Social Impact Tech: Nick Martin of joe On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact
An Interview With Jilea Hemmings
We bring independent coffee shops together to make it easy for people to choose small businesses.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Nick Martin.
As the co-founder and CEO of Seattle-based startup joe, an app that helps indie coffee shops leverage the same tech as national brands, Nick Martin is on a mission to give small businesses an advantage over corporate chains. Prior to launching joe, Martin worked for a number of well-known companies, including Zillow, Microsoft, Yesler and more.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
I grew up in Central Washington. My mom was a radio personality, and my dad owned a small business building lawn and garden storage sheds in our backyard. Even though we grew up in a low-income household, my parents worked extremely hard to help make sure my brother and I got everything we needed. With the family-owned business it meant we were able to spend a lot of time together. My brother and I would pitch in during the summers, and my mom would occasionally work construction when she took time off of her job. When my brother, Brenden, and I were in high school, we started working at local coffee shops and saw the importance of relationships and community in that environment. Fast forward to a couple years ago and those experiences of what it means to build a small business and serve your community inspired us to launch joe.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
One major moment was the second we decided to go all in on joe. Brenden and I both had other jobs at tech companies and decided at one point to quit them to spend all our energy on joe. My wife just gave birth to our twin boys and my brother had a 1-year old so there was already a lot of change going on. We had been moonlighting a prototype for joe and were seeing some solid traction in an number of shops that we were piloting. We sat down together over some coffee and realized that if we were going to really go for it, we had to go all in. So we both quit our jobs, picked up freelance work to pay the bills which allowed us to spend more time talking to coffee shop owners and recruited our tech co-founder, Lenny Urbanowski and paid him out of pocket. Then, we signed up for Coffee Fest in L.A. and set the goal to raise funding before we hit the showroom floor. When all was said and done, we actually had our seed funding wired to us on Day 1 at Coffee Fest about 5 months later. It was a whirlwind.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I personally credit Brenden, my brother and cofounder, for helping us gather the courage to believe we could do it. When you come from a background where you’re taught to keep your head down and follow the rules, going against the grain and having the attitude of “why not us” takes a lot of courage. Brenden has never been afraid to take big leaps and shoot for the stars. We never would have gotten off the ground if his vision and faith weren’t fueling the journey every step of the way.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Try not to become a man of success, but rather to become a man of value.”
My whole life, I have taken issue with the fact that when people say someone is “successful” there is an understanding that they mean “they make a lot of money.” It’s always rubbed me the wrong way that we so narrowly define success, and I think it leads to a lot of anguish for people as we equate the worth of our time on this earth with the balance in our bank account. Being a person of value broadens the criteria of success, and it means something different to everyone. Thinking critically about what it means to be a person of “value” allows us to let go of false-truths we accept from the culture we were born into and build a life around seeking truth and meaning.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
First off, empathy. You have to be able to empathize with peers, employees, customers, and any other stakeholder to find common ground and prioritize action accordingly. When the pandemic hit, our relationships with partners were our guiding light. We cut our own profit, waived fees, and re-prioritized our roadmap, all with the intent of giving coffee shop owners the best shot possible for survival. It was unpopular among some of our investors to make some of those moves, but those relationships with our partners mattered more, and we knew we could make good by our investors in the long run.
You also need conviction. To create value in new ways, you have to be able to question things that others accept as truths. Then, you have to throw everything you have behind it as if it were a certainty. Early on, you hear 100 “no’s” before you get a “yes.” And usually, feedback is to take an easier path you know in your gut won’t deliver the transformational shift you’re aiming for. Without conviction in the idea, self-doubt can squash an effort.
Finally, self-awareness. As a founder, you are influenced by so many factors from your personal life, to the competitive landscape, to confirmation bias and more. Being aware of how different dynamics impact the way you make decisions and when a trusted team member might be better suited to make a call is incredibly important.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our society. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?
Today, convenience is king. People settle for corporate chains because it’s convenient and although the experience might not be amazing, it’s consistently okay. 85% of people say they would purchase local over corporate if it’s as convenient — and they’d pay MