The Redesign That Cost Our Rankings, Indie Roasters & Resilience with Elise Papazian

My name is Elise Papazian, and I own GoCoffeeGo, an amazing coffee site where we carry roasted-to-order coffee from top artisan roasters. We’ve been online for 18 years. It’s been a long haul, but we’re still here and I’m still loving this business. It’s evolving and changing, and I never get tired of a good cup of coffee.

My late husband, Scott, and I were in London, and we couldn’t find great coffee. It really was a tea culture then. It’s changed a lot in recent years, but we just couldn’t find a good cup of coffee while we were on vacation. Then we went into a cafe and were actually shocked at how good the coffee was. We wondered how you would know where to find great coffee unless you just stumbled upon it. And how would you know at home either, unless you were somehow in the know or it happened to be in your neighborhood?
So we came up with the business model of bringing together the top artisan roasters. We secretly ordered coffee and did research, because we didn’t know who the great roasters were across the US, in places like Topeka, Kansas, where we had never been. We came up with a list of roasters we were interested in and cupped their coffees. We weren’t professional cuppers by any means. We were just coffee lovers, like the everyday person. We reached out to the ones we really liked and went to check out the roasteries. We spent two months on the road with our son, who was two years old. That was crazy, planes, trains and automobiles with a two-year-old.
We checked out the roasteries to make sure they were roasting to order, because you really want coffee to be fresh, preferably with the roast date on the bag. Not everybody was roasting to order. They claimed they were, but not everybody was, so it was important that we met with people and came up with the list we wanted to launch with.
When it came to how the website was going to look, I have a really diverse background. I was a concierge in the hotel business for a short period. Then I met my husband, who was a director and an editor, and he needed somebody to style a music video for him. I did it just for fun. I always loved fashion, and I got noticed in LA for my wardrobe styling, so I became a stylist. I got engaged and moved to LA with my husband, and we were in the entertainment industry. We eventually moved back to San Francisco for family reasons, and there’s not really a major film industry here, which led us to come up with something new. That’s when, on vacation, we came up with the idea for GoCoffeeGo.
Our approach to the website was that we didn’t want to look like roasters’ websites. We wanted to be really different and unique. We were in the creative world, we were writers, and my husband was a director, so we brought a whimsical, Hollywood, creative, crazy vibe to a coffee shop on the internet. We wanted to be the Disneyland of coffee. When we launched, it was a really crazy site, the first of its kind, I think. We were pioneers, at least that’s what people say. I don’t know of any other site that was like GoCoffeeGo, and we were definitely filling a void in the marketplace.
As a business owner or entrepreneur, if you’re going to put your chips on a number, you want to be filling a void. And if you’re not filling a void, you’re bettering what’s out there. You’re becoming the best in your field or offering something new. You just don’t want to be another number out there. So we took a creative bent on the whole thing, and we weren’t trying to compete with our roasters. We wanted to be our own crazy, silly site, and it worked.
There was no coffee movement at the time, so we were trying to build an audience where there really wasn’t any. The roasters were basically solo flyers. People in the roasting world might have known who they were, meeting at origin in different countries and sourcing green beans, but I don’t think the general public knew. It wasn’t a hipster thing back then. It was a very niche business, and nobody could go up against the Starbucks of the world and the chains. But by bringing together the best, suddenly they could. Together they could. GoCoffeeGo brought them together, and that created momentum and power, and then the chains started going, “Geez, what’s this? Now suddenly they’re together.”
It took a while to build an audience, because the general public wanted coffee that tastes like coffee. They were used to burnt coffee and weren’t really connoisseurs the way they are now. But I think we answered a need. As a business owner, you have to answer a need, and you have to push your industry forward. That’s what I think we did.

We try to keep it fun. We’ve tried to make the website fun from day one, and I think people need to realize that with technology comes change. The website originally had a mascot, and I still have him. He was a fat, chubby coffee connoisseur, and I love him. I haven’t retired him, but he’s not as prevalent on the website right now. We’ve got more of a bespoke, slender version of him in a bowler hat. The original Professor Peabury was a 1960s guy, a chubby fellow with a coffee cup. We had Flash animation, and he would float across the screen in a hot air balloon over a map of the coffee-growing regions. There was all this crazy stuff on the website. When Flash became something the internet didn’t want to support, things had to change. Some of the crazy that made us fabulous went away, because you’ve got to evolve with technology and with what the internet will support. We tried to keep it as fun as we could, even in our redesign for our customers, and it’s going to get funner, let me tell you.

