Background

For the solo project, I've decided to help out a friend to create her own coffee subscription website. We live in Brasília, Brazil's capital and a fast-growing specialty coffee market. Before the pandemic, the city had just reached 2nd place in the country's specialty coffee market (we're behind São Paulo). We had numerous coffee shops and roasting companies opening here during the last five years, and the city hosted the 2018 National Aeropress Championship.

During the pandemic, my friend Mariana Mesquita (a well-known barista in the city) had the idea of creating her own coffee subscription service: she realized that if on one hand, people in Brasília didn't really know all the local roasters, on the other, they were growing tired of drinking the same coffee from their go-to roaster shop. She decided to create a subscription service that would deliver two coffee bags for the users: one from a local roaster, the other from a roaster anywhere in Brazil, with Mariana's curatorship.

Oh! I'll write the whole project in English and translate to Portuguese when complete. 😉

Research Goals

• Understand Brasília's specialty coffee market;
• Get to know Brasília's coffee lovers;
• Understand our users's coffee drinking habits;
• Understand our user's knowledge on specialty coffee (and what they want to learn next);
• Determine if related products (cold brew coffee, teas or bean-to-bar chocolates, for example) could be of interest;
• Understand what kind of coffee-related content our users are interested in.

Methods

• Competitive analysis – I'll analyze not only the local and national coffee subscription services, but also local subscriptions of other products such as wine and premium meat. (This one's ready, please check out the link)
• User interviews – Thankfully, the specialty coffee community is quite united, and it won't be difficult to find coffee lovers and experts to interview.
• User surveys – Again, the survey should also give us data and insight on the users' needs. (Also ready, please check out the link)
• Expert interview – I'd like to talk to Giselle Coutinho, a journalist and barista in São Paulo who's got her own specialty coffee curatorship and delivery service. I'm sure she'll give us great insight;
• User personas – I'm pretty sure we'll discover at least two user personas during the process: the ones who like chocolate-nutty tasting coffees, and the people who like more exotic flavors.

Potential Participants

• Coffee lovers in Brasília;
• People interested in buying from local business;