PAT:
Welcome to this episode of Like a Glove, the startup podcast about product-market fit. I’m your host, Pat East, and we’re recording here in the podcast studio from The Mill in Bloomington, Indiana. The Mill is 19,000 square feet of coworking and incubator space, where our mission is to launch and accelerate high-potential companies, and our vision is to become the center of coworking and entrepreneurship in Indiana. Today’s guest is Jane Kupersmith. Jane?
JANE:
Hi.
PAT:
Hey, thanks for being here.
JANE:
Thanks for inviting me.
PAT:
So, you are currently the assistant director of small business development for the City of Bloomington, but really, today, I want to focus on your life before that. And I guess your current life, which is you’re a coffee shop and roastery owner.
JANE:
Yeah.
PAT:
So, tell us about Hopscotch.
JANE:
So, Hopscotch Coffee is a small batch coffee roastery and coffee shop. We have two locations, and we supply a few other cafes in town. And we sell our coffee at a few different grocery stores. And we are five years old as of October, 2019.
PAT:
Oh, congratulations.
JANE:
Yeah, thank you.
PAT:
You’ve passed that five-year mark. That’s a big milestone.
JANE:
It felt really exciting.
PAT:
Yeah, that’s very cool. And so, how did you and your co-founder start it?
JANE:
There are different ways to answer this question. I think coffee came about for me as a project just because I had left my full-time job after becoming a mother, and I was freelance copy editing around town and was dissatisfied with the types of environments I was hanging out in. I mean, they were great, and I love Bloomington. I’ve been here for a long time. But coffee quality was all over the map, and I knew from visiting other cities that there was a different way to do it. So, I started thinking about this idea, as simultaneously I reconnected with a childhood friend of mine who was roasting coffee in Iowa City, so I would pack my son up and go back and visit him and just nerd out about the business aspect of coffee.
And since I had come from book publishing and was developing and marketing academic books, which is pretty tight market, we were just geeking out about how similarly the products behaved and how it didn’t really matter what they were, but the principles were the same. And then, we were also just geeking out about the coffee itself, and so he was teaching me how to roast, and we were tasting all kinds of great coffees. And he said, “Yeah, screw your day job. You’d be really great at this.” So, after talking to my husband about it, my husband was really supportive and was like, “Yeah. You always talk about your time as a barista as like your favorite job and your favorite thing that you did, and clearly, there’s room for this in Bloomington.” So, we just started pulling the thread and figured we would stop if it didn’t make sense.
The farther we got into it, I realized I didn’t want to just run a roastery, because that’s more production, wholesale, shipping, online store, and I knew that that wasn’t my specific interest. I knew I was really interested in shop life and running a café, but I knew those were two completely separate jobs and would require at least two people to manage those operations. So, after a few different attempts at finding business partners, we ended up with… Well, and I should say, a few attempts, the first of which was Jeff Grant and Erin Tobey, and the last of which was Jeff Grant and Erin Tobey. So, we asked them first if they wanted to partner up, and they initially said no, but then—
PAT:
You had to convince them otherwise. Yeah.
JANE:
Yeah. Well, they kept asking what was going on, and then, eventually, I think they were like, “Okay, we need to—”
PAT:
“We can do this.”
JANE:
Yeah. “We need to make this happen.” So, we signed an operating agreement, I think, January, 2014. Yeah.
PAT:
Awesome. I love these stories where it’s not that you just had this moment of clarity that you’re like, “Oh, I have to do this with my life,” or, “Here’s this one big gap in the market.” It’s lots of small things that you start to piece together the puzzle. So, you had this childhood friend that’s a roaster, and he was teaching you how to do this. And you’re spending a lot of time in coffee shops and various places because you were freelancing, and you just understood, “Okay, there’s a market here.” You used to be a barista yourself, so you understood that side of it. So, yeah, I just love those stories where it’s a long, slow burn, and eventually, you get this idea of, “Okay, I need to put all these things together and do this new thing with my life.”
JANE:
Yeah.
PAT:
Yeah. I love it.
JANE:
And along those lines, looking backward, everything seems like it falls together really easily, but my 20-year-old self who was working at a coffee shop and studying film studies in what would now be a media school, but at that time was a comparative literature department–at that point, I never would have imagined that this was the road I would walk down.
