My entire life, as far as I can remember, has been about dreaming up new startups.
As much as buying an existing cash-flow business and improving it is the recommended path — and one I would strongly advise for any fledgling entrepreneur — there is nothing more fun than a true zero-to-one startup. To ideate something from the ether, find product–market fit, and bring that vision viably to life.
But it turns out, at least for me, that is incredibly difficult to do. They say 9 out of 10 businesses fail, so just start 10 and one will stick. But in my nearly 20 years of entrepreneurial pursuits, I think I’m closer to 100 startup ideas I’ve worked on. Some with much more varying degrees of resource and investment input.
It is much harder than I ever imagined it could be to start a business that can have lasting impact.
During each failed attempt through the years, I would always learn a lesson — or a framework, rather — that would inform my next hypothesis of what business to start.
I knew, in exploring my next business, that getting 2–3 of these frameworks right would make a decently successful business. But during the couple of years I spent researching Excelsa coffee, I started to realize all 10 frameworks were lining up for me — as if by some cosmic, divine force — and it made me realize this endeavor could be far larger than I ever dreamed of.
So without further ado, here are the 10 frameworks I have learned through years of hardship and work that are aligning for me to go all in on my next startup: Excelsa Coffee.
1. Have a Black Umbrella (An Insurance Policy)
Things will inevitably go wrong, and insurance is your way to not lose it all. I have a vivid memory of my business college professor lecturing this 20 years ago.
It should be assumed, as the little guy in business, that any product–market fit you validate with your idea will be taken by a much more capitalized organization who will put you out of business.
With Excelsa, we acquired the IP (trademarks and domains) in advance, leveraged AI for SEO and content, to ensure our multiple internet assets will be top of Google, ChatGPT, Amazon, and Walmart for the next century.
If and when Nestlé or Starbucks jumps on the Excelsa bandwagon with their billion-dollar investment, squeezing all of our supply, I already know 30% of organic internet traffic (millions of people) will be funneled through these IP assets by reverse engineering their long established behavior.
So we can move forward being viable as a specialty coffee company (fun!) or have an exit to sell to the big brands — because we have an insurance policy of capturing a vast amount of organic search traffic forever. (What is 30% of internet traffic worth to a big brand entering a billion-dollar space? A LOT.)
2. Be On Time, But a First Mover
This is incredibly hard to time. Being early is just as damaging as being late. But over time, after enough lived experiences, you start to see patterns and oscillations in the evolution of businesses, news, and their life cycles.
You want to be ahead of the news cycle so you can actually be part of the narration of the news and take control of it. Being early entrenches the moats of unfair advantages, and market efficiencies that make up the mix of our reality.
Being early means you are wasting time and money, getting burnt out. Being late means you are chasing the competition and spending money inefficiently. Because a subset of every customer you acquire will go through you to the best seller (the first mover) in perpetuity.
We spent almost a year holding out on incorporating our business. I was convinced everyday I’d wake up to someone beating us to the punch. But the timing was perfect, and that patience saved us thousands and thousands of dollars.
3. Have an Unfair Advantage and Economic Moats
When we named our company Excelsa Coffee and launched ExcelsaCoffee.com, it was a massive economic moat and unfair advantage based on those assets’ ability to acquire search traffic for excelsa coffee from Google, ChatGPT, Amazon, and Walmart (a bulk of total internet traffic).
For every subsequent Excelsa coffee brand that launches, it builds validity, and search volume traffic to our original internet assets which outrank as the incumbent.
We further launched ExcelsaCoffee.org and ExcelsaCafe.com to further entrench an unfair advantage — leveraging the internet (a tool billions use per day) to capture a bulk of that traffic and to be able to tell the story we wanted to put forth around Excelsa (to further propagate narratives being written so we can control much of them).
It would have been an uphill battle to start an Excelsa coffee company without these powerfully relevant unfair advantages and economic moats.
4. Entropy and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics
Business and consumer behavior are human activities. Human activities reflect nature by their very essence of being part of the natural environment.
Entropy explains how time can only move in one direction (forward), and how disorder/fragmentation will always increase — because it’s overwhelmingly more likely it will.
When looking at a large macrocosmic consumer trend, if we apply an entropic lens by saying “general coffee” is low entropic, and that the rearranging of its inner constituents is more likely with the passage of time to become highly entropic, then the end result of the coffee movement is to be specialized and nuanced.
Coffee becomes Excelsa, Liberica, Geisha, and so much more. Excelsa, as a constituent within an industry of low entropy, is likely to become more centered and forefront with the passage of time.
