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- The Coffee Truck Idea I'd Start Tomorrow (Thanksgiving Mailbag)
The Coffee Truck Idea I'd Start Tomorrow (Thanksgiving Mailbag)
A little something for your Thanksgiving Commute
Brian Scordato
November 26, 2025
Idea to Startup: The Coffee Truck Idea I'd Start Tomorrow (Thanksgiving Mailbag)
These are definitely getting worse.
This Episode
Today, we're digging into the mailbag for your Thanksgiving commute. First, what idea would Brian start if he had to start an idea? We go deep on why a coffee truck idea is the best possible business for this moment. Next, we talk through how to get your spouse on board with your idea, and finally we hit on the best gifts for new entrepreneurs.Take that, Kyle.
Pod References + Timestamps
0:30 Mailbag!
01:25 Question One - What Idea Would Brian Start?
03:05 The Four Idea Criteria
06:40 Idea-Founder Fit
07:51 A Coffee Truck
14:50 Smooth Jazz
15:25 Question Two - How do I get my spouse on board?
19:26 Question Three - Best Gifts for Entrepreneurs
Transcript - feel free to read like a long-form article
Today, we’re going to pop open the old mailbag and knock out two fantastic questions.
I know a bunch of folks won’t listen to todays episode because it’s the holidays, but every time I skip a travel day pod I get a bunch of sassy, passive aggressive emails that say something like “sure would’ve loved a pod for this 5 hour drive I’ve got, but luckily my first million has a new episode.”
And yeah, that email only happened once and it was three years ago but damnit Kyle, it stuck with me.
So we’ll do a mailbag today. Just for Kyle. The goal was something to pass the time for the travelers but not well rounded enough to be a full episode, but then I got into it and loved it and it might kick off a series. We’ll see.
And please do send me emails with questions - I love answering them and 95% of them I just reply to and don’t put them on the pod: Brian at get tacklebox dot com.
Enough preamble. The first question is a super fun one:
“Hey Brian. If you had to stop everything and start a company today, what would it be?”
Thank you to Jeff in Leeds for this. There’s a Leeds in England and apparently one in Alabama, too. I don’t know which Leeds Jeff is from but weirdly Alabama and England are two of our highest download density spots. Like 30% of our emails come from Huntsville, Alabama. Something startuppy definitely happening there.
Anyway, I love this question and think about it all the time. Because the answer change like the tides depending on how I’m feeling and what I’m seeing.
Right now, all I see is chaos.
The markets are a bubble, AI funding is a bubble, VC might be altogether broken, no one has any idea if AI is going to replace everyone’s job or most peoples job or just some peoples jobs, and they don’t know if it’s going to start with middle management or entry level or investment bankers making a million dollars a year or line cooks at chipotle or truck drivers or all of those. Chaos.
During times of hectic, frantic change I always lean on the Jeff Bezos approach. Instead of trying to predict what’s going to change, bet on what you’re absolutely sure won’t change.
Look for customers with problems and needs that’ll be there in 10 years no matter what AI does.
That’s my top guiding principle.
Next, I jump into the idea framework I personally use.
We’ve got some tools at Tacklebox we use to help folks come up with ideas and evaluate them at the earliest stage, and for me, knowing my strengths and weaknesses and the challenges I’m willing to deal with for an idea and the challenges I’m not, I have whittled those into a two-layered system.
First, I look at four idea criteria:
Problem Frequency
Delta 4 Potential
Organic Growth potential
Wedge customer
I despise marketing. Which might be surprising, because we talk about it a lot and I’m confident I write effective messaging and all that. It’s more that I’ve been worn down by reality.
You can put the perfect product in front of a customer with endless, excruciating pain, market it perfectly with problem language and the right call to action and wedge, price it in a way that they get clear value, and they’ll still squint their eyes and shrug and say they’ve just got to wait for things to calm down before they can make a decision.
They’ll sit at the bottom of a well and turn down your rope.
The reality of marketing for a hyper early stage startup is that it’s mostly useless. It can work on the margins, but if you don’t have a different growth driver you can’t rely on marketing.
I think this is the biggest change I’ve seen over the past 10, 11 years doing Tacklebox. I’ve watched potential customers become more and more paralyzed by simple decision making. You can blame whatever item you’d like from the pu pu platter of nonsense that’s bombarded us in those 10 years as the culprit, but people don’t make decisions like they used to. That’s the reality and we have to work with it.
The way 99% of people make decisions now is watching someone they trust be successful in some way, then asking that person how they did it.
