Launch HN: Bottomless (YC W19) – Coffee Restocked with a Smart Scale

[seizethecheese]

Hello, HN! We're Michael and Liana, co-founders of Bottomless (https://bottomless.com)

Bottomless automatically re-stocks coffee using a smart scale. Users leave their coffee on the scale, then we detect the perfect time to trigger re-orders. We ship the scale for free when customers buy their first bag.

We met in college, and bonded over talking about businesses we could build together. You could say we've kept in touch since then: we're now married. Bottomless was born out of our frustration managing our household stock levels. We always seemed to be running out of one thing or another.

When we thought about it, we realized that restocking was a universal problem.

But if this was such a big problem, why was there no great solution? Subscriptions should be a solution, but they don’t work well for items that aren’t used on a set schedule. It seemed that if we could capture data on usage and stock levels in a passive way, we could solve the problem. Thus, Bottomless, the concept, was born.

The market for stuff people repeatedly buy is enormous. (We'll leave an exact estimate up to the reader's imagination.) We decided that to start we'd establish a beachhead with a single market. We landed on selling premium coffee because it's cheap to ship and has good margins. It also is much better shipped straight from the roaster than bought at the grocery store.

In the beginning, we built the simplest thing possible to test if the concept would work. We hacked together a scale prototype, made five of them and got them into the hands of friends. We bought coffee from roaster websites with our customers’ addresses to bootstrap supply.

The goal was to test if people would leave their coffee on a scale, and if we could reorder at the right time. It turns out they would and we could!

Since then, it's been a matter of making larger batches of scales. We bought a few 3D printers and acquired quite a few burned fingers from soldering.

We've benefited from a few technological tailwinds. For one, smartphone supply chain has driven down the cost of components quite a bit. We've been able to build hardware that works for this business model out of super cheap WiFi modules and LiPos. Also, the level of open source software for ML is quite powerful and well-documented.

We're aware that we are just scratching the surface of re-ordering hardware. We'd be interested to hear ideas that the community might have about this space!

[function_seven]

My initial reaction to this post was very dismissive. I was ready to jump into the comments and nod along with everyone else shitting all over it.

But, I don't want to be like CmdrTaco and the iPod, or whoever thought an rsync bash script could replace Dropbox.

If you prove this out with coffee, and work on making it for all "constant" foods in the home, this would be awesome.

Milk, butter, cheese, eggs, soda, cereal, apples, tortilla chips, baby food, etc. A whole section in the fridge or pantry that a user could arrange how they like, and use the app to set restock thresholds. Smart logic on your end to bundle items in as few shipments as possible (i.e. send the butter restock a week before you really need to, because other items are queued up now) and this becomes a magic grocery delivery service where—not only do you not need to go to the store—you don't even need to think about placing an order!

Good luck on this, and probably a good decision to target coffee snobs first.

[rorykoehler]

I kind of like going to the supermarket. I also like variety. This sounds like it would work better for offices etc

[MagicPropmaker]

This was tried with eggs, and it failed:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/egg-minder-smart-tray-let...

But maybe if someone does it with a camera and a little AI in a fridge for Milk, eggs, butter, etc. it could work.

[seizethecheese]

Great comment. You hit the nail on the head with the potential for smart batching.

Thanks for the well wishes!

[wtvanhest]

You should check out his invest like the best podcast. This will likely be a big business.

[lianaherrera]

thank you! keep in touch, we might end up solving this problem for all your pantry needs!

[jvagner]

I’m sticking with dismissive.

[alphagrep12345]

Few of questions

1. People always make weekend grocery trips. Why can't they just add a packet of coffee powder? Why do they have to use you? 2. Amazon just discontinued their dash buttons. There should be a strong reason for it. Do you know what it is? How are you planning to avoid it? 3. The issue with diapers and toilet papers is huge. They take up a lot of volume and have very little weight. Does the scale approach work for them? I'm not sure.

It'd be interesting to see how you guys evolve going forward. Best of luck :)

[hn_throwaway_99]

I'll answer some of your questions:

1. You asked about "adding a packet of coffee powder". If you're asking about coffee "powder" (i.e. either preground or instant), then you are not the target market. For coffee aficionados, there is a very short window of peak freshness, about 1-2 weeks post roast. This model works great for these coffee folks who care about this freshness. Note supermarket coffee is usually hopelessly stale by the time it is sold. 2. While the physical dash buttons may have been discontinued, the virtual ones (through your phone, the web, Alexa, etc.) are still heavily in use. My guess if they discontinued them is that they figured they can get just as much play from the virtual ones, especially through all the "smart home" devices they are pushing.

[seizethecheese]

Thanks for the questions.

