Mike Lackman - Trade Coffee | Purpose & Passion in Business - Episode 32

Conquer The Noise

In this episode of Conquer The Noise, Mike Lackman (CEO, Trade Coffee) speaks with Jonathan (CCO, Unconquered) about how Trade Coffee offers deeply personalized specialty coffee subscriptions to their customers.

Trade Coffee is a platform that connects the best craft roasters in the country to consumers who want to make better coffee. The company delivers fresh, on-demand coffee by creating deeply personalized experiences for coffee lovers. It offers a highly modular solution with 8 different frequency intervals and quantities to choose from.

Mike explains how Trade Coffee uses an online subscription model to provide their roasters with consistent business. He stresses the importance of ethical standards and how they are Rooted in the philosophy of direct relationships between roasters, farms, and importers. They ensure all stakeholders with living wages and a further investment in those crops.

Their goal is to be able to provide easily accessible and affordable solutions to specialty coffee buyers. The personalization happens through buyers answering a simple quiz followed by an extensive data analysis. According to Lackman, , measuring customer loyalty is one of the most reliable success metrics for the business.

Lackman’s vision for the company is to scale the business to reach a much larger audience and do so without compromising on quality. He explains how focusing on the smallest audience segment is among the hardest things to do. He says that Trade Coffee is one of the few businesses for which a picture is not worth a thousand words because the narrative that data provides is more important.

As for marketing, he says the company advertises to a broader target group as opposed to spearfishing for hyper-targeted audiences. For the team at Trade Coffee, it’s more about identifying interest groups that disproportionately fit with what they’re trying to do and how to get better at catering to them. They heavily invest in influencer marketing as they believe the narrative is key to their story. This strategy has been very valuable for the company says Lackman, explaining how people showed up and understood the pitch better when it was delivered through a trusted source.

The conversation ends with Lackman explaining how he believes it is important to set expectations of what success looks like for the company and trust the organization’s stakeholders in the process. He concludes by saying it is necessary to allow the team to take bets confidently while knowing that some of these might not work.