Episode 15 of Lunch Academy (YouTube) features hosts Sam and Sade interviewing Launch Academy alumnus Tom Fitzgerald about his coffee-shop subscription app, Ciply. Tom describes Ciply as an app-curated list/map of high-quality local coffee shops (launching in Vancouver) that processes transactions and offers modest per-drink discounts (example: up to $1 off a $5 coffee). He reports pilot testing over ~1–1.5 months and a closed beta about to launch with ~100 spots (roughly 35 remaining). The episode includes light, local-flavoured banter (weather, Vancouver coffee snob culture) and sets up a coffee taste test.
Questions this video answers
February 2, 2019.
A coffee shop subscription service based around an app that curates top coffee shops in a city.
Vancouver.
All transactions go through the app.
A $5 coffee with up to $1 off (e.g., roughly $4 for certain drinks).
Chapters
Everybody, awesome start. Oh, can I cut that? I. I can't. We're live. Welcome, everybody. This is lunch Academy episode 15, the Redo. Sorry, guys, for. We did actually film an original episode 15, but due to technical, everything went south. I don't want to talk about it. My lawyer said I can't talk about it. Let's not talk about it. But this is Sam here, as always, and as always, my co host, star of the show, Sade. Hello.
Hi, everyone. I'm here with Tom.
Yes, hello.
She took my line.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, you introduced him. That's your part.
This is Tom.
Thanks. That was amazing. That's such an intro. Well worth the wait.
But Tom's one of our many launch Academy alumni and he has a little company called cipli. Do you want to introduce it a little bit?
Yeah, sure. Yeah. I am an alumni here. I had an awesome time when I was here. Ciply. So it is a coffee shop subscription service based around an app. And I curate, or we, as cipli, curate the best coffee shops in a city. And we're starting with Vancouver, and we put them all inside of an app on a map and then a list. And then as a user of that app, you get first off a really great list of coffee shops that are more or less guaranteed to be great. And then if you buy coffee at those coffee shops through my app, you save a little bit of money and it kind of adds value to your buying process there.
Saving money and good coffee.
I had a great analogy the other day that seems to have started to catch on a bit. And it's kind of like a compass card for coffee. So you use that at a coffee shop and you get a little bit of a discount because you use the compass card.
Oh, and is it. Do you have money through the app to pay? Yeah. Oh, interesting.
So all the transactions go through the app. And so for example, you would get something like a $5 coffee for anywhere up to a dollar off of it. So like maybe $4 for a certain type of drink.
Yeah. And if you drink a lot of coffee, that stuff adds up.
It really does. Yeah. We did a. We did a kind of a survey, and I'm thinking people are going to be 30, $40 a month. There are people out there who are like 4, $500 a month on coffee in coffee shops. Like, I drink a lot, but not that much. That's pretty impressive.
They buy for like entire nations at a time. Well, or how pricey are the coffees?
Maybe they. Yeah, maybe they buy Coffees for other people a lot. Like they have a lot of coffee meetings.
I got the feeling that a lot of those kind of high end people were like, they just had a need for themselves. So they were buying like five to ten coffees a day sometimes is my guess.
Yeah, that's crazy.
So what stage are you guys at right now and what's, what's going on right now in Sickly.
Okay, so we are about to launch a closed beta on Monday. So that over the last like week it's been a flurry of marketing campaigns and outreach on social media and on mailing lists. So we've got, got 100 spots open for that of which there are about 40 left. No, probably less than that, 35 left on the closed beta.
Oh, amazing.
Yeah. So we've been doing pilot testing before that for the last roughly a month to a month and a half. And it's been going really well. The customers really like it, the coffee shops really like it, and overall it just seems to be a really great way to, you know, operate a transaction inside of a coffee shop. So I can't wait for Monday. It's going to be a bigger, bigger audience and more testing.
Yeah, I thought day was Monday.
Congratulations on getting everyone on board.
Thank you.
That's awesome.
Awesome. Before we dive too deeply into it, so we have a couple of surprises. So as we all know, Vancouverites love talking about coffee, right? And we're definitely going to talk more about that, but we also need to do the weather report. So take it away.
Coffee in the weather. That's like Vancouver's two main life source of conversation for the weather this week. Everyone, this is my weather forecast. Posed for the people watching live screenshot. Rain and more rain. And then we have some sun later in the week. Like I think Tuesday. Yeah, we have snow.
I thought we were having snow.
Just said we have snow.
Apparently she knows shades butchered the job on the weather report this week because she's not even. She doesn't care.
My brand is to be the worst out there in the world.
She doesn't care because she's leaving.
She's.
She's going to la, so.
But I know the weather for la. It's gonna rain, so I'm cursed.
Good.
It's gonna rain in la.
I hope it rains the whole time.
I'm okay with that. Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Yeah. They went through a drought, they need all the rain they can get.
But like, couldn't they wait a week? I'm trying to catch some sun.
Oh, no, she didn't have enough sun. But on top of that. So thank you for the weather report. Just check the weather app on your own time, guys. If you're tuning in for just the weather report, I mean, we got other issues. So we did have a little bit of an experiment here for you. So before we dive too deeply into it, Shade has run around town picking what we think are some of the best coffees. And now we've put them in these very beautifully labeled Launch Academy mugs. Free plug. Launchacademy.ca. that works. So we're gonna do a taste test.
Just to give you guys a little bit of background. I love coffee, but Tom over here is a coffee expert.
You might say he's like a snob.
Yeah, some.
Some would say snob. Some may even call me a Vancouver coffee snob. See what I did there? Yeah, that's branding right there.
About Vancouver Coffee Snob. It's a real big thing here in Vancouver, and Tom actually started it. And when did you reveal? Because I know that that was on.
This for a long time, like two days ago. Because part of the siply process is that I got. I'm in the videos and so it's. A lot of people know who I am anyway. But it was like the official reveal just the other day because.
Did you check it through with your agent?
You know what? If. If anybody wants to represent me as an agent, my. My expectations are pretty high, but I actually agent free at the moment.
Well, we'll see how this taste test does because maybe that's the end. Coffee Snob. If I win, we'll just call you Launch Academy Snob.
I'm like, that's it. Mic drop.
Walk away. Hang on. Didn't you go out and get these coffees, though? So if you win, it's kind of.