PAT:
Very cool. When you started, how many other roasteries or other cafés were in Bloomington? I mean, you knew that maybe they weren’t hitting the mark in the way you thought they should be, but surely there was still competition here.
JANE:
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I think we have particularly good timing for what we wanted to do because nobody had a joint roasting and café operation, so we were the only ones doing that. Brown County was roasting a lot of coffee and primarily organic. Well, I think it’s all organic fair trade. actually. He’s doing huge volume, but he was available to his customers in a nice way, I think. But his product is quite different from what we were aiming for. And then, after we opened, Needmore, I don’t know how… I think they might be two or three years old. They must be three years old now. But they’re also roasting in their shop. And then, there’s a place in Ellettsville now that has a shop roaster as well. So, when we opened in 2014, nobody else was doing it.
PAT:
Nobody else was doing it, and other folks have either copied you or saw it happen in other cities or just the market moved that way.
JANE:
I don’t think it’s copying at all. I think it’s just what one version of coffee that is appealing to the market right now.
PAT:
Gotcha. So, let’s dive into more of the product-market fit portion. So, what’s your definition of product-market fit?
JANE:
Well, I don’t really have one, and actually, you invited me on this podcast, and I didn’t even bother to Google what this is. But what I assume it is is finding the niche, that connection between what you’re offering and who the end-user consumer is and how you negotiate that relationship, which can be shifty sometimes.
PAT:
That’s perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody has their own definition of product-market fit because, while it’s such an important topic, very few people actually talk about it in depth online. And so, I always say it’s probably the top three things that startups need to understand, but it’s the bottom three things in terms of information that’s available. So, everybody has their own slightly different definition, but all of them have that common theme of, “I need to find the pain in the market.” I like your word “negotiate” with a customer. It shifts quite a bit, because customers aren’t static. Their needs and wants change over time. Yeah.
So, when you had started Hopscotch, did you think about competition and market size, or were you just like, “Nope, here’s this thing I want to do. I want to open my own shop. I’ve got a little bit of a background, and I think there’s a place for it here.” And you just figured things out along the way, or did you do a lot of market research ahead of time?
JANE:
Yeah. Well, lucky for me, in this case the “you” that you’re speaking to is a collective, it was my business partner, Jeff, his wife, and my husband and I. So, Jeff and I were running the day-to-day operations and doing the planning together, so we would try to think about these questions together most of the time. And I think that already broadens our base for how we’re thinking about our product. So, you asked if we were thinking about competition or whether we were just bringing something to market that we felt really confident about. We did feel confident about what we were doing, but we were definitely looking around to see what else was happening in Bloomington and trying to see what we could address and what we could offer that other places weren’t doing.
So, yeah, but there are a bunch of different products within our operations. There’s the coffee that we’re preparing, but we also see the environment that we were creating for customers to hang out in, and also the environment that we were making for staff to work in. We really early on began to feel pretty strongly that the first audience that we were serving is our staff members, and we wanted to make a really great place for them to work. We wanted to offer good coffee, education, and really just a positive environment to work in, which I think maybe hadn’t really been out there before. We wanted to professionalize service industry work.
PAT:
And so, you were thinking about your competition or market not just in terms of, “Okay. Who are my direct competitors for coffee?” But you were thinking about, “Okay, how do we professionalize the service environment? How do we get the employees we want here?” Right? “How do we make this a place that we would want to work here ourselves if we didn’t already own it?” So, you were thinking much more broadly than what business owners initially think about.
JANE:
Being a shop roastery, I think thinking about your staff as one of your primary audiences is becoming more common, which is great because we’re thinking then about workers’ rights and the working environment and fair wages and what we’re offering people. But yeah, absolutely.
PAT:
And you mentioned that you were thinking about what are some of the things that we can offer that other cafés or other roasteries don’t, and so what are some of those things that you ended up doing?
JANE:
Yeah. Well, I don’t want to act like we’ve solved for this, right? It’s a moving target, and we’re still beholden to pretty tight margins. So, it’s an ongoing subject. So, my business partner, Jeff, had been a barista for a long time and helped his in-laws start Rainbow Bakery, which we ultimately purchased in 2017. But because of all of his experience front of house, and I had some but it was already, I don’t know, 15 years old by the time we were opening Hopscotch–he had all of this front-of-house experience and, really, was thinking from the perspective of the barista. “Okay, what’s going to make it easy to provide service? What does a smooth transaction look like at the point of sale? What does a smooth hand-off look like? Where do I want the milk refrigerator to be placed in relation to the espresso machine? Where should the knock box go? What are the right tools for us to make the best and most consistent product?”