1. I always forget to get one or two things when I go to the store. This removes having to remember coffee stock levels. Also, the coffee in the store isn't fresh because the distribution chain is too long. We ship straight from roaster to customer, so the coffee is really fresh.

2. Dash doesn't work because it's a new habit and people have to remember to find and press the button before running out. We're a Dash button that automatically presses itself and is fully passive.

3. For toilet paper and diapers it may not be a scale but some other sort of passive monitoring system. We definitely plan to address these eventually.

[stevedzreams]

I think the target audience aren't the sort of people that buy a packet of coffee powder from the grocery store.

[sna1l]

Another question is what is stopping Amazon/Instacart/etc from copying this model?

Presumably Amazon Go shops have this capability and it could be modified to suit end consumers in their homes?

[rconti]

If you can crack the market of auto-restocking a large variety of household goods, I think you're on to something, hopefully just using coffee as a starting point.

I HATE managing 'subscription' services; it's more work than just reordering manually, (looking at you, Soylent and Amazon) and Amazon Dash buttons didn't help because the item you paired it to is never still around when you press the button.

I wouldn't want to deal with all of this overhead for just restocking one supply (coffee) but I certainly see the value if many products were covered.

Best of luck!

[swampthinker]

In a different life, I was working on a device that could turn any fridge into a smart fridge. Using computer vision to auto restock food when you ran low. The prototype felt pretty magical for the few food items it could recognize.

Maybe some day later down the line :)

[seizethecheese]

Exactly! Coffee : Bottomless :: Books : Amazon

Interesting you mentioned Soylent. Part of the motivation for Bottomless was our Soylent subscription. We have enough piled up to survive Armageddon.

I'm curious about your comment on the overhead. The scale takes 60 seconds to set up, and lasts for over a year on a charge. I definitely understand that any set-up sometimes feels like too much!

[wenbin]

I just listened to Michael's podcast interview. Very smart & inspiring!

https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/invest-like-the-best/mi...

[alexpetralia]

He sounds like a philosopher more than a business person. But my bias is that that's a good thing.

[noirbot]

So, I really like this idea, and I've been with plenty of coffee subscriptions over the last few years. My issue/worry is that I don't make coffee at home on a daily rate. I have coffee at the office most weekdays, and then at home on the weekend, and then usually also on one day I work from home.

For me, it would be really nice for your service to work out something like "You make 60g of coffee on Saturdays and Sundays, and then 30g's on Wednesday" and then work out when I'll be running out, and maybe order me a new bag to come in on Friday because it knows I'll likely run out on Saturday.

This doesn't seem super hard to do, but does seem like something that's important to work out, since there's a lot of products that people don't use on with regular daily amount.

[seizethecheese]

Interesting use case.

This actually mirrors a lot of our customers, so it's important for our system to take this consumption pattern into account.

After a few orders, the system will learn that you make 120g on weekends with sporadic weekday consumption.

[psalminen]

I am in the same boat. This kind of irregular is what has stopped me from automatically re-ordering a la Amazon subscriptions. It would be amazing if this was solved.

[LeifCarrotson]

I think the business case with the same idea and tech, but a lot better market cap, would be providing a restocking service to businesses who are using tens of thousands of dollars of consumable shop supplies than the small audience of people who are willing to buy coffee from a subscription for $3/mo.

To make the pain point that I'm familiar with on a daily basis crystal clear to you: I'm an engineer at a small, shop that makes industrial automation equipment. Each machine contains (in addition to bill-of-materials listed components, an array of stuff we consider "shop supplies".

Some components I'd inventory include a lot of items from the McMaster Carr, Grainger, Bolt Bin, and Digikey catalogs. We have racks of pneumatic fittings, electrical conduit connectors, dowel pins, electrical connectors, extrusion hardware, labels, and all manner of other industrial Lego. There's a large area with hundreds of drawers holding alloy cap screws in socket, button, and flat-head in metric and SAE from #4-40/M3 to 1/2-18/M10 in quarter inch/5mm increments. Every tool and die shop, industrial facility maintenance department, auto mechanic, construction contractor, and so on has a similar set of drawers, shelves, and ULine bins that contains stuff like this.

Each item only runs a nickel to a couple dollars each, so it's hardly worth adding to a spreadsheet, checking out of inventory, and cutting a purchase order for a replacement, but our little 20-man shop probably goes through $150,000 worth of these consumables each year in the process of building $10M worth of machines. Keep our fabricators supplied with the components they need, and stop our expensive engineers from spending $50 in time every week or two purchasing these components, and I'd be more than happy to pay for the value it would provide. Which is a lot more than the value that would be provided by keeping my home kitchen stocked with coffee.

