Cloosiv, Y Combinator funded startup takes on mobile ordering for local coffee shops

Tim is CEO and co-founder of a company called Cloosiv (YC S19).

 

Cloosiv is a company looking to offer smaller coffee shops a mobile ordering solution that can compete with those of the mega coffee brands. 

 

Tim had an idea when he was working at Apple, he was looking at the Apple Store app and customers could walk into the store without ever talking to anyone and buy something. This sparked Tim to build something like that for other markets, which kicked off a journey to the coffee shop market.

 

He became a management consultant at the North Highland Consulting firm, and they invested 300k into the winner of a startup idea. Tim was that winner and they gave him 300k to start his business. Tim found his cofounder James on UpWork to help develop the app. 

 

Tim had to unlearn how to be a management consultant, generally, companies pay large dollar amounts and "paid for perfection". But as a startup founder Tim mentioned he had to test, removing those own expectations. 

 

Tim's first idea was to create a unified payment app and mentioned he would stand outside stores at the mall and ask questions to the customers walking around. Tim met with the founders of DoorDash and Instacart to learn about mobile ordering. Coffee shops have never had an app that was just for them.

 

Tim applied to Y Combinator 4-5 times over and over again getting rejected, but Tim never gave up. Dalton Caldwell called the Cloosiv founders delivering the bad news about not getting in and Tim applied again after making progress.

 

In one trip to San Fransisco and through a fortunate series of events came to a meeting with Sam Altman, who made some introductions, one being Lachy Groom who was an early employee at Stripe, previously head of stripe issuing, core payments product. Lachy was one of Cloosiv’s first investors. Laura Behrens, Founder & CEO at Shippo joined as one of the early angel investors.

 

Square is now Cloosiv’s payment partner, coffee shops tend to have very little free table space and their app can run simultaneously as the Cloosiv app on an iPad.

 

Tim and the Cloosiv team manage a coffee shop's inventory of coffee ordering real-time working towards a platform for a coffee shop to build their brands.

 

More about Tim here -

https://www.linkedin.com/in/griffintimothy/

 

More about Cloosiv here -

https://www.cloosiv.com/