So, I think that little hub became really important and is really important. And what’s interesting about it, too… Well, I mean, in the whole question of product-market fit, I mean, I keep thinking about this in terms of a listening exercise, because you have to keep making adjustments. So, in terms of the service side, we have rebuilt our service bar, I think, at least three times. We’ve been through several expansions at Hopscotch, and with each expansion, we are moving infrastructure around that customers don’t really see, but staff is definitely using every day.
PAT:
Yeah. I really love the way that you’ve characterized product-market fit, which is just a listening exercise, right? It’s, you really have to intently listen to your customers, and your customers aren’t going to say, “I want this product,” or, “I want X service.” Right? You have to listen to the things that underlie what they say, and you have to figure out what those are and translate them. And so, when you do things like redo your service bar three times, I think that’s awesome. You’re really listening to your customers and saying, “Here’s what we can do much better in terms of service delivery.”
JANE:
Yeah. Well, and it’s really mind-bending, too, because you’re not just listening to your customers, you have to have enough ego at play to say, like, “I feel really confident about this thing I’m trying to do, and I know that you will like this. And here it is.” But conversely, when the customer is like, “Oh, I like most of this,” or you see that certain items are selling, certain items aren’t. Certain seats are getting filled, certain seats aren’t. You have to really be able to set that ego, the same ego that drove you to do this in the first place, you have to set it down and be like, “Okay, I was definitely wrong in this regard,” and, “Oh, we seem to be on target over here.”
PAT:
Yeah. Yeah. I think you’re coming up some really good insights, and I’m starting to make connections to a few things. So, as an angel investor, one of the things I always look for is founders who are willing to listen. And it’s always been because I want to work with founders who are easy to work with, right? If I’m coaching you or guiding you, I don’t want to waste that time doing that, knowing that you’re just not going to listen to me, but now that I think we’re in maybe episode 10 or 12 of the podcast, certainly double digits, I’m starting to make the connection to, “Okay. If you’re willing to listen to an investor, really, product-market fit is just one big, long listening exercise.” Right? And so, you have to have that empathy with a customer, and you have to have, like you said, you have to have a little bit of an ego to be able to say, “Okay, you weren’t asking for this thing specifically, but I mind-bended a little bit.” Right? “And here’s what I figured out that you really want.”
But also, if it’s not working, you have to figure out how to tuck away that ego, which is more listening. Right? Maybe adjust along the way. And part of that’s admitting you were wrong and you mind-bended the wrong way. Hopefully, it goes right, but it doesn’t always. Right? It’s just constant, incremental listening and adjustments. Yeah.
JANE:
Yeah.
PAT:
I remember being in your shop one time, and I think you offer, I think it’s called Cobra Verde. Is that the specialized canned drink? Am I getting that right?
JANE:
Yeah. Absolutely.
PAT:
Okay. Tell us what that is, and how did that come about? Because that’s different than what a lot of coffee shops offers, so that’s a very unique differentiator.
JANE:
Well, Cobra Verde has its own pretty cool entrepreneurial history. So, as I mentioned, I was visiting my friend Jarrett who owns the Wake Up Iowa City company/Constellation Coffee back in Iowa, so he was roasting coffee and had also developed this green coffee drink. So, the green coffee drink is called Cobra Verde, and we describe it as a green coffee elixir. So, it’s basically green coffee extract with ginger. Well, the original was with ginger and citrus. And then, now, the version that he is canning and distributing nationally is sweetened with fruit puree. And I think it is certified fair trade, and I think it’s also certified organic.
