I’ve long wanted to own a coffee shop. The past few days I’ve been wrapping my head around a “curated coffee house” (apparently a few already exist). Meaning, I don’t have one specific roaster to supply beans, but a number of high-quality roasters to offer my patrons a selection. I’m terrible with remembering everything I think of on a whim’s notice, so I’m going to start my business plan (term used loosely) here.

I chose the name CurrentBlend for the possibility of this type of shop, so we’ll stick with it.

After you read this, let me know if you want to invest. I’m dead serious. I want to do this. Just need to figure out where…

DECOR
Charcoal grey walls – almost black. Wood, high-standing tables, standing mostly with a few spots to sit. Small patio out front with a few chairs. We’re going for a European vibe, so I want a small space. I’m not interested in having patrons stick around for hours. Frankly, I’m going to continue my consulting practice and will use this to compliment the business. I view it more as a place to stop in for a quick beverage, read the paper, have a chat and go. Speaking of reading the paper, there will be the Financial Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and others, tons of magazines and other periodicals I find to leave out. Much of the look will be rustic with re-purposed items used throughout. Tables of reclaimed wood, jars as coffee cups, copper piping as magazine racks (bathroom?), pink, grey and black accents. Travel cups are going to be pink (maybe grey or black).

ROASTERS + MACHINES
Curated by CurrentBlend, we’d select the different roasts we want to serve and price accordingly. Similarly, we would have a line up of machines to make both coffee and espresso in anyway a patron would want. Possible roasters to feature include: Stumptown, Ugly Mug, Intelligentista, Blue Bottle, Dunkin Donuts, Cafe Bustelo, Chock full of Nuts, Gimme!, Cafe Du Monde. We can offer regions, specials, etc.

I would love to be able to offer coffee from different machines. Drip coffee, chemex, handpresso, perkalator, french press to name a few. And, same with espresso. Can you imagine a whole lineup of espresso machines and you say “Stumptown roast, hand pulled espresso, two shots”. Oh dear I’m getting excited. Too much to think about and link to right now. Check out my delicious feed and my tags (coffee and espresso) for more.

MENU
Espresso or coffee. Short or big cup. Stay or go. Sugar (rock candy!) and milk available. Warm or cold milk. No steaming, No frothing. No mocha. No whipped cream. Coffee, like it should be served. Maybe a cappuccino if you’re nice. Debating on having a pot of steamed milk available that way you can order espresso or coffee and do the rest your self.

One thought I’ve kicked around for a while is the $1 coffee. I think the model works and here’s how I’d recommend. A constant pot of coffee brewed in the shop off to the side. Cups, sugar, milk setting there with a Square or honor system jar. Customers who are in a rush and/or want a quick cup to go can serve themselves for $1 and be on their way. Nothing fancy, just a quick cup.

Other thoughts: cold brewed coffee with real coffee ice cubes, irish coffee, coffee to go, featured recipes (affogatos, shakerato and cowboy coffee for example), complimentary mint with your coffee, and figure out a way to make these little dudes.

There’s a ton more, but that should give you the gist. I think the idea fits the name, CurrentBlend! Let me know if you think it could work or you want to help!

Digital shops can bring not only the expertise of management consultants, but also the tech chops to execute, he said. “Our model is more powerful because not only can we come up with these ideas, but we can build them,” he said. “A lot of great ideas would fail if they’re not well designed.”

Well said (oh yea, hi!).

To say Andy Spade has the life I want to live is an understatement. He built two brand (Kate and Jack Spade) and now has a branding studio/storefront, Partners & Spade, which is my dream studio/client list. Reading this New York Magazine feature only made me swoon even more for his life.

As a small elite group they believe there is a need to provide creative branding solutions across every platform. They can do it quicker and more efficiently then the traditional agency model. They can also do it cheaper without sacrificing the quality of the work. Arguably the work may be better.

I believe this to be true.

Ideas are free. It’s the implementation that costs. I’ll tell you all my ideas, but how I’d implement it is a different story. So, what Charlie says makes a ton of sense to me and how I (try) to do business.

