Here at Splick–it HQ, we believe in practicing what we preach. Just as any chef would taste his/her own recipes to ensure its quality, we think it’s equally as important to use our product on a regular basis. It’s that guiding principle that promp
ted us to start “Drinking our own espresso,” which is our own take on dogfooding. We believe that everyone in the company should interact with the platform on a daily basis. There’s no excuse for any of us to be unfamiliar with our product.
As a company originally born out of a coffee shop, many of us exhibit the predisposition for freshly-roasted beans that one might expect. We drink so much coffee, in fact, that we decided to buy our own espresso machine to feed the addiction. On any given week, the team will go through about 3lbs. of espresso beans. That’s a lot of espresso for the half-dozen or so regulars.
The problem is that coffee-snob grade espresso beans, and the professional grade machine for that matter, aren’t cheap—especially by startup standards. So, after smooth talking our CFO, he agreed to pony up for the machine so long as we each vowed to chip-in a buck per each shot pulled to pay back the cost. Naturally, as a mobile ordering company, we decided to contribute our dollar by “ordering” shots with the Splick–it app.
Within a few minutes, a new location and menu for Splick–it HQ appeared in the app, and the orders have been flowing ever since. But aside from well-caffeinated, hyper-active employees, something else happened that we hadn’t anticipated in the beginning.
What started as a way for the team to pay off the machine has become a staple of our company culture. Not only does the Astra espresso machine make a mean shot, but it serves a dual-function as the office rallying point around which discussions, ideas, and arguments abound. On any given morning, it’s not unusual to find three or four members of the Splick–it team conversing over a round of Americanos.
There are even instances in which orders will be placed without the intention of drinking a cup. For example, our developers will often preemptively order a shot in order to do a final live validation of the system—something that is traditionally very difficult to test in a transaction-based system as our own.
We could have never anticipated the extent to which the espresso machine has become such an invaluable part of our company. Not only has it cultivated numerous conversations that have had a direct impact on our business, but each time we send through an order, it reminds us who we’re doing all of this for: our clients’ customers.