But this has been such an interesting puzzle, and I feel grateful that he invited me in on it. So, there’s some IP at play. But my friend Jarrett was working on product development and knew that he needed some additional input, but he was really, really leery of sharing the recipe. So, we signed an NDA and set up some terms under which Hopscotch would be allowed to sell Cobra Verde. So, we used to make it in-house, and it just was going like hotcakes out of the gate. We started out making it weekly, and it’s pretty laborious. And it’s so laborious that the margins are really tight, but the initial version that we made was so great. So, we were juicing all of these fresh and organic fruits in-house and making the coffee extract ourselves. And I’m trying to think, kegging it, and then selling it via the taps in our shops, and then filling growlers occasionally, too. But we had to stop filling growlers. because we just couldn’t keep up with the demand.
PAT:
That’s great.
JANE:
And in fact, the first year, first two years, this was my breaking point. This is what reduced me to tears at the end of every week. It was like Friday, I was trying to keep up with all my roasting and trying to get the orders filled, try to do the grocery runs, trying to support bar staff if I needed to be on the bar, and then also trying to keep up with the Cobra Verde, which we were selling to The Back Door, which is a local bar. So, we did have one wholesale client, but it was just so challenging. And then, Jarrett kind of knew all along that he wanted to can it and distribute it, but he was just working this problem over time. One problem was like the large-scale manufacturing, since there was so much ginger in it, ginger is like a suspended solid, it never dissolves, so it creates problems with manufacturing equipment. And because you have to do a certain level of filtration, if you’re going to bottle it and have it be shelf stable.
So, he worked around that. I can’t remember how exactly, but it ended up being a refrigerated plastic bottle. And then, it’s been so long, I can’t remember the individual steps. He came around, he found an organic processing plant in Wisconsin, and then came around to the current recipe, begrudgingly, because the ginger has been such an important component of that drink, it’s what everybody really loves about it. But he had to pull the ginger out of it in order to be able to make it shelf stable. So, he did that, was looking at where the friction points were in the process. And so, even though the market wanted that ginger, he knew that he needed to be able to scale up if he was ever going to do what he wanted.
PAT:
And so, how did the market react to not having the ginger, if that’s the thing they really liked and made it fly off the shelves?
JANE:
Well, for us at Hopscotch, because we were, and still are serving customers directly, we just decided to add the ginger shot ourselves. So, we serve it on ice with ginger, so you still get that at our shop. But for customers who are buying the cans in the grocery, I think there was resistance initially, but the original product soon became forgotten. And then, the second product became the thing that people define as Cobra Verde, and so it wasn’t an issue. Because it is really special. I mean, the coffee buzz with the green coffee is just totally different from what you get with roasted coffee.
PAT:
And it’s the literal green coffee bean before it’s all roasted, right?
JANE:
Yeah. Yep. And so, I describe it as being a slow buzz. Like if I drink it in the morning . . . I’m really sensitive to caffeine now, which is unfortunate, but—
PAT:
The irony.
JANE:
. . . it’s like a slow ramp up, and it lasts all day. So, when I rode the Hilly Hundred, I took one bottle of ice water and one bottle of Cobra Verde, and that got me through the day.
PAT:
That got you through . . . That’s funny.
JANE:
Yeah. It’s pretty great. It doesn’t make you feel as jittery as like an espresso will, so it’s quite different. But I think that’s part of what the staying power has been. So, even though the project shifted a little bit, I guess the perception was that the ginger was the defining characteristic, but ultimately, it’s the green coffee—
PAT:
Oh.
JANE:
. . . taste.
PAT:
Oh, interesting.
JANE:
Yeah.
PAT:
Right. Right. So, you had a pivot, but it was an unintentional pivot. You weren’t saying, “Hey, we need better product-market fit because this is what our customers are asking for.” Jarrett needed to scale up this part of the business, so it was hard to do that with ginger. And ultimately, what you figured out was, okay, people like the ginger, but it was really this long, slow-building buzz that they get from it that lasts longer. Right? And also, the taste of green coffee’s different. Yeah.
JANE:
Yeah. It’s really clean and refreshing. It’s just great in the warmer months. So, yeah. And so, then I guess we trained for that with our staff. We just try to, when we have questions that come up pretty regularly with customers, we have a staff discussion about like the best way to handle that. I mean, Jeff and I think about how we want to answer those questions, but we also… Yeah. We chat with our staff about what their methods are for answering them and what’s worked and what hasn’t worked. And then, we try to collectively settle on what the best type of response is. And then, that’s great for staff because they don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they’re having this conversation. They’re armed with a good, solid answer.
