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Lavazza together with stovetop mocha machines are a solid choice IMO. Plus you can buy that brand all over the world. You won't win any specialty points though...

You sure they are blends for espresso? Italian brands or "american" brands.

Not sure about the authority of this page:

> Most of these Italian blends (Illy is the exception) clearly make effective and imaginative use of coffees of the robusta species

http://www.coffeereview.com/italy-seen-from-america-nine-gen...

It took me a while to figure this out.

I also grew up with italian espresso and I always wondered why all these crafty, specialist roasters (all over the world) can't do a drinkable espresso and always end up with undrinkable acid in a cup.

A lot of italian espresso blends are a mix Arrabica/Robusta. Robusta beans create the sought-after strong/bitterish italien espresso flavor and probably also reduce/mask/balance the acidity.

Robusta beans according to the crafty roasters are low quality garbage, and they only care about arrabica beans. Clever marketing by the arrabica industry? Robusta beans have a bad reputation because they are majorly used by cheap coffee brands - but not all robusta beans are the same either.

So because third wave/hipster coffee shops only do arrabica, but italian style espresso needs a blend. That's why we can't have a good things.

I simply order espresso machiato when i want an espresso, the bit of milk foam reduces acidity to an acceptable level.

There is a longer article somewhere on nytimes about this topic. can't find it anymore.

The cellar of my home in Switzerland also acts as a bunker and has massive concrete doors (0.5m thick). When I was a kid, inspectors came by to check that enough water and food was stocked and not too much stuff inside the cellar. There was also a list of which bunkerless neighbour you have to host in case of emergency.

Basically, get a lot of domain knowledge about a market, understand your customers, etc. Build trust. Don't focus on profit initially.

Pick a niche market. Talk with 5 businesses in that niche market about their pain points. Discuss with them their painpoints, repeating tasks or reports. Then crystalize a problem that all of these businesses have in common. Find a freelancer that creates a quick&dirty prototype that solves the problem to some extend. Show them the prototype and have them subscribe to a 50-100$ plan. Fix all bugs in a reasonable timeframe. Now either automate more of their work, or find more people in that niche to buy your software.

Niche markets: Pick any existing popular SaaS that non techies use that have an API and some community (discussion board or forum) you can reach out to. Ecommerce: Shopify, bigcommerce, magento. Payments: stripe, wordpress, stripe, braintree. Accounting: xero, quickbooks.

- Do not code yourself, it requires great discipline. It's always more fun to code than to talk with customers. - Businesses are happy paying money even for a terrible product if it makes their lives easier. - People love to talk about their problems (aka how you can extract money from them). - There's multiple ways to start a business, this approach is just one of them. - Don't read too much blog posts and business books about online businesses. They are confusing you and holding you back. Business is a skill like programming, you learn more actually coding, than reading about how to code.