You don’t try a new coffee shop in town when it opens up. You wait for a friend to tell you they tried and and loved it and then you go. So, we have to design for that.
Because if you can’t easily fill the top of your funnel with customers, you can’t get the reps you need to make a product good. That flow of customers is the lifeblood. Without it, working on a startup is miserable.
Which means we have to work backwards and only touch ideas where we’re confident that, if they work, they’ll spread organically.
And that’s where my four criteria come from.
Frequency - I prefer daily. Meaning, the customer has the problem every single day, which gives you tons of opportunities to help them solve it, and tons of “success moments” for the customer once you have. People talk about success. Frequent problems give us lots of shots on goal.
Delta four potential - the current solution for the customer you choose is an absolute disaster. It’s a 4 out of 10 or lower. Meaning, there’s a huge opportunity for a leap. People share leaps. If you can turn a situation that was a 4 out of 10 into an 8 out of 10, people will not shut up about it. Importantly, no one talks about moving from a 7 out of 10 to a 9 out of 10. The change isn’t big enough and the initial pain wasn’t bad enough.
Organic Growth Potential - Will it be hard for your customers to not talk about it. I love cohesive customer segments, meaning a group of customers that constantly bump into each other. It’s a killer combo with a frequent problem. See each other a lot, have the problem a lot, really good chance your product will get shared.
Wedge customer - is there a subset of customers with a smaller, unique problem you can solve to get early traction. This is where domain expertise comes into play.
If your idea hits on these four, it’ll have a built-in growth engine. It won’t require early marketing.
That’s the first silo of my two-part system - problem frequency, delta four potential, organic growth potential, wedge customer.
The second part is idea-founder fit. There are two things I look for here: Unfair advantage, and passion for a thing other people hate.
Unfair advantage. Has the founder, in this case me, been subconsciously preparing to start this business for years. Do they have a secret - something they know that no one else does? And number two,
Passion for a thing other people hate. What do you - in this case, I - like about the idea that other people will hate? What energizes them but drains you? What stops 95% of founders from pursuing this idea, but motivates you?
The most important part of this framework is knowing that if you look for an idea with these traits in mind, you’ll never find one.
The path is to go down rabbit holes - stuff you’re interested in problems you see, problems people tell you about - anything. Come up with an idea, then put it up against the framework. Ideas come from the world, not staring at the framework.
And remember, it doesn’t need to hit all of these on day one. You mold it, or you, so that it does.
Back to my ideas.
The one I’m most interested in?
A coffee truck. Well, a fleet of them. But we’ll get there.
I tend to get obsessive about things and I am obsessive about coffee. I make my own water for coffee. I know the difference between washed and natural process and honey process and I know what to expect out of beans from Ethiopia or Colombia or Kenya and I grind differently and heat the water differently and use different tools to brew each. If I found five thousand dollars on the ground I’d buy the weber workshops eg 1. Which will mean nothing to 99% of you and 1% of you will sigh dreamily.
I ruined my wife - she can now only drink great coffee and I’m confident I could ruin you, too. Just give me a week.
So, I’m very interested in coffee. But that doesn’t make a coffee truck a good idea.
The next circle in the idea venn diagram might.
I grew up in a NYC commuter town. There are, by my count, 38 of them.
In these towns, hundreds of people hop on trains each morning and commute into NYC for 39 or 47 or 58 minutes. They take trains that leave at 6:21 and 6:25 and 6:47 and 7:12. Rarely later than that. They do this 4 or 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year. And, way, way fewer than you’d think do it with a coffee in their hand.
I know because I commuted for years when I was living at home and working in the city after college, and because I went to these stations recently and watched. I asked people getting on the train, Why don’t you have a coffee?
Now, most of these commuters are showing up at 6:43 for their 6:46 train, so they don’t want to talk to you. But the people who did told me that making coffee was too loud in the morning and woke the kids, or they didn’t want to take the time, or no coffee shops were open. They all said they got their coffee near their office.
I asked the question; if there was coffee waiting for them at the train, would they buy it? Sure, they said.
But you listen to this podcast. You know that answer plus a dollar fifty will get you on the subway. It means nothing. But I asked it anyway, because sometimes I don’t take my own advice.
Maybe we’re making our way to a secret.
Maybe there are thousands of commuters every morning across 38 towns who’s lives would be much better with a coffee. Maybe.
Ok. Now, to the other silo. The four idea qualifiers:
Frequency
Delta 4 potential
Organic growth potential
Wedge
These are the characteristic for an idea that’ll grow without much poking and prodding.