Wine, beer, spirits, cooking oils all went through this entropic transformation. I would never bet the highly nuanced wine industry will default back to consumers just saying “red” or “white” wine like they did 100 years ago.
The only challenge: we don’t know how long the timing will take (it might not even happen in our lifetimes — see item 2). But its inevitability is literally baked into the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Seeing these oscillations and potential opportunities is important in the dark days when your work shows no output and no one sees your vision. Use the physical laws visible now, to envision a possible future world before anyone can see it.
5. Efficiency Rules the World
Without going too far down the rabbit hole, even concepts like socialism and capitalism are just labels people fight over that mask an underlying and purely objective efficiency of the universe.
Most people think there is a man somewhere pulling all the strings — when it’s in fact a bunch of powerless people thinking there is a man somewhere pulling all the strings.
More than anything, the world is ruthlessly efficient and no one is in control. All the IP, trademarks, patents in the world won’t protect your moats faster than the sheer efficiency of the markets, people, behaviors, et al.
If peanuts grow in California’s Central Valley, and you want to sell them to the California market, no amount of IP or moats will protect your business if you want to run your office in Europe. Markets always become most efficient.
Geography is a massive driver of this efficiency. Being in Southern California is a powerful efficiency for coffee grown in Southeast Asia, brought to a port near our house, and distributed to the USA market. The coffee is going to cross our neighborhood whether we do business or not because thats its most efficient path. That is a huge advantage for us to choose a business that is done already most efficiently where we live.
6. Total Available Market
It’s likely I’ll never be able to take more than a fraction of a percent out of my business each year as my salary without causing damage or incurring deep inefficiencies to my operations.
Therefore, whatever I pursue needs to have a prerequisite total available market — before I even start ideating or deploying a strategy — that’s big enough to make it worth the work. That makes worthy pursuits few and far between.
If I wanted a million-dollar-a-year salary one day, then my business needs to be doing far more than $100M a year in revenue — probably closer to $200M+. In the $150B/year coffee space, I only need to conquer 0.13% market share to be able to ask for the salary I want. Not easy at all, but at least possible.
7. A Disruptive Go-to-Market Strategy
Think of consumer behavior as a giant brain, with neural pathways of repeat behavior that get baked into concrete over time they way habits in your day cause repetition.
No one is looking for a new iPhone company — Apple solved that problem in 2009 and we moved on. I don’t care to buy a different car than a Toyota because I trust that brand and don’t want to think about which car to buy.
The more problems I solve with what I already trust, the more I can move on to the next exciting thing.
But disruptions are patterns — very predictable ones (see item 4) — if you focus long enough on a category. As a disruptive product, you need to move quickly, ship something great, invite competitors into the market to validate your contrarian view, and then attack the incumbent.
With Excelsa, climate issues are hitting monoculture coffee hard, and demand for nuanced, specialty flavor is growing. We ship quickly, build loyalty, invite others in, and don’t wake the giant until it’s too late.
Seems obvious, but it’s hard. Good marketing can only carry a bad product so far. Eventually, efficiency beats even the most brilliant marketing.
8. A Good Product
I had a compostable plastics company once. It felt good — until I found out each product contained PFAS, a forever chemical. Greenwashing. I folded before I became the one holding the bag when the music stopped.
Excelsa is the opposite: genuinely better coffee, and I believe that with my whole heart.
9. Vertical Integration
For centuries, the proprietor was the USP — it was hard to source quality materials, make the product, and distribute it with meaningful marketing, and once achieved it was a trade secret. Now? Everything’s accessible. White-labeling a gadget just validates it for a more capitalized company to copy.
The only defense is vertical integration: doing something efficient, unfair, and first from manufacturing to the end consumer— so you can’t be instantly replaced.
10. Altruism and Purpose
I left this for last because, as a personal driver, business has to be more than the bottom line.
My biggest failure would be to be rich and old, sitting in a lonely house, with no one visiting me because I only served myself.
Altruism solves real problems — waste, inequality, biodiversity loss — and, when truthful, it becomes one of the most powerful foundations for a brand.
Coffee’s industrial complex keeps farmers in poverty and fills our bodies with chemicals. Excelsa can fix pieces of that — creating a better cup, a better livelihood for farmers, and something I can feel proud of.
So those are my ten frameworks from 20 years of entrepreneurial trials. Even getting a few right gives you tailwinds. But to have all ten align? That’s rare.
That’s why I decided to go all in on Excelsa Coffee Company — to create something that can last 100+ years.