PAT:
Right. With the right response. Yeah.
JANE:
Yeah.
PAT:
So, let’s talk a little bit about the staff and I guess the coffee shop, the café portion, a little bit more. You introduced me to this concept of third place maybe a year or so ago, and I think if you’re in the coffee world, you really understand what the concept of the third place is. But it was really insightful for me. So, what’s the third place concept, and why is it important to coffee shops?
JANE:
Yeah. The third place, I guess I might get a different definition if I Google this, but I think of the third place as just being a concept in our modern American culture that’s neither home nor work, where we do community building and gathering. So, I think maybe 100 years ago, you would find this at your fraternal order or your church. We socialize in much different ways than we used to 100 years ago, so now, a coffee shop really fills that void. It’s like a safe space for communication, and especially, I think as we become more accustomed to this digital interaction.
And I’m a solid Gen X-er. I’m 41. So, I don’t want to speak for people younger than me, but I suspect that younger folks are less comfortable winging it with random interactions. And the coffee shop is really safe because it’s pretty scripted, it’s pretty clear what’s going to happen there, what’s not going to happen there, and especially as you get to know a place, you know what the culture or the vibe is.
So, yeah, it’s just a safe space to get that human contact, and people might not be thinking that’s what they’re after when they go there, but I think that’s definitely one of the things that comes out of it. So, when we opened Hopscotch, we were definitely familiar with this idea, but we just wouldn’t have been so forward to think that like, “Yes, we’re going to become the third place for all of our customers.”
PAT:
“This is what people need, this community, this scripted way of being welcomed into a place” versus, “Hey, we want better coffee.” Right? You weren’t thinking, I think rightly so, you weren’t thinking in those terms.
JANE:
We were thinking more about a superior coffee product and a beautiful space, and we hoped that if we made that, people would want to come be there. But as Hopscotch has grown and evolved, it’s just been really lovely to see other people own it, to see customers claim it as their own.
PAT:
Oh, cool.
JANE:
Yeah. And I think that’s another interesting pivot with the ego thing. Like you have to have enough ego to have this vision, and this vision for Jeff and me that was the physical space, we felt strongly enough that we spent a lot of money on it and putting it together. But then, the second you opened the doors, you’re just turning it over to your customers. And I think we really liked what we called “private coffee shop,” where we had the space finished and the machine was running, and we just had to finish all of this work before we opened the doors. So, that little crepuscular moment was really fun. But then, when we opened the doors, it was fun to see how customers made it their own. And one of the things that started happening early was just so much action on Instagram with our custom wall. People loved it, and they loved… They didn’t want to just take a picture of the wall, they wanted to take a picture of themselves in that context because they thought it was cool.
PAT:
Oh, gotcha. Like a selfie of themselves working—
JANE:
Yeah.
PAT:
. . . working against the wall?
JANE:
Yeah. And I just thought that was really lovely. I don’t know.
PAT:
So, one of the things you’re definitely selling is, people don’t just come in for coffee. I mean, some people do, right? They come in, buy coffee or espresso, and then they leave. So, they’re literally buying that product, but other folks are coming in there because they know the coffee is a superior coffee. I think any coffee shop has to have good coffee, but they’re really staying, and they’re really going to Hopscotch versus Starbucks or another coffee shop because of the environment there. It’s, like you said, it’s scripted, they know what to expect, they’re welcome there. Right?
JANE:
Yeah. I think so. I think we offer something different on being on this park space, too, with being located on the B-Line Trail and having these huge windows that just flood the place with light. It’s really peaceful in there, just by the sheer fact that it’s not parked on Walnut or College, which have their advantages, too, right? Yeah. For Hopscotch, it’s great. And especially with the porch space and the warm weather.
PAT:
That particular location, that’s your first location, and colloquially, you call that Hop 1. And so, the second location is called Hop 2, and it feels more industrious. There’s not a place to sit down, it’s really just a walk-up. And so, how did you decide to open up that type of coffee shop versus replicating exactly the first one?
JANE:
Well, we needed the second location to be our production facilities. That was its primary purpose. But before we took over the lease, it had been a tile fab shop, and it had this, I mean I don’t even know how many square feet it is, 50 square foot retail, little… It’s like the point of sale, and that’s it. It’s tiny.
