Co-founded an online roasted coffee retailer for home brewers, offices and cafes. It did not work. Ten months, closed.
Specialty coffee looks like an ideal e-commerce category: consumable, high repeat rate, passionate audience. We built for it and it did not convert the way the category promised.
Salha closed after ten months. The consumer and wholesale motions needed different products, different margins and different operations, and a small team could not fund both at once.
We split a small team across a consumer audience and a wholesale audience and got neither. A consumable product only works when repeat purchase is engineered before the first sale, and we treated retention as something to add later. I have never made that trade again, which is why the retention layer goes in first on every funnel I have built since.