1 session inside Boa
Jaryd Terkelsen
Co-founder, Before You Speak Coffee
Jaryd Terkelsen grew up on Magnetic Island off Townsville, trained as a carpenter and spent six years building homes and mining camps before moving into sports nutrition retail and personal training. He founded Before You Speak Coffee in 2017 with a business partner, starting with a single performance coffee product. The brand is now in more than 1,500 retailers nationally, has just gone national across Woolworths, and has signed partnerships with Formula 1 driver Jack Doohan and the Alpine F1 team.
The session
What Jaryd teaches
Improve an existing daily habit rather than replace one
Jaryd's starting question was "what's going to replace coffee?" He changed it to "why replace it when we can just improve it?" Coffee is the most widely consumed beverage behind water and people do not skip their morning cup, so adding vitamins and minerals means the customer gets the upside without changing behaviour. If you want a big brand, pick something already inside a daily habit or routine.
From Before You Speak Coffee: from one SKU to 1,500 retailers →Launch with one product and one audience
Before You Speak launched with a single performance coffee, still its number one seller today. With limited resources you are the marketing team and the customer service team, so pushing multiple messages to multiple audiences makes your own life harder. Get one product moving, then use customer feedback to guide what you build next. The unsweetened range and other SKUs came later.
From Before You Speak Coffee: from one SKU to 1,500 retailers →Do not order 10,000 units on your first purchase order
Their initial PO was 10,000 boxes. It took roughly nine months to sell through, which Jaryd calls not the smartest move on cash flow. Size your first order against a realistic sell-through window, not against your ambition, because that inventory is cash you cannot spend on acquiring customers.
From Before You Speak Coffee: from one SKU to 1,500 retailers →Formulate for the market, not for your own palate
Neither Jaryd nor his business partner drank coffee with sugar or sweetener, but market research showed most people take coffee with milk or sugar, so they built the product with stevia. They did not love the first samples. It grew on them, and it became the best seller. Build for how the majority actually consumes the category, then niche later.
From Before You Speak Coffee: from one SKU to 1,500 retailers →
Watch the full sessioninside Boa.
Session notes are free. The recordings, the live advisories and the founders in the room are for members.