This Startup Founder Created a New Way to Make Coffee and Is Putting Everything on the Line to Take…

To solve this problem, Wilbur created the first patented coffee steeping system — a single-serve bag of specialty coffee that you place in a mug of hot water. It’s like tea, but not quite. Its name, you guessed it: Steeped Coffee.

Unlike tea leaves, coffee starts to go bad as soon as you grind the beans. In order to preserve the freshness, Steeped Coffee bags are sealed with nitrogen — so no oxygen can touch the grounds.

Steeped Coffee is the first patented methodology to combine the quality and ethics of speciality coffee with a convenient Single-Serve unit. For steeped coffee to succeed in changing people’s (often religious) coffee habits, Wilbur and his team will have to make it through the bowels of the startup J-Curve.

Howard Love writes that a startup usually follows this path. The six phases are: 

• Create a product 
• Release it into the wild and gain feedback 
• Morph accordingly (i.e., pivot) 
• Establish the right business model 
• Step on the gas and scale 
• Harvest profits and satisfy stakeholders 

Imagine you’re camping overnight in the woods. You wake up in the morning and light your pocket rocket mini stove to heat water for breakfast. Once the water boils, instead of a Starbucks Via pack — something Wilbur regards as artificial and gross to drink — or a cumbersome french press set up, now you can tear open a Steeped Coffee pack and plunge the bag into your steaming cup of hot water. In four minutes, you’re sipping on a fresh cup of premium Joe.

Josh Wilbur has an IQ of 152, is Dyslexic, and listens to Audiobooks at 4X speed. He thrives on four hours of sleep, finds himself pulling an All-Nighter at least once a week, and works hard to somehow still Prioritize relationships and family, he says. In January 2017, the initial investment for steeped was $250,000 and it literally emptied everything in Wilbur’s pockets.

The more players in the game the better for steeped coffee. "competitors are partners," said steeped coffee's founder. "whoever wants to sell their beans in a steeped bag can," he said. It's not a like a like a windows or Mac decision. It's more like a laptop, tablet, desktop decision.

Startup founders are Stone-Cold machines when it comes to risk. One sold her house to buy Adwords so that she could scale her App’s user activity and glean deeper audience insights. A new method of coffee brewing is in the works. Steeped coffee isn’t a thing, but it’s a way to find out. The taste changes character depending on how long you steep it. Steeped coffee isn’t a thing, but it’S ..