How PrepIt Solves Coffee Shop Operations with Focused SaaS Development

Every day I would get messages asking, "Who finished that task?" or "Who is supposed to do that?" or "How much oat milk do we have?" That made me think of some system. The first was a workaround on Notion, but it was not perfect, slow, and had extra stuff people didn't need, and was overly complicated to use. I gathered some information from other baristas and managers to see pain points and validate the issue. I built my first MVP just as a shop station for iPad, with no managers' access, PINs, or anything. It was way better than my workaround with Notion. My staff and managers agreed and liked it way better than manual ways to track everything. Digital recipes were easy to adjust, track the inventory deductions, clock in, and clock out with a digital checklist with timestamps and initials. Then, after MVP, I started working on the backend with RLS. That's how I started building PrepIt.

One growth tactic that worked for sure was talking about a very specific problem instead of trying to pitch the whole product. Posts about inventory, batch prep, and coffee shop operations got much better engagement than generic “we’re building a platform” updates. LinkedIn gave me a lot of useful feedback from fellow coffee shop managers and baristas. I finally could get some useful info from people working in different environments. What completely didn't work was broad self-promotion as a founder of something. Straight product promo without a useful takeaway did a lot worse because people usually do not care about a new tool unless the problem feels real first. Also, I don't think other startup founders are helpful; 90% of them are not useful. Or maybe I was not doing a good job with communication. That's my first startup, and I learn while doing it. I also tried to hire multiple people for different positions (backend, frontend, and mobile/Swift) and ended up with just one developer, which was more helpful.

They complained about the clarity of the demo data. I played with it a bit and changed it to be clearer. The second most popular complaint is that the design feels disconnected. A good example would be two blocks on one screen. One has data, and the other has a selector to change the time frame for that data, but they look like two completely different tools or features. For me, as a developer, it was easy to understand how everything works because I built it or other developers did that with my approval. For users, the same thing was not as clear because they saw it for the first time. Some of the staff members never used digital systems for managing shops. They were using paper notes, group chats, or marker boards. I gathered some feedback from those people and from people who never dealt with systems like PrepIt and adjusted the design so it feels like a united system.

First. A lot of people and businesses think coffee shop operations can just be managed with spreadsheets. That works up to a point, but it breaks down really fast. Spreadsheets are not a strong system for privacy, accountability, speed, or day-to-day reliability. Once a business needs real structure, role-based access, and consistent execution, spreadsheets and manual tools like paper and pen stop being enough. Second. A lot of people underestimate how operationally complex coffee shops and other hospitality businesses actually are. From the outside, it can look simple, but behind the counter there is inventory, batch prep, recipe consistency, opening and closing routines, shift handoff, and constant coordination. People don't see the messy group chats or marker boards full of notes for missing ingredients or stop-lists. It is not a lightweight workflow, and generic tools like spreadsheets or self-made systems usually miss that. Finally. Managers are not the only users. There are also staff members, SMM, and volunteers. They all need one system.

Over the next 6 months, the focus is on making PrepIt more connected and more useful in daily shop operations. That includes integrating with popular POS systems, linking SOPs directly to tasks, adding invoice and receipt scanning, expanding notifications and reminders on iPad, and building widgets for faster visibility and access. Another big project is making a roastery mode, possibly adding curves for roasting, green/roasted coffee calculations, inventory transfers between the roastery and the coffee shops, and shared calendars and schedules.

That's my first project like that ever. I built a system on Notion for the coffee shop I worked for, but it wasn't enough. I had more than 3 years of experience in hospitality, so I knew what I was dealing with. On the hard skills side, I was not coming from years of building large software companies, but I was not starting from zero either. I took multiple classes in college while getting my degree in computer science, including Python, Java, C++, and SQL. Before building PrepIt, I was working as a freelance frontend developer, making websites for different companies and local businesses in my hometown. That was COVID time, so it was a pretty successful gig.

The biggest mistake was trying to think too broadly too early. I wanted to be a prefect all-in-one coffee shop operations system right away, starting from the MVP stage. My perfectionism delayed the actual start of the project by months, just because I wanted my project to be perfect. It is easy to want to solve every operational problem at once, especially when the space and the market have so many gaps. What I learned is that focus matters more than ambition and perfectionism. A product gets stronger when it solves a smaller set of real problems well before trying to expand to a huge company.