Transcript
Introduction
Patrick
My guest today, Michael Mayer, is the founder and CEO of Bottomless, a company that automatically replenishes your coffee supply, where I'm both an excited investor and customer. Today's conversation is about tactical lessons Michael has learned while building the business. We talk about identifying an addressable problem, how to avoid solving for bottlenecks that don't yet exist and how to iterate through problems before scaling. As yet another example of a self-taught entrepreneur. It's inspiring to hear Michael's mindset for problem solving. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Michael.
Problem #1: Finding the Problem to Solve
Patrick
So Michael, this is going to be a pretty unique version of this series that we call Founders Field Guide for two reasons. One, you've been on the show before, so we're going to make sure to cover ground that we didn't cover the first time and people can go listen to that episode if they want. It's awesome. And second, because I have the pleasure of knowing you and Liana and the team at Bottomless really well, I'm an investor in the business. I've known you guys a long time. I'm a user, et cetera. So we thought brainstorming, that the fun thing to do here is a new format that goes through five, maybe six major scaling challenges that you've had as a business, sort of the absolute worst things that you've had to deal with. What the problems were and how you overcame them because I think my experience with businesses of your type is that, that's all they ever are, is just a series of these, what seemed like insurmountable challenges that then you figure out and you move on to the next one. So we just thought this would be a neat format to try out, look forward to doing with you. I'll kick it off by asking about the most nascent problem, which was, how you got into this problem space in the first place as a single founder and narrowed the scope of the problem that interested you into something that actually could be tackled.