What I'd build for a coffee shop, if I walked in tomorrow

Every coffee shop already has the data it needs for a useful dashboard. It's just spread across a POS system, a scheduling tool, and someone's memory.

So the first project is never complicated. It's a single page that answers the questions an owner asks themselves every morning: what sold, what didn't, and whether yesterday was normal.

The first version

Yesterday's sales, broken down by hour. Best and worst selling items. Labor cost as a percentage of sales. Anything unusual compared to the same day last week. A read on which regulars haven't shown up lately.

None of this requires machine learning. It requires pulling numbers into one place and presenting them clearly.

The real value comes after

Once an owner has that dashboard for a week, they start noticing what it's missing. That's the actual product conversation: 'what did you look at today that this didn't tell you?'

That question is where the second, more specific version comes from, and it's usually something far more useful than anything we would have guessed upfront.