Look, people saw what we did. Whenever the cool kids do something cool, corporate America jumps on board and wants a piece of the action. With their corporate money they come up with competing websites, and that’s fine. The market is big enough for everyone. But we’re like an indie record company, but in the coffee world. Or a talent agent, since I have that Hollywood background. At one point I did temp work as an assistant at a big talent agency, working for a Hollywood agent, and you learn that you have to take chances on new roasters.
Anybody can go out and carry the big brands, but for me the most interesting thing is bringing on an unknown roaster. I’ve always been willing to do that. If I think somebody is great, even if I know nobody knows who they are and they’re not going to make me money, I’m willing to take a chance. It’s like taking a chance on the Hollywood ingenue, but in the coffee world it’s the unknown roaster in the middle of nowhere. If I think they have a passion and they’re doing great coffee, I’ll bring them on. The bigger a lot of these brands get, the more profits come into the situation, and the more it affects what they source, what they don’t source and how many locations they have. I just don’t think they’re always going to be supplying the good stuff.
So being willing to carry smaller roasters, coffee discovery for my audience and my customer base, is what keeps us different from corporate companies that just want the profits and the known brand. Companies like that think a known brand means sales, so they do the math. I don’t really do that. It’s like a record company that signs a cool band nobody knows because they think they’re cool. My competitors sign people they think will bring them profits, and they can negotiate a really good wholesale price. I don’t do that, for better or worse. I think it keeps us real. I’m for the customer. I’m for the coffee customer.

That’s a number of questions. I think if you’re going to go into something, you should love it. That’s number one. Number two, if you love your business and what you’re selling, it’s going to feel less like work. It’s always going to be work, and you always have to suffer for the success. But if you’re suffering for a product you don’t care about or believe in, good luck to you. You’re going to be miserable and probably broke, because you’ll want to throw in the towel.
You also need to understand what you’re selling. I hate it when I go into a department store or a boutique and ask the salesperson about something and they don’t know what they’re talking about. With GoCoffeeGo, or any company you start, you should try to become an expert. As much as you think you’re an expert, you’re always learning and growing, and you always have to keep up the education, because the market changes, products change, everything changes.
When my husband passed away nine years ago, from cancer that came out of nowhere, we were flying really high. It was hard, and I won’t go too much into that. But when you lose your business partner, your husband and the father of your son, who was in fifth grade, it’s rough. You have to go into emergency mode, staff up and keep marching forward. You can’t lie on the ground. You’ve got to get on the horse, raise your sword and ride out to battle, as much as you want to lie on the ground. Part of that was asking how I was going to take this company forward, how I was going to keep growing and getting better with competitors coming out of the woodwork.
So I decided to become a Q grader. My son was in fifth grade when my husband passed away, and he became interested in coffee. I think he was just trying to help me: Dad’s gone, so I’ll try to help Mom and the team. In seventh grade, he and I decided we were going to become Q graders, which is the equivalent of sommeliers in the coffee world. It’s really crazy. Back then it was 19 tests, and I think maybe it’s 18 now. They throw you into dark rooms with red lights, and you’re cupping coffees. It’s intense. My son started that in seventh grade, along with another girl named Frankie. They were in this class with coffee professionals, and they went for it. They were interrupted by COVID, which is another story, but they both eventually passed. Ollie became the youngest male Q grader and Frankie the youngest female at the time. Now you have to be sixteen to do it, because it’s for coffee professionals, not seventh graders. But they did it, and rock on.
We learned not to say “I like this coffee” or “I don’t like this coffee.” Q grading isn’t about that. It’s about evaluating a coffee based on its attributes, like aroma, flavor, body and acidity, and giving scores on every attribute. It’s not fair to the farmer otherwise, because everybody has their preferences, but if you stick to the facts you evaluate it in a fair way. Bringing that knowledge base back to GoCoffeeGo really helped when I cup coffees with people while evaluating a brand. I have a number of other Q graders on my team. Ollie is at school in Scotland, at St Andrews, and when he’s home he helps me. He’s the guy who brings the best coffee to St Andrews right now. The staff has expanded, and you’ve always got to bring new people onto your team.

Technology was moving forward. We established the site around 2009, about eighteen years ago, and the templates back then weren’t widescreen. They were narrower. Technology was different, and then the internet changed, so we needed to modernize. I don’t know if “relaunch” is really the word. It was a website redesign, and it was necessary because our template was old. We wanted it to be wider-screen and more modern.
The very difficult thing people don’t understand is this. People with storefronts aren’t as dependent on the internet, because people walk by their stores and there’s visibility. But a website or store that’s only on the internet, or that depends on the internet for its revenue, even if it does have a storefront, needs visibility. And when you redo your website, bad things can happen. You’re migrating data and all kinds of things to the new site. Google has known your website for so many years, and you’ve got great authority as an older site and great ranking. When you do that, you can lose your ranking if you’re not careful, if the migration is done incorrectly.
Anybody out there with a website who’s thinking about this had better pay really good attention. If the data and everything is not migrated exactly perfectly, your organic ranking can fall off a cliff. And it happened to us. Then you think, “My God, what do I do?” You’ve got to try to fix it, and a lot of times you can’t. You’re kind of starting at ground zero, and there’s no undoing it. I don’t want to put the fear of God in people, but I kind of do. Be very, very careful, because then Google owns you. Then you’ve got to do AdWords.