If I don’t know you, go find three opportunities at startup companies that you think you could kick ass at.  It’s so easy to find… just do a job search on Indeed.com or on the First Round jobs page.  Outline a couple of ideas for ways in which that company could improve its efforts related to that job.  Ex: “As Community Manager, I would get Modcloth on Tumblr because their users are already talking about the company there and it’s the right demo.”  That’s the kind of thing that I can just forward outright to the CEO and say, “Check out this person’s awesome ideas.”

In order to quantify all the responses, I had to essentially transcribe each entry into tags that I could sort and filter. For each question, I would run through the responses and extract the pertinent information… the things I ate or drank, where we went, the topics we discussed. Everything was reduced to a tag with as much specificity as provided.

Personal metric maven Nicholas Felton had that to say about the data he collected for his 2009 Annual Review. He’s really on to something, as I’m sure you can gather. But it’s something that I don’t think he specifically addressed. Measurable data is widely available for us, as marketers, to tally, measure, analyze and use. Surveys aren’t a necessity any more; they’re a nice to have.

I’ve always had issues with (filling out) surveys. For one, I’m constantly trying to figure out what the survey is really getting at. Second, they are typically too long and when they are offer me choices, like a multiple choice question, the answer I want to put is never there (it’s easier to measure though is what we’re told). And lastly, what’s the incentive for filling out the survey truthfully?

My belief is that we can use the internet for our surveys. Take for example, Turkey Twitter. We started out with the specific hashtag we wanted to measure (#turkeytwitter), however as we saw what was happening we realized there were 3 or 4 different hashtags that would gather better information.

Now, how can we pull data bits that are valuable out of a tweet that says, “I’m #thankful for friends, my dog beau, this cranberry sauce and world peace”. It’s easy. By analyzing what is in the data set we can break down that this person was thankful for “friends”, “dog”, “cranberry sauce/food” and “world peace”. It sounds simple, but I’m not sure how well it’s being used. Maybe someone could point me to some examples out there (companies using this data, tools out there, etc)?

So, I guess my point is that the web has allowed us this infinite pool of data to use for our research. I propose we, as marketers, do our jobs and use this data more routinely in our work.

PS. Having said all that, I do want to use a similar survey mechanism that Felton used for his survey. I think that’s powerful data and the quantified self is something I’m very interested in. In his case, he had to initiate the data through a survey as there are likely no tweets that will specifically address a meeting with him to the level of data he was interested in tracking. Sounds like a pretty good excuse to get some letterpressed business cards!

Please allow me to welcome you to JoshPremuda.com version 2.0. I decided this site needed a new feel, so I re-branded the whole site. I was never really happy with the previous look and hadn’t finished what I had planned – I’m sure you could tell – so I scrapped it all. While I won’t say it’s complete (it’s always a work-in-progress), I will say that the majority of the site is complete and updated. For further detail into things, read on. WARNING: it’s long, but I’m proud of my site, so please read it.

SUBSCRIBE
I’ve made it much easier to subscribe to www.joshpremuda.com. There are three ways (at this point) you can get your JP fix: (i) visit www.joshpremuda.com, (ii) subscribe via RSS and/or, (iii) subscribe via Email. You pick. I just want you subscribed, please. And, as added motivation, I’m planning on deleting my Facebook account, so that’s one less way for you to stay up-to-date with me.

By the way, I’ve subscribed to the email version of this site and it’s a rather cool way to take in my content. One email shows up with the days posts. You get to see it in your inbox and it’s shows how my mind progressed (or digressed) that day.

SPONSOR
It’s much easier to sponsor me. I’m cheap and I like to barter; I really just want this site to pay for itself, so if you have something you’re interested in promoting, contact me and we can work out an arrangement. You get your ad above the fold, a couple of tweets and likely a post or two, so it really works out to your advantage. First sponsor is my company, CurrentBlend (I’m in the process of updating that site as I type this – more on that later).

STYLE
The most obvious change is the color palate. I’ve always enjoyed the color orange and figured why not use that here. I wear an orange watch band daily and apparently it has some pretty cool meanings (I’m not sure that’s the right word, but you catch my drift). All hyperlinks should appear as orange, so anytime you click one of those, you’re going to a new page. Also, those little orange rectangles on the main page (above the posts) are the permalinks, so click those (or the link called “Comments”) if you want to comment or read more of the comments. And, the big orange rectangle will always take you back to the homepage. So, I guess you can say now that orange is my new black (although I don’t really like black outside of a tuxedo or athletic gear, but that’s a completely different story).