Frequency - do these commuters run into the coffee problem daily? Yep.
Delta 4 - Is the current solution a 4 out of 10 or less? Yes, I think so. A few of the people seemed pissed they didn’t have coffee. Now, there are some red flags here, because if coffee was THAT big of a problem, they’d have figured it out. Maybe. Delta 4 isn’t a home run. But the next one is.
Organic growth potential - if we built something, would it be impossible for it to not spread? Yes. This is the reason I love this idea. If we somehow make great coffee and get it into the hands of commuters every morning, and if we’re even remotely creatively competent, like, we put the coffee in a bright orange cup, people will talk about it. Everyone on the train will see it. A highly visual product, in a confined space, crammed with all of your other potential customers… that’s a scenario entrepreneurs dream about. Or at least I do.
Wedge - What’s the subset of customers we start with? What’s my unfair advantage or secret knowledge? Well, I told you already. It’s that I know an ethopian coffee is going to be finicky and you’ll need to get a higher temp and finer grind size but man oh man when you dial it in it will sing. My wedge is the coffee nuts. The ones who know what I know. And I’ll speak to them in that secret language and they’ll convert and lead the way.
Frequency, delta 4, organic growth potential and a wedge. Interesting.
And, finally, the bezos question.
Am I trying to predict the future here? Am I betting on AI hitting some level or quantum computing or VR or anything else?
No.
I’m betting that people will commute to NYC and that they’ll want great coffee on the way. Pretty safe bet.
Of course, there’s one other question you have to ask about any idea:
If it’s so good, why doesn’t it exist already? And that’s where we get, at least for this idea, to the things people hate.
Sometimes you can’t answer this question until you’re knee deep in the muck and sometimes you answer it the second you start working on the idea. For this idea, it was the latter.
As you might’ve guessed, and I think I’ll go into on another episode bc this is fun, comment on spotify if you want me to - i also think that helps the algorithm or whatever - I want to plant a coffee truck in train parking lots from 5-7am every morning.
Well, the second you start looking into that you realize that the towns around here are a pain in the ass. The train stations are owned by metro north, which is one battle but actually not a terrible one. But the town needs to give you multiple permits, which are meant for either food trucks or cafes. I’d be… neither. And, there are limited numbers of each given out. Here’s a common conversation:
“I’d want a permit to sell coffee for two hours every morning, from 5-7am.”
“Well, we just gave a coffee shop around the corner a permit two years ago.”
“Yes, and I love that place. But, it opens at 8am. We’d be long gone by then.”
“I get that, but we gave out a permit for a cafe already.”
So the thing that people hate and might’ve pushed them away is the red tape. Which, I guess, is something I don’t mind too much. We’re pushing through.
And, if you have ideas or thoughts or connections - email brian at get tacklebox dot com.
So that’s the idea I’d go after.
Probably a bit surprising. And I do have a bunch of tech ideas, too. But, for the framework I’ve got, that’s the most promising.
We didn’t touch on profitability, but it’s very profitable to sell coffee in the way we’d be selling it.
Now we’ve spent too long here and we’ve got to get to the next question.
So to wrap up:
Silo one, the entrepreneur:
Your unfair advantage
Passion around something I love and other people hate
Silo two, the idea and customer:
Problem frequency
Delta 4 potential - meaning the current solution is god awful
Organic growth potential - meaning your customers won’t be able to not share
Wedge - a sub group or sub problem you have serious, intimate knowledge about. A place to start
And finally, during times of turmoil, figure out what won’t change. Don’t try to guess what will.
Ok. Let’s do some jazz, with a discount code, then get to our second question.
Hey!
We’ve got a little discount going - 50% off month one with code HOLIDAY2025. Apply for the program at gettacklebox dot com and once you’re accepted put in the code.
If you’re working on a startup and have a full-time job, our program will help you validate and launch it in 90 days. Three months to get this thing up and out.
Or, we’ll realize the idea makes no sense and pivot or call it a day.
Either way it’s a win.
Code holiday2025 for half off month one.
Back to it
Question 2:
REAL doozy for questions two. I won’t say who it’s from, and it’ll be obvious why:
“Hey, love the pod. I’m working on an idea and I’m trying to get my spouse on board with it. I feel like this will only work if we’re aligned. It’s not that they’re saying they don’t want me to do it, but it just feels like when it was this nebulous idea, they were excited and encouraged me. But now that I’m going after it, there are tradeoffs and sacrifices. I know this will never be easy and smooth, but… any ideas?”
For sure.