Also, from my point of view, the equipment to use to measure this stuff is not ESP8266 modules and a soldering iron, it's an off-the-shelf PLC, some DIN rail and screw terminals, and some load cells or maybe strain gauges if you really want to optimize costs. Get a volume of equipment sold before trying to roll your own full-stack hardware supply chain...but that's beside the point.

[peterwwillis]

Came here to echo this, but for grocery stores ala Amazon's bumbled attempts to optimize Whole Foods stocking.

Your use case and the parent's sound like a good use of JIT Kanban[1], waiting for inventory levels to drop below a threshold to replenish them. However, demand-forecasting[2] may also be useful in the parent's use case, and sometimes both systems are used in a product lifecycle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_forecasting

[mooman219]

This would be killer for the workplace and tracking these incidental materials without spending people hours to do so.

At home, if this is on a per-item basis, I could see you being able to set expiration timers too, and triggering a re-order then.

[seizethecheese]

Thanks for laying out the use case!

I’ve previously worked in restaurants and there’s an analogous problem there. I think this tech will be everywhere someday.

I’mcurious about your insight on the tech. Could you flesh that out a bit more?

[drtse4]

> The only sensor in the scale is a weight sensor.

? Why not add a RFID reader (relatively cheap) to the scale and then add tags on the coffee bags to be able to log the consumption for multiple types?

You could even be able to identify the weight of multiple objects (tracking what's on the scale and how the weight changes when it's removed and when it's put back) on a bigger(longer?) scale.

And you could sell kits with tags that people could slap on their own containers and register multiple custom items.

I agree, "autonomous dash button" is a nice way to present it, but if it was capable of detecting what's on it, it would become more or less a "sentient dash button", way better ;)

[seizethecheese]

Yes, we've thought a lot about this. We could end up doing something like what you describe.

The reason for the current format is that we want the scales to blend into your normal life. The scale is the size of one coffee bag so you just put it where you'd normally put your bag.

[bg451]

Just a note on four barrel: One of their cofounders sexually harassed and assaulted their employees. The other cofounders were aware and complicit until a lawsuit finally hit. They promised to make four barrel employee owned but still have not followed up on that promise: https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/Four-Barrel-...

We stopped ordering from four barrel because of these reasons and I'd recommend you'd consider not carrying their coffee either.

[seizethecheese]

Thanks for the note.

We have been told by Four Barrel that they are now employee owned and that the former owner is no longer involved.

My email is available at my account. If you know for certain that the above is not true, please reach out.

[jchallis]

The biggest stockout problems in my life are those where an inconvenience turns into a big mess. If you can expand your thinking to that problem, I'm very interested.

Specifically:

Toilet Paper

Diapers

Diaper Wipes

Paper Towels

Cat Litter

Laundry Detergent

Sanitary Napkins / Tampons

Auto-coffee refill is something I can avoid. Diaper stockout -- the horror!

[seizethecheese]

Thank you! We're always wondering what the biggest restocking problems are for people.

Your list are all products we're planning to address eventually. The real question is: what do we do next?

[jfk13]

I can't imagine having sufficiently spacious and sparsely-populated household storage that each of these things could live on its own individual scale, to be monitored in this way.

[black-tea]

Use reusable diapers.

[davidgh]

What I want is a scale on both sides of airport security. I weight myself as I enter and weigh myself as I exit and if it matches, I know I didn’t leave anything behind.

Bottomless seems like a clever solution to a common problem. I don’t like subscribing to auto-refills based on dates as I end up with more than I need and causes the reverse of the problem I was trying to solve.

[lianaherrera]

Interesting use case on both sides of airport security!

Yes exactly. It's almost better to go to the store than having loads of product sitting around getting stale.

[curiousfiddler]

I have to confess, that I don't understand the business case, but I applaud your confidence to go after such an extremely niche area (I wouldn't call it a problem). However, if I convince myself to see the value here, I see the real product as the solution around using your scale to work on pantry restocking in general, not just with coffee.

All the best!

[schappim]

Michael and Liana I love what you are doing and the intersection of electronics hardware and e-commerce.

Some background: Hi I’m Marcus. I’ve previously started an IoT company and have just made & patented some WebUSB Shipping Scales and a seperate WebUSB Label Printer (primarily for e-commerce. E.g. creating shipping consignment labels directly from Shopify and other platforms).

We made our own hardware to automate our electronics components e-commerce business and now are looking to share it with others.

Whilst my company sells sensors including the load cells found in scales, we found it way easier to go to China and mod an existing scale, really just switching out the electronics for our own.

I’m wondering what path you took with regards to the electronics. Are the insides a mash of Sparkfun and Adafruit parts?

How did you came to the decision that 3D printing was worth it even for an MVP?

Just out of interest, what wifi module are you using ? I’m guessing an ESPXXXX?

