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Comment by toast76 | Hacker News Reader

The coffeeshop fallacy is, in fact, a fallacy.

People don't open coffee shops to drink coffee all day any more than someone would open a bar because they want to drink all day.

My brother is a wine maker. He is insanely passionate about wine (Pinot to be precise). When he's not working he's talking about and sharing wine. But at the end of the day, he's just a farmer. He tends his vines, picks the fruit, puts in vats, waits a while and then pours it out into bottles. It's horrible, torturous, back-breaking labour for him. But he does it because he wants to put the best damned Pinot on your table.

That's why you open a coffee shop.

That's why game developers build games.

Anyone passionate about wine knows what it means to make wine, and anyone passionate about coffee knows what it takes to make coffee. The coffeeshop fallacy assumes our coffee drinker knows no shit-all about coffee.

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Quite.

I speak here as someone who owns a coffee shop's less profitable cousin, the independent film company.

There are basically two types of people who will start a "cool" company - those who like hanging out in coffee shops, and those who would be making coffee for people whether they were getting paid or not. Those people, in fact, whose happiness is in large part directly related to the percentage of the day they've spent with their hand on the lever of a manual expresso machine. Yes, they exist. No, they're not kidding themselves - that really is what makes them happy.

Discouraging the former from starting a coffee shop is an excellent plan. Speaking as one of the latter (film-making, not coffee), trying to discourage them from starting a coffee shop (or indie film company) is a) probably pointless and b) not a great idea if you actually care about them as a person.

Their passion may wane. They may decide to start other businesses to help their passion business grow (as I've done).

But at the end of the day, people like toast76's brother, me, and a wide variety of other people are GOING to open the damn coffee shop, and if it works, it will make them happier than anything else they could do.

In those cases, you will be better STFUing about how awful an idea it is to open a coffee shop, and instead starting to talk location, accounting, and sales skills...

I read this at least three times while thinking of how true it was.

My wife is someone who would happily spend all her waking hours on the back of a horse. She's trying to make her horse training/riding lesson business work while I wonder if it's ever going to be possible to make a living at something that's essentially become a luxury but which people aren't willing to pay luxurious prices for. Talking her out of it would be pointless, so the only thing I can do is try to help her find ways to make it even slightly even more profitable.

Even has an HN component: I just mentioned patio11's Appointment Reminder as she was sitting around with four horses tacked up and ready to go, pissed off at the people who made an appointment and didn't show (eventually got here about an hour late).

At least hay's cheaper per ton than coffee :-)

"The coffeeshop fallacy assumes our coffee drinker knows no shit-all about coffee."

I think you missed the point. It doesn't matter how much you know about coffee. It matters how much you know about other things, mostly unrelated, accounting, cleaning, hiring, cleaning, customer service, etc.

No I didn't :)

You can learn "accounting, cleaning, hiring, cleaning, customer service". You can't learn passion about coffee.

toast76, lots of people open coffee shops because they're seduced by the dream of hanging out in a cute little cafe all day. They aren't necessarily dedicated to putting the best damn coffee on their customer's tables. More importantly, they neglect to richly imagine that other crap that comes with running a coffee shop.

I wrote an essay a while ago, very similar to this one, only I cited people who actually fell prey to what I called The Cute Little Café Syndrome:

http://unicornfree.com/2011/dont-follow-your-passion/

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