WeCoffee is a startup coffee company founded in Shanghai, China, specializing in flash-frozen coffee pods. The WeCoffee pods mainly target users with a busy urban life, especially students and the working class. Its technology allows the capsules to simply dilute for 5 seconds to create a cup of coffee. Ingredients like probiotics and sodium hyaluronate are added into the capsule to meet the customers’ demands in balancing health and beauty.

I joined WeCoffee at its market research and initial product development stage. At the beginning month of the internship, I worked on researching the investment cases for the Chinese coffee and snack industries in the recent two years. By listing out each brand’s category, investment company, financing rounds, and assets evaluation, the data allows WeCoffee as a startup to make plans for future investors.

After intensive research on investment cases for the recent snack industries, WeCoffee was more clear on how and when to appeal to investors in the next step. Meanwhile, we occasionally had coffee-tasting sessions where the team do a blind taste test and rating which suppliers have the best-tasting coffee. We had a lot of fun! But it is also hard to fall asleep at night...

Meanwhile, as the product is being iterated, I helped conducted intensive research on marketing strategies of mainstream Chinese consumer coffee products, focusing on their strategies on social media. I analyzed the data and conducted user research on these competitor brands, and documented the process in a document. For user research, we conducted user interviews, focusing on their experiences purchasing the coffee and analyzing their like and dislike of certain brands.