PAT:
Right, right. Yeah. I mean, literally you can fit maybe two or three people in the line up there. Right?
JANE:
Yeah. That was already carved out and separated, and it had a regular door and everything. So, we just felt like that would be a great to-go bar, and I think we felt like it would be cool and European that we were envisioning people coming up and drinking their demitasse and then heading off to work or whatever. But as with everything, it functions a little differently than what we planned. It functions how the customers needed it to function. So, we sell a lot of just to-go drinks all day long, which is great. And then, the other half is our roasting facility. And then, we do some special events there, like in the warmer months, we’ll have events during the Farmers’ Market or we’ll have coffee cuppings. And I had a class there last week, Edible Education through the Food Institute. We had 22 undergrads and a faculty member, and that was super fun.
PAT:
Oh, cool.
JANE:
Yeah. So, it was packed.
PAT:
This production facility is where you roast the coffee. You used to roast the coffee literally in the coffee shop, and so it sounds like you moved that away, or do you do it in both places now?
JANE:
Yeah. No, we moved it out, and that was another course correction with market fit. I think Jeff and I were so excited about coffee roasting and sharing this with our customers that it was a no-brainer to us that we wanted to put the roaster in the cafe. But in reality, coffee roasting, it’s loud, and it’s messy, and it has a totally different aroma from brewing coffee. So, customers just didn’t respond well to it. Nobody liked it. I mean, they were interested in what was happening, but once you’d seen it a time or two, there was not much more to be gained from the customer side except for the inconvenience of the noise, and it was taking up a lot of space. So, we made so many adjustments to that space. I think the first thing we did was expand. I think we expanded the space—
PAT:
Oh, expanded into the empty space next door.
JANE:
Yeah.
PAT:
Yep. I remember that.
JANE:
We doubled the square footage. And then, the second thing we did was rent the Hop 2 garage and moved the roaster out. And then, we added the beer bar, and then now we’re getting ready to expand again, which is pretty unbelievable. You can tell we have like the least-efficient approach to, I don’t know what, our operational footprint.
PAT:
Let’s talk a little bit more about the beer bar. How did you decide to offer adult beverages at a coffee shop?
JANE:
Yeah. I think that was another case of us making an adjustment that we felt like we would like if we were a customer. I think we selfishly wanted a place where we could go have a beer that wasn’t a bar and that was bright and cheery. And on the park, we could imagine having a beer and then taking a walk or whatever. So, it’s pretty self-centered.
PAT:
So, it’s really just, “Hey, we had this idea, we’re going to scratch our own itch.” I mean, you did the beer bar at least two years ago now. Right?
JANE:
I think it’ll be two summers ago.
PAT:
Yeah. And so, it’s still around, so it’s gone well, right?
JANE:
Yeah. It’s great. It’s great. It’s been interesting. We don’t do a huge volume, but it definitely attracts more customers in the evening. Our evenings used to be so quiet before. So we added hours, and then just having the beer brings in more foot traffic. And it makes it more fun for events, too.
PAT:
Oh, sure. Sure. So, normally, the last question I always ask is, what’s the single biggest thing folks can do to get better product-market fit? You’re a really, really good listener. I can just tell by the stories you say and how you have this intuition for, “Okay. Here’s what we do next.” In the case of the beer bar, it’s, “Here’s what we would like,” but literally everything else you’ve said is, you’re trying to make incremental changes around the customer. Right? And so, listening is clearly the thing that you do really well and what folks can do to get better product-market fit. But maybe let’s get a little analytical and scientific about listening. How does somebody listen better? I know that’s a really general question, but what do you think makes you such a good listener?
JANE:
I don’t know that I’m a great listener. I mean, I think I have raging empathy. My empathy is just off the chain, and I think that I have to work pretty hard to shut that down sometimes.
PAT:
Oh, really?
JANE:
Yeah. So, I don’t think I’m a typical entrepreneur maybe. Not that entrepreneurs aren’t empathetic, but I don’t know that that’s always what they lead with. And I also think I’m risk averse, which may be why my business partner is running our business and I’m working at City Hall.
PAT:
Right. You’re working for the government. Yeah.
JANE:
Yeah. Like what could be more opposite? So, I think just practicing empathy, and I think about a couple things. I think in envisioning it as like . . . Oh, damn it, I’m going to forget the name of the book. Atticus Finch. To Kill a Mockingbird.
