It started with a coffee grinder.
I was sitting at my desk at MetaLab, our design agency in Victoria, BC, when I heard this awful whirring noise coming from the kitchen. I walked over and found Ali Bosworth, one of our developers, hunched over the counter like a surgeon. He had a Baratza grinder going full blast, a gooseneck kettle at the ready, and this weird plastic tube that looked like he’d bought it at the hardware store.
He carefully tapped the grounds into the tube, then pulled out a little eye-dropper and started dripping water onto them.
“What are you doing?”
“Removing the static,” he said, like this was a perfectly normal thing to do at 2pm on a Tuesday.
I watched him pour water from the kettle, wait exactly ninety seconds, then press down on this PVC-pipe-looking thing. Dark, syrupy coffee dripped into a mug.
“What is that thing?”
“It’s the AeroPress. Made by this really cool serial inventor. Guy also invented the Aerobie.”
I’m a coffee snob. I had a $5,000 La Marzocco espresso machine at home. I took a sip expecting gas station drip.
Whoa. It tasted the way the beans smelled. Rich, clean, no bitterness.
“Twenty-nine bucks,” Ali said. “Cheapest and best coffee maker on the planet.”
I wasn’t just a consumer. I was an investor.
AeroPress had maybe the best moat I’d ever seen. Nobody searches for “plastic press coffee maker.” They search for “AeroPress.” It’s like Kleenex or Band-Aid. The brand IS the category. When you own the noun, you own the market.
And then there was the community. The World AeroPress Championship grew organically, run by volunteers, with baristas from Melbourne to Helsinki competing to brew the best cup. Thousands of participants across sixty countries.
When I saw people had AeroPress tattoos, I knew. That’s not customer satisfaction. That’s religion.
After we bought AeroPress, I looked back at every deal we’d done at Tiny and realized there was a pattern.
Dribbble isn’t a design portfolio site. It IS the designer network. Serato isn’t DJ software. It IS DJ software. Letterboxd isn’t a movie logging app. It’s where film people live. Creative Market isn’t a design assets marketplace. It’s THE place independent designers sell fonts and templates.
Each one IS the thing. Not a thing. THE thing. They’re category-defining brands with fanatical users who wouldn’t switch even if you paid them.
Early on, Chris and I spent a lot of time driving around Victoria looking at boring businesses. Bottle depots. Elevator repair. Gravel pits. Funeral homes.
The math never worked. Hundreds of employees, massive complexity, razor-thin margins. And one innovation away from irrelevance.
I think about newspapers. In the 1990s, they were money-printing machines. Then Craigslist showed up. Then blogs. Then Google. Within fifteen years, newspapers went from gold mines to pennies on the dollar. The moat was never real. The moat was the absence of alternatives.
The businesses we buy? Good luck opening an AeroPress across the street.
A business we can explain to our parents. If I can’t describe what the company does in two sentences, it’s too complicated.
Healthy profits. Between $500K and $50M in annual profit, with a consistent track record. Not hockey-stick projections. Real cash, coming in reliably.
Happy employees and customers. High retention and low churn tell us more than any financial model.
A unique advantage. A brand people search for by name. A community that self-organizes. A network effect. We want the AeroPress, not the gravel pit.
A long track record. Three to five years minimum. Survival is its own credential.
A fair price. Our simple test: can we get our money back in five years or less?
Speed. We can make a fair offer in days, not months.
Permanence. We don’t have a fund lifecycle that forces us to sell. When we buy a business, we intend to keep it.
Autonomy. We don’t want to run your business. We want you to run your business. Founders can stay, leave, or anything in between.
If your business sounds like any of these — a brand people search for by name, a product with a community that organizes itself, a simple model throwing off real profit — I’d love to hear from you.
No bankers, no pressure, no ninety-page NDAs. Just a conversation.
