The Store Is Live. Here Is What It Actually Took.

The store is live. That is the sentence I have been trying to write for a while, and it turns out the hard part is not the writing. The hard part was everything underneath it.

If you go to our website right now, you can buy a bag of freeze-dried ice cream sandwiches and pay for it with a card, and a real order lands in a real system. That sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing. For most of this year the website could only be reached from inside our own network, which meant that every person who searched for us found nothing to buy.

I want to be honest about what it took, because the version where a small business just puts up a website and customers arrive is not the version that happened. There was a freeze-dry operation, a bowling alley, a farmers market table, a coffee roaster, and a website that was technically finished and practically invisible.

What Was Actually Wrong

Not the products. Not the prices. The door. The site existed but it had no door to the street. Google could not send anyone to us because there was nowhere to send them. A social post could not point anywhere. A person who wanted to give us money had no way to find the cash register.

That is fixed now. The store is on the public internet, the search engines can find it, and a checkout works end to end. I tested it myself this week: a real order, a real order number, and a real payment link.

What Happens Now

Now the actual work starts, and I would rather say that plainly than pretend the hard part is over. A store with no customers is a very tidy room. The next part is getting people through the door.

That means the Google listing pointing at the store instead of at a dead page. It means telling people we exist. It means walking into shops and cafes along the corridor and asking whether they want our snacks on their shelves, which is the part I have been avoiding because it involves being told no.

It also means the honest part: we have not made a real sale yet. The orders in our system are tests. Zero real customers so far. I am writing that down because it is the true number, and I would rather it be true and on the record than hidden.

The good news is that the thing we were missing is now in place, and it was never the product. The ice cream sandwiches are good. The fruit is good. The margins are strong enough to build a business on. What we needed was a door, and now there is one.

So if you have been waiting for a reason to try us, this is it. The store is open, the snacks are in Iowa City, and the coffee is strong. Come find us.

Stay curious. Stay crunchy. Stay cosmic.

— Sara Jane Shelvock, CEO, Torus Coffee Company LLC