At the beginning of 2017 I posted my predictions and promises for the year. Here’s my report on how they stood up over the 12 months (ratings out of 10).
Keep the Good Vibes
Creating valuable content for free and balancing that with paying salaries is hard. We definitely focused a bit much on the latter this last year, and our email newsletter read rates suffered because of it (more on this in the 2018 predictions and promises!). That said, the vibes are definitely still good, the community is stronger and larger than ever, and we have 4 full-time team members! 7/10
The Year of Freezing
I’m definitely surprised to see so few people adopting this method of coffee preservation. There’s been a few whispers, so I remain hopeful! 2/10
Carbon Negative
We smashed this and I’m super proud. Go check out our dashboard at Cool Earth – https://www.coolearth.org/profiles/baristahustle/. We’ve offset more than 20,000 tonnes of CO2 in the last year, along with protecting 19,000 trees indefinitely, and conserving 6 million litres of water annually. If there’s any way our business has a larger footprint than that I’ll happily shut it all down. 10/10
The End of Consistent Espresso Pressure
Decent Espresso, Astoria, and Dalla Corte, were all showing off flowrate-controlled espresso machines at HOST this year. Duvall Espresso also road-showed their new piston-powered machine the FC-1. I didn’t make any measurable predictions about this one so it’s hard to judge, but there’s definitely movement in the right direction. 6/10
Make More Mistakes
This was mainly about being transparent and vulnerable rather than deliberately trying to make mistakes. We’re definitely sharing more of what we do. The Great Distribution Tool Debate was a considerable foray into this (although we’ve been rather slow due to equipment setbacks – sorry!). I think there’s still a lot of room to improve. 5/10
A Barista Hustle Bar
Definitely a fail. The location we managed to secure for our office is too small for any experimental retail aspirations. It’s looking like we might fail for a while, too. 0/10
Average: 5/10.
Rough. But not a failure! Perhaps I’m too optimistic. If everyone hurried up and joined the future I’d be far more accurate.
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