How to Turn Your Passion Into a Thriving Business: Lessons From Those Who Made It

ONE37pm and Squarespace have teamed up to create an editorial series that offers resource support and expert advice for entrepreneurs and small business owners in our community who want to start or grow their own business. You can try Squarespace for free to create your own website, then use code “ONE37pm” to get 10% off when you’re ready to go live.

In today’s world where entrepreneurship reigns, the opportunity to learn from others who have blazed (or even blundered along) the trail before you is a must. And while often times advice comes along unsolicited, there are certain gems worth bookmarking. 

One such piece of advice comes from the founders of Superlost Coffee, Craig Deahl and David Roa. From the very start, the duo knew that their coffee business would be based online, so creating a website was a must. Enter: Squarespace. In the three years since Deahl and Roa used the platform to build their e-commerce site, they’ve seen immense growth, and most recently secured a partnership with Whole Foods.

ONE37pm caught up with the founders to talk about the strategy used to grow their business and their thought process behind the website. Read more to hear about how it played a major role in helping Superlost Coffee become what it is today.

ONE37pm: You started Superlost Coffee back in 2017. Tell us about that journey.

“Our coffee roasting business was born on our Squarespace website. We sourced coffee from a farm we visited in Colombia, roasted it, packaged it with cool art, but needed a place to sell it. Since we had no brick-and-mortar location, we decided to launch our brand online. After having a few very successful runs, it started to attract the interest of restaurants and our wholesale business was born. Three years later and we have a fairly large coffee roasting operation, including selling our beans in Whole Foods. It all came from that initial Squarespace website we made.”

Obviously, the decision to start a website for your business is a critical one. What was that process like for you in terms of selecting a resource?

“There are so many tools online for creating websites, and quite frankly, it was a bit overwhelming. After a bunch of research, we concluded that Squarespace made the process of starting and launching a website much easier. For us, the two most important things were the ease of set-up and analytics. Building our site by customizing a template made setting up extremely easy, and once we got going, we realized the analytic tools were unmatched. Being able to tell where our traffic was coming from and how it was happening was really useful for growing our business.”

As far as the design and branding, how did you choose?

“Squarespace made that fairly easy to do using one of their many templates. We were able to find a layout that we liked, and then we slowly started adapting it to our taste. Since we were able to customize nearly every single component, the more changes we made, the more our own voice started to shine through. The way our site looks now really feels like it tells the story of who we are and we are quite proud of how it turned out.”

How important has your website been to the growth of your business?

“We can’t emphasize enough how crucial our website is to our business. It’s the single most important piece. It literally connects all aspects of our business into one package. Being able to have a single place where people can learn about our brand, order coffee for themselves, order cold brew kegs for their office or watch videos of our journey is invaluable. During COVID-19, it was honestly the main thing that kept us afloat—it shifted so much demand online we saw tenfold growth year-to-year on our site.”

What advice would you give to new startups that are looking to build a website?

“Building a website from scratch can be intimidating, but momentum is everything so it’s crucial to get your site up and running as fast as possible. Squarespace made it so that we could get our business up and running in one day. The analytics and tools provided were essential in getting to know who our customers were in those early days, and they become more important the bigger you become. There’s never been a better time to start a business, and with Squarespace, it literally has done most of the back-breaking work for you. All you have to do is add your product and you’re set!”

Head to Squarespace.com to get started on a free trial and when you’re ready to launch your website, use the offer code ONE37pm to get 10% off your first purchase.