clubhouse where we had free access to established founders and key players in the startup space. I truly wanted to move TheGivers Coffee from 0 to 1, so I participated in most of these sessions which I found really invaluable. We covered things like Bootstrapping, Hiring, Legal Structure, MVP Development, Social Capital, Funding, Agile Leadership, Startup Mistakes, Personal Branding, etc
In August 2021 at Buildr, we were exposed to the reality of equity and the rule of law involving shares and percentages in business between founders, co-founders, and investors. I doubled down on execution with my solution. We were able to gain more traction, and we secured our first coffee shop in October 2021.
In November 2021 through Talemia’s partnership network (Treayos Digital), we developed our website with a fully integrated payment gateway and relaunched TheGivers Coffee to the larger public. This means that we are now ready to start taking orders right from our website. That was some 0 to 1 move for us!!!
In December 2021, our customer base grew by 35% and we currently have 3 signature products while working on more new recipes. We have also secured 2 retail shop outlets. We look forward to adding 3 more new retail shop outlets, growing our team to 15 superhumans and also increasing customer retainership rate by 70% in Q1/2022. I am particularly thrilled at the many more milestones we’d hit through the support of Buildr and the entire team of Talemia. Joining Buildr was my biggest business investment in 2021. You should join us too if you desire to move from 0 to 1.