For this Start-Up Feature, we will be interviewing Keyis, Co-Founder of Cafebond.com.
Hi Keyis, what’s your current role in Cafebond, and how did your past experiences take you here?
I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of Cafebond.com, a specialty coffee bean e-commerce marketplace for coffee lovers to shop beans from top cafes around the world.
I have been a coffee addict since I was 20 when I started working in the Marketing industry, and a trip to Melbourne, Australia, with my CTO and Co-Founder Eugene Chen 2 years ago let us tasted one of the best coffee we ever tasted, and everything else is history.
Which 3 words would describe you best?
Ambitious, hard-working and creative.
How did you come up with the idea? And what problem is Cafebond trying to solve?
It was a leisure trip to Melbourne 2 years ago with my co-founder when we tasted one of the best cup of coffee in our life and we want the world to share the same experience we had.
As a coffee lover myself, buying fresh coffee beans offline is a troublesome process due to my busy schedule and I do not want to settle for anything less. Also, usually there isn’t a good variety of coffee beans for me to choose locally. That’s the 2 main problems Cafebond.com is adding value to for our customers.
Cafebond.com currently has 15 top Australian cafes on our platform, including names like Seven Seeds, Market Lane, St Ali from Melbourne and Ona Coffee from Canberra, which is owned by Sasa Sestic, the World Barista Champion of 2015.
Our coffee are roast to order and ships weekly from Australia at a flat delivery of S$10 regardless the order size. The affordable shipping is only made possible with our Shipping Consolidation Algorithm, which we consolidate customer’s order to bring down the shipping costs greatly.
How long did Cafebond take to finish development? (before the product could meet the market)
Our team took a year to finish the product development. During the time, we also spoke to lots of potential customers with both coffee lovers and also café merchants to constantly improve our platform.
What are your preferred platforms/tools?
Microsoft Azure of course!
Have you gotten any interesting feedback from users of the app?
We have gotten quite a few feed backs from coffee lovers to expand to other Southeast Asian countries.
I’m excited to share exclusively with Spiffy.sg readers that Cafebond.com’s expansion to Malaysia is in the works and will happen very soon!
How do you keep yourself motivated, especially during the low times?
Having support from my co-founder, friends and family.
If you could go back in time when you first started, what would you have done differently?
Nothing. Even though we took quite a bit of time to be launch-ready but the process has been really rewarding for us to understand our business and our customers better.
What’s next for you?
Constantly improving the key needle movers in our business and of course focusing on our expansion plan to the Chinese market.
What’s one advice you would give to budding entrepreneurs?
Quoting Steve Jobs – “Stay Hungry, stay foolish”.
How has it been like working with Consumers as an audience?
Very exciting, especially talking directly to our customers where we gain lots of insights to constantly make our platform better.
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