PAT:
To Kill a Mockingbird. Yeah.
JANE:
Okay. Let me just qualify this by saying I didn’t read the second book because the author didn’t want that to be published, and I know the second book is very problematic. So, I—
PAT:
Well, the second book just came out like in the last few years, right?
JANE:
Yeah. So, I naively occupied the space of the first book. But there’s a line in which Atticus Finch says, “To understand somebody else, you have to get in their shoes and walk around.” And I actually think about that image a lot, and I think it helps to think about physically shifting your perspective and physically trying to occupy the space of your customer. Like who are they? Where are they? How are they getting to your place? Yeah. So, I like that idea. And then, in terms of being a better listener, I think I have a problem. I know because my husband tells me I do this, and even when I was going for my job interview at the City, he was like, “Don’t—
PAT:
“Don’t do this.”
JANE:
. . . don’t interrupt. Let people finish their statements.” But I get so enthusiastic that I try to sub in the answer before the person I’m speaking to is finished. So, I really am now trying to practice active listening and stopping whatever narrative I’m building in response to the thing that the person just said. And I’m really just trying to accept—
PAT:
Just trying to gather all the information.
JANE:
The information. Yeah. And I think that takes a lot of effort, even though it seems like it should be really easy.
PAT:
I really liked the idea of practicing empathy as this physical thing you do, too. Like you don’t physically walk another mile in somebody else’s shoes, but you are picturing doing it in your mind versus, “Hey, how would I get to Hopscotch? Well, I would just go from my car, or I would just drive in my car from my home.” You’re literally saying, “How does anybody get there?” Right? Some people are going to walk on the B-Line, some people are going to take a Lime there. Some people are going to drive there, and so what does parking look like? Right? Yeah, you’re literally going through all those steps in your mind, which I think is a interesting way to approach how to think about your customers.
JANE:
Yeah. And I don’t know that it’s right, but it’s definitely in the way that I do it. And it works, I think, for retail food service in a way that might . . . It might not be the most productive way for other businesses, but for us, it’s really good. And even the exercise of thinking about transportation, with each mode of transportation, and then it walks you through a deliberate visioning process where you’re thinking about what the friction points might be for each of those. And then, some you’ll have to look and be like, “Yeah, that kind of sucks for that person, but it’s not realistic for us to address that.” So, some you just hang out with, and others, you try to fix.
PAT:
Right. Yeah. So there’s some problems that you can’t fix. Right? Or they aren’t worth fixing. I think when you said the word “deliberate,” I think that’s what I like so much about it is. You’re being very deliberate about how you think about your customers, trying to physically walk in their shoes and going step by step being very intentional about that.
JANE:
Yeah.
PAT:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. All right. That does it for this episode of Like a Glove. Jane, thank you for being on.
JANE:
Thanks, Pat. This is really fun.
PAT:
Yeah. This was very fun. So, if folks want to find you online, how did they go about doing that?
JANE:
Well, hopscotchcoffee.com is our main website, and we have contact info there. And then, we also have pretty robust social media. I think we’re @hopscoffee. And then, we also own Rainbow Bakery, which has a really, really beautiful Instagram, and it’s just @Rainbowbakery.
PAT:
And Rainbow Bakery, we didn’t really talk about that a lot because I was really more focused on the coffee side, but Rainbow Bakery is . . . Is it still a gluten-free bakery?
JANE:
Some of it is gluten-free. It’s all vegan.
PAT:
Okay.
JANE:
That was its identity when we got it.
PAT:
When you got it?
JANE:
Yeah.
PAT:
Yeah. Okay, great. And what’s your contact info at the city if want to reach you there?
JANE:
Jane.Kupersmith, K-U-P-E-R-S-M-I-T-H, @bloomington.in.gov.
PAT:
All right. Great. Thanks again just for being on.
JANE:
Yeah, thank you for having me.
Like a Glove is a production of The Mill, a coworking and business incubator space in Bloomington, Indiana. Our mission is to launch and accelerate high-potential companies, and our vision is to become the center of coworking and entrepreneurship in Indiana. You can learn more about The Mill at dimensionmill.org. Thanks for listening, and be sure to check back every other Monday for new episodes.