We skipped wifi because our solution had to be idiot proof. Think the difficulty in making a process that would enable your grand parent connect the scale to wifi... I’ve been there, and it still somewhat sucks with cheap wifi modules.

Have you considered HomeKit?

I wonder at what point other technologies like cellular would make sense.

Sorry for all the questions!

Written on a phone. Excuse the typos.

[conductr]

> universal problem

Slight inconvenience != problem. If this works out, I’m going into the catheter business because peeing is universal too.

I do wish you best of luck and hope you find people who care enough to buy your product. This just sounds like an uphill battle to me

Edit to add; I’m not a fan of the weight approach. This assumes a lot and can’t predict what I’ll need tomorrow. Also, it forces me to put things back in their place, no thanks.

[edmundsauto]

Super interesting, congratulations on launching! I think the HN perspective here ("Why can't they just add a packet of coffee powder?) is bog standard + a lot of people aren't your market.

The consumer side is interesting and has been addressed, but I think the more interesting component is you've essentially become an integrated sales partner for a really big industry. I've worked a lot in leadgen, and it turns out that most companies are pretty bad at optimizing for conversions. They pay a lot to keep the inbound requests going, but often they're not very good at handling the needs of a particular channel (especially when that channel has different expectations than their normal customer).

By actually making the sale, you turn coffee companies into a branded drop shipper. That's really really smart, IMO -- you've got the consumer at the purchase point, which is really the chokepoint for a lot of business.

Congrats again!

[alexbecker]

I don't see the value-add of a scale over, say, a button. I'm going to be interacting with the coffee when I use it, why not just leave the decision to re-order to me then?

[seizethecheese]

Thanks for the feedback. We weren't sure a scale would work either. We tested it with some skepticism.

It turns out, leaving your coffee on a scale is intuitive for most people. This actually works as a way to do re-ordering without the user having to think of it at all. It's like a Dash button that presses itself.

For what it's worth, Amazon recently discontinued Dash buttons. :)

[bradknowles]

Can you share your designs of your scale?

What I want is a scale that I can put under the cat food or water bowl (or under the cat litter tray), so that I can measure on a minute-by-minute basis how much water was drunk, how much food was eaten, or how much poop or pee was generated, and see those trends over a long period of time.

Cats are really good about hiding weakness and illness, and we've found that frequently one of the best indicators of health issues is a significant change in the intake and output processes.

You could then follow that up with a bigger scale you can put under the food/water bowl area, so that the cat ends up weighing themselves, every time they go to the bowls.

But I want these things recording this data locally, making it available locally, and not sharing it with any facility that is outside of my home.

[Beefin]

The problems that this batch of YC companies are solving is quite strange. Happy to be proven wrong but it doesn’t seem any of the companies in the winter batch is addressing the RFS problems...

[ham_sandwich]

I just heard about this on Patrick O’Shaughnessy podcast. As a coffee-fiend, I really should look into becoming a customer, and am also interested to see what offerings come next.

Reminds me of a Whitehead quote that I like that can also serve as a heuristic to evaluate business ideas:

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them”

I love that literally everything is abstracted away from the customer. Stuff just appears like magic.

[lianaherrera]

I love that quote, I had forgotten about it. I'm gonna tweet @bottomless :)

[tedmiston]

Any chance you have a link to the podcast episode?

[rangersanger]

I hate subscription services and smart home solutions, but you've hit on an actual solution to an actual problem. I have a subscription with Peace Coffee right now that I have to manually manage. I only subscribed because it saves a good bit of cash. I'm sitting on an extra 5lbs of coffee because I'm not good at that kind of thing. This resolves that.

I'd totally sign up today, but why only a dark roast option? Add light roast and I'm 100% in.

[seizethecheese]

Hey there, you can sign up for any coffee! Sorry our on-boarding flow is a bit confusing.

Just click the "Shop All Coffee" link.

[nathan_f77]

This is awesome! I've been wanting to build something similar to this for many years. I also wanted to hack together a prototype with a Raspberry Pi and scale, and automatically add items to a grocery list whenever the weight dropped below a certain threshold. Automatic ordering and delivery would be great too, but I don't think that would be viable in most countries.

I'd love to have a smart fridge / pantry where every spot on the shelf had a scale, and could detect when things are running low. Unfortunately most of the big appliance companies seem to be spinning their wheels on strange and useless "innovations" like putting Twitter on your fridge.

I think starting with a single product and having a subscription model is a really smart idea. Unfortunately Amazon has an enormous edge, especially after acquiring Whole Foods. Also the Amazon Dash button, and Amazon Go for automatic checkout. I've been expecting Amazon to put out a product like this for a long time (maybe their own smart fridge with automatic restocking.)

So I think it's very brave to go into this market! I hope it works out well with the coffee, and that you're able to expand into other products.