How Henry's House of Coffee Is Re-Creating The Coffee Shop Experience Online

The Kalebjian family has been roasting coffee for three generations, and they've taken all that knowledge online through a quiz that helps customers find just the right coffee beans for their personal tastes. As a huge coffee fan myself this quiz was perfectly accurate and I just had to learn more about how they did it.

Learn more about how Henry's House of Coffee created a personalized experience for every website visitor in this episode.

Helpful links: -Take the Henry's House of Coffee Quiz

Podcast Transcript

Josh Haynam: Everyone here, I'm here with Hrag from Henry's coffee house, a local institution here in San Francisco, where I am based out of as well. Super excited to talk to you today because the way that you're using aQquiz is really similar to the way that I've talked about quizzes being used since the beginning of our existence eight years ago. And so when I found how you're using this quiz, I just knew I had to talk to you. So thanks for chatting with me today.

Hrag Kalebjian: Thank you Josh. I appreciate you having me today.

Josh Haynam: Yeah, so just to kick things off, where did this idea come from? How did you decide to start using aQuiz? And can you just give everybody a little context on how you guys are using the quiz?

Hrag Kalebjian: Yeah, of course. So, we launched our website in 2014, and we've been doing pretty well over the last five, six years. Just to give you an idea, when we launched, we were doing like 20 orders a month back in 2014, now we do over 800 orders a month. So a lot of growth there, but I come from a finance background, so a lot of the stuff I try to do is as analytical as possible. And what I would notice is through chats on our websites, through emails and conversations, new customers that were coming to our page were confused as to what to buy, they didn't really know the story of Henry's House of Coffee, their experience with coffee was all over the place, some people thought they liked the light rules when in fact they didn't and they wanted something dark. Some people were experts and they wanted a very specific type of coffee.

Hrag Kalebjian: And I thought by having a chat feature on our website would be very easy. But with chats you can only do so much, it's not 24/7, I'm also working on other stuff so I couldn't be available all the time. And one of the things that caught my attention was a competitor of ours called Trade Coffee, I'm not sure if you've heard of them, Josh.

Josh Haynam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Hrag Kalebjian: So Trade, their whole thing is when you land on their page, they start you off with a coffee quiz. And when I saw that, I thought, "You know what, that really reminded me of my dad." And what I mean by that is when customers come to the shop and they're looking for coffee beans, they love having that conversation with my dad because he's like the coffee doctor, he's having a coffee consultation in a sense. He's not looking just the sales, he's really looking to understand. So he'll ask people, "Do you smoke cigarettes? Are you drinking your coffee with food or just by itself?" There's a lot that goes into it. And I always thought, "Man, it would cost me so much money to develop something like this. I have no idea where to begin."

Hrag Kalebjian: And there wasn't anything like that for years. And then literally like three, four months ago I was like, "Damn it, I need to figure this crap out. I need some kind of a quiz." And so I Googled... I don't remember what I Googled, and sure enough Try Interact was one of the first that popped up. And what really got me excited about it was the fact that it was free to try it. A lot of other companies we're charging, and I was like, "I don't even know if this shit's going to work." Pardon my French. I don't know if this is goi...