Also changed is the font choices. I went with Helvetica since I think it’s much easier to read, and it’s tons prettier. Titles are Palatino (and are typically hyperlinks – but they’re grey, not orange like all other hyperlinks; I misspoke earlier – so they should take you somewhere should you click on them).

ORGANIZATION
I wouldn’t say I reorganized everything, but I did make some changes to the presentation. I’ve added a “Comments” counter on the main page along with a more visible tagging display. This way I hope you begin to comment more and use the tags to explore other posts that are related.

I’ve updated the About, Archive, Contact and Subscribe pages and have plans to add a few more pages (e.g. Beau, Sponsor, and Reviews to name three).

There are a few other items I’ll leave up to you to find and I will also be rolling out some other pages and such (updated footer, contact page, random post function, twitter implementation, archive re-org), but will let you know as those happen.

COMMENTS
I’ve gone with Disqus to control comments and I’ve made the comment link much more prominent on the main page as I’d like to encourage discussion. The fun part for me of posting all this information is the responses I get in return. Rather than on Facebook where it’s a limited conversation, I’d prefer to have all the discussion take place here on this site.

Using Disqus will allow you to subscribe to comments via email so you can stay up on the discussion. So, let’s get the conversation going. Having said that, you can always send me an email: joshpremuda AT gmail DOT com.

This statement by Mike Arauz sums up my feelings on personal brands and how I’m cultivating CurrentBlend’s brand.

Our company’s online brand is really the sum of the online brands of the individuals who work there.

I LOVE Salt 101. Highly educational, interactive, non-preachy and it provides credibility with Alton Brown (loving the bow tie and tweed suit too, ps). It takes some searching to realize that it’s been presented by Diamond Crystal Salt. Smart move and I’d love to know who set this up for them. This is the sort of content I love.

As a side note, I am very curious about the different types of salt and the best uses for them. I’ve heard that regular table salt isn’t the best option for salting food.

Fleur de sel – Or Malden’s or whatever your preference is. Regular table salt isn’t ideal for salting food after it’s served. Malden comes in nice flakes that melt nicely on the food. Meg prefers fleur de sel but I find it too crunchy. A 4 oz. container will cost you $11 — 3 times as much as 3 pounds of table salt — but it’ll last for months or even years.

TurkeyTwitter was a lot of fun and was a smashing success in my mind (as of 9:26p EST we have 69,506 tweets tracked). Thanks to everyone who participated, tweeted, and blogged about it. I especially want to thank Gary Petro and Chad Weinman for helping me see this idea through. I’m already thinking of ways to make this applicable in different ways.

Anyway, it was a fun couple of days and I thought I’d do my best to capture some of the links, reports and other press we go from it. If you have more, please put it in the comments or email it to me (jpp AT currentblend DOT com).

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Dan Schawbel thinks we just want press from Techcrunch. I respond.

Washington Post and Business Insider republish the Techcrunch article to give baby his first WaPo story.

The Christian Science Monitor interviewed me where I had this to say about eating and tweeting.

“I hadn’t really considered people eating and tweeting – I hope they don’t. Maybe we [should] schedule time to tweet thanks before or after the meal,” he said.

MediaBistro is surprised to find that a former auditor can think of something like this, creating my favorite line of all this.

(Other interesting note: The site was thrown together by a Denver-based IT internal auditor, an Ohio-based IT audit and security consultant, and a third guy who, if our Web sleuthing did us right, is a Chicago-based Web specialist at the Society of Actuaries. Criminey, who knew auditors and actuaries could be so fun?)

Vator News interviewed me as well and offered a spot on critique of the site. There’s even a CurrentBlend plug in there. And, maybe even future plans…

I asked him if he had plans for future holiday-Twitter-themed sites, in which he responded, “We’ve talked about a couple other instances where this could be fun to do, but have no definite plans right now, but having said that, stay tuned.”

Web Pro News chimes in and says if someone made a Thanksgiving Twitter site, they’re talking about it on Thanksgiving. Case Closed.

Yahoo News Wire gets this (from CS Monitor) too.

ABC out of Toledo, Ohio (the news station I grew up watching) covered TurkeyTwitter as well.