I think our history speaks for itself. Roasters know we’re the OGs and that we started it all. Unlike other competing businesses, we’re not squeezing the roaster to death. If a roaster carries a twelve-ounce bag, I’m not going to demand a ten-ounce bag for a subscription. If that’s the roaster’s standard bag size, that’s our standard bag size. We’re not trying to squeeze the customer. We’re trying to honor what the roaster wants to do. Everything is drop-shipped from the roaster to the customer, and we’re not warehousing anything. The roaster is very concerned with fresh, roasted-to-order coffee, and by drop-shipping it we’re honoring their commitment to providing the best coffee to the customer. Everybody on the site, except maybe two roasters who just do things differently, puts a roast date on the bag, and that’s important to roasters.
So roasters trust us. It’s a long-term marriage. We love, promote and respect our roasters, and there’s a level of friendship too. It’s not like we’re just some corporate company. We’ve got personalities and feelings and faces.
As far as customers, I’d like people to feel free, like children running naked through the sprinklers. I’m not trying to lock people into subscriptions. If you want a subscription, we’ve got it and it’s going to be great, and we’re going to curate things we love. We’re not curating based on the price we got something for, and we’re not withholding the good single origins because we didn’t get them at a good price. With us, they know we’re just going to curate what we like. We try to keep it spicy and fun, and we offer new coffees all the time. Honestly, you don’t want to eat the same dinner every week, and you don’t want to drink the same coffee every week. Some people do, and that’s fine, but I say mix it up. You can have your favorites, but be adventurous, play the field, try other roasters. If you hate something, I’m going to take care of you. We’re never going to let you suffer with something you know you hate. That’s where the concierge in me and my team comes in. We want people to be happy and to love our coffee, and I think our customers know that. We always try to let people know we’re human and that they matter to us. They’re not a number. They’re people.

Elise: Wow. I would say business is really hard. It’s way easier to go get a nine-to-five job and clock punch, have your weekends, go to the park and have picnics. When you’re a business owner, you’re always on the clock. People say no, no, no, but it’s a lie. You have to be committed to your business, and if you’re going to be a business owner, it’s always on your mind, even at 10 o’clock at night. If I get a customer service email and I’m online, I’ll answer it. I know it sounds insane. Maybe I don’t have boundaries, and maybe that’s a problem for me, but it’s to the benefit of my customers. If you’re a really committed business owner, you want to make your customers happy, so you have to be committed to your business’s success.
You also have to actually like the business you’re going into. Don’t go into it because of profits. If you don’t care about your business model, if it’s all dollars and cents and there’s no passion, you’re going to be miserable. When a tsunami wave hits you, and it’s going to hit you over and over again on your journey, you’re not going to want to get up. So you have to love your business model.
Also, have fun with your business. Do something creative. Be crazy. If you’re going to do it, make sure you love it. Don’t put your toe in the pool. Jump in headfirst. It’s okay to run away and join the circus. You should. But realize that when you take a chance and join the circus, there is risk, so calculated risk. Don’t put all your chips on one number if you’re a married person with children. You can be crazy, but not too crazy. You do have to have a bit of a safety net. Go all in, but without risking your stability and the roof over your head. A lot of people don’t think it through, and I’ve had friends who didn’t and found themselves in difficult positions. But you do have to be a risk taker. If you’re not, don’t even go there, because everything is a risk. So join the circus.

We’re always evolving. Technology has advanced since my last website redesign, and I want to bring more of that GoCoffeeGo fun back into the new site, which makes us unique and different from everyone else. If anybody else did the kind of things we’ve done in the past, it would be out of place. But for us, in the universe we initially created, and we still have a lot of the fun, I think we can bring that Hollywood creativity back into the website, always pushing forward and always learning.
We’ll see what Oliver, my son, does, and whether he’ll join the team or not. I want him to get in his hot air balloon and float across the world, and I want him to be free to do whatever he wants to do, whether it’s coffee or something else. I’m always going to have a really good team here of coffee enthusiasts, I’m always going to bring on new roasters to excite and delight my customers, and I’m always going to be here to concierge for the customers who want help finding their perfect cup of coffee. That’s what I think the future brings.

Thank you. It was a pleasure.