We have coffee

Hello dear friends,

It has been now a little over a year since I’ve been hard at work to give my project idea a chance.

Over the course of Crowdtainer’s development, I’ve learned a ton of things to say the least, and of course, met several unexpected challenges, which delayed things more than I’d like – mostly on the legal/practical side of running an online business in Germany. I had to iterate between lawyers and the technical side, to adapt the project to the existing laws. The good news is that, with the help of some wizard lawyers and lots of patience, I’ve been able to overcome each obstacle so far. 

In the process, I came to the conclusion that to run a real e-commerce project, there’s much more than just fun EVM solidity files involved. Long story short, I went through the ‘traditional approach’ of opening an online store, in order to learn all the basics first.

Learning the ins and outs of GDPR, AML, consumer laws and protections, obligations as a company, etc, just to sell some roasted coffee online, is overwhelming to say the least. Setting up the online store was a piece of cake in comparison, but still involves a lot of work. In my case, I used WooCommerce since it’s largely open source and can be self-hosted. I’d like to share the knowledge I gained about this at some point, if people would be interested. In fact, the docker compose files used to deploy this store will be open source too.

The first Barterfly coffee batch (which I named ‘Genesis’), was roasted with the help of the awesome people at We Roast Coffee, here in Berlin:

And here’s the result – a happy (hopefully ; ) first customer / friend, holding a bag of nice Brazilian coffee (see more about this coffee’s farm clicking here):

Another friend made this amazing Latte art with Rosie’s espresso coffee:

Now that the operational basics are established, I’m able to hook Crowdtainer sales into the traditional e-commerce shop via REST API’s, and can therefore leverage all the existing ecosystem around fulfilment – shipment, order, invoice, etc that already exists.

The shop is hosted at https://shop.barterfly.de (this site). Yes, you read that right – I haven’t misspelled ‘butterfly’ everywhere : ). The name of the shop is indeed barterfly – as in ‘barter’. Everything – including the infrastructure code I use to run the e-commerce shop, will be open sourced. The idea is to create a community around this so that others can solve similar problems with the same or similar toolkit.

For now, you are welcome to make the first orders in the shop with the limited supply (~18 kg) of coffee I brought from our farm in Brazil. You can see it being roasted below:

Once the first online sales had proven successful, the big deal begins – that is, a few things will happen in parallel:

• Attempt to conduct the first sales / collective orders through my hosted instance of Crowdtainer. These will be present at https://app.barterfly.de – until then there are only past “test” projects displayed on the page.
• More time invested around ‘marketing’ and community building – which basically means I will start telling the world about this project, try to improve the design of the websites, and create more content in general (FAQ, share more about design decisions, things I’ve learned thus far, etc).
• Figuring out the remaining open problems around getting either a full container or an LCL (Less than Container Load) from Brazil to Germany.

That’s what I’ve got for now – please reach out to me for any feedback around the experience on barterfly’s shop. Hopefully you’ll enjoy drinking this coffee as much as I do.

I’d like to thank everyone that has supported me thus far – you know who you are. However, this is hopefully just the beginning.

Until the next one, stay healthy and happy!