It took a few years for me to learn that my job at Tacklebox is 50% coach/strategic startup guy and 50% therapist. I’m wholly unqualified for the second part, so I stay in my lane on the stuff I know. And I’ve learned some stuff here. Most of our founders have partners and many have kids. This comes up constantly.
There are three things to do and we’ll knock em out quick because they’re straightforward.
Create Boundaries - Remember the treadmill
Run Weekly Updates - Lines not Dots
Get Clarity on Stress - Name and create metrics around the actual risk
The reason I’m answering this question is the advice is super helpful for solo founders that don’t have partners, too. Because in that case you’re just fighting an inner battle, where your left brain wants you to stop this nonsense and your right brain wants to cook.
First, boundaries. If I asked you to hop on a treadmill and sprint, you’d hate me. If I told you to hop on a treadmill and sprint for 7 minutes, you’d pay $150 an hour.
If you tell your partner that you’re going to be working on your startup nights and weekends, quote, until you get enough momentum that you can go full-time….they’re going to hate you. No one wants to sprint with no end date.
So, create a sprint. Over the next two months, I’m going to work on this idea during these times. I’m going to have this support system in place - coaching, tacklebox, whatever - I’m going to be able to make these decisions at the end of the two months. To make those decisions, I’ll need to learn X. So, everything is about that.
Piece of advice number 2: Run weekly updates.
People get excited about things based on lines not dots. If you’re trying to get VC funding and you pitch someone your idea, they won’t invest. You’ve just created a dot. The next dot you create is at the next meeting. They then compare that dot to the previous one and measure the slope. If it’s steep - meaning you’re moving up and to the right on the progress graph - then maybe they’ll invest. But probably not. Because they’ll want to see three, four, five more dots to ensure that slope is consistent.
Your partner is the same way. The dot of “I have an idea” means absolutely nothing. The second dot of “and this is the progress I’ve made” will show slope. Slope is very exciting. Progress is exciting. So, make sure you’re adding dots and showing slope.
Weekly updates will do this. What you did, what you learned, what you’ll do. Sunday night over dinner or after the kids are down. Then watch Pluribus.
Finally, number 3: Get clarity on stress
Nebulous stress is paralyzing. Specific stress is tacklable.
If your partner isn’t on board, they’re stressed about something. What is it? Financial? Time? Relationship? The fact that they’re now the normal, boring one? What?
If you don’t know what it is you simply cannot alleviate it.
If it’s financial, make sure there’s an abundance of transparency in your weekly meeting on financials. If it’s relationship, set up binding weekly dates.
I’m not qualified to help more here, but hopefully you’ve got someone in your life that is. Find out what’s actually stressful, call it out, and attack it.
I will now take off my startup dr phil bald cap.
And we’ll do one more bonus one, because it felt like that was shorter than I’d thought it’d be.
From Eliza in California, “What’s the best $100 gift for a brand new founder?”
Great question.
The obvious answer is pony up a bit more and get them Tacklebox. Although with 50% off month one $100 is nearly there.
But if we’re talking no Tacklebox, I’d start with books. The best books you can buy are the ones on your specific domain. The stuff other people haven’t read. But if you aren’t sure what those are, start with the basics.
First is disciplined entrepreneurship. Probably the best startup book every written. I’ll link to these in the show notes, too.
Second is the personal mba. The best business book ever written.
Third is the power of habit, the best habit book ever written. Although atomic habits is great, and so is four thousand weeks.
Learn about entrepreneurship, business, and how to set yourself up to be productive.
That’ll get you to like $50.
Next, I’d want to help this person with accountability and feeling like they’re actually doing something.
For like $10 bucks a month, you can join Focusmate. It’s a virtual coworking tool. You sit on what’s basically a zoom call with a bunch of other people working on interesting stuff and have a visible checklist of what you’d like to get done in the next hour. Then, you do it.
So, I’d give two months of that. We’ve got $30 left.
And, to stay on theme, I’d buy them a $30 gift card to the local coffee shop with a caveat. That coffee cannot be drank (drunk? drank?) by them. That is customer interview coffee. There must be a potential customer’s butt in the seat across from them drinking from that $30 gift card.
Ok.
I hope this was entertaining and took the edge of the ride over to Uncle Steve’s. Maybe the kids quieted down for a bit and maybe they didn’t.
And now you can go listen to my first million, KYLE.
Have a great thanksgiving everyone, and yea, if you want more coffee shop talk…. comment. Maybe we jsut do the whole thing live here? Who knows.
Have a great week.