Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in food and beverage but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Joaquim Mach, Co-Founder of Incapto, located in Barcelona, Spain.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

Incapto was born in 2020, during the COVID pandemic, to offer a better way to consume coffee in B2C and B2B sectors. We stand for back to basics, importing green coffee beans, toasting them locally (we're from Barcelona), and delivering to our customers regularly. Moreover, as we want our customers to have the best experience ever, we design our own automatic coffee machine. Coffee is always better when it is recently grounded. So, our machines are simple, with basic functionalities, but on the other hand, they're cheap, compact (the smallest on the market), and very robust (estimated 10 years of utility).

Our main enemies are coffee pods or coffee capsules. With this approach, we achieved more than 10.000 customers in Spain. On the B2B side, we developed our own IoT solution in order to have a connection with all our machines. This business is different than B2C. Customers don't pay for machines; they just pay for coffee cups. Every time an employee clicks for a coffee, this consumption goes to the cloud, and the owner has a back office to check his staff consumption. Then, at the end of the month, we invoice just for this consumption. And also, this visibility helps us to manage automatic billing and coffee demand planning.

Our target is mainstream customers. The coffee pods industry controls nearly 50% of the B2C market in Spain. So, we don't hide. We attack this mainstream audience. Mainly Nespresso customers. We follow different market trends: sustainability, subscription, real food, and convenience.

Tell us about yourself

After more than 10 years in the local, digital, eCommerce, and startup environment, I felt it was time to create my own project. In every single experience, you learned something. Even if it's something you do not have to repeat.

In my case, I have three daughters, and I am really worried about climate change. Maybe I'm not saving lives as a doctor or discovering new planets as an astronomer. But I had a clear vision that my project should have sustainability as a focus. And fighting for a better coffee experience and avoiding useless plastic and aluminum pods felt like starting point. That's my main motivation day by day. Then, with my partners, we also saw very interesting points in the coffee market - nice margins, retention, repetition, and good customer lifetime values...

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

Moving from 0 to 50 employees and from 0€ to 6M€ (forecasted this 2022) in just 2 years.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

Talent acquisition. Businesses are people. So, at Incapto, we take our culture and values very seriously. Ownership, take it simple, innovation, etc., are some of the core values that we try for all our employees to accomplish.

It's easy for first employees to keep the founder's culture. But the huge short-term challenge for Incapto is to hire people not only for technical criteria but with cultural fit.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

I do not have a secret/magic potion. Everyone has to find his own path.

  1. Execution > Idea - Start facing the market even if you feel you're not ready. Inputs will be amazing.
  2. Resilience: You will face more bad days than good ones—iceberg image. People just see the peak...
  3. Find your partners accurately: If you have good and aligned partners, you'll arrive farther.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://incapto.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IncaptoCoffee/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/incapto_coffee/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/incaptocoffee

LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joaquimmach/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/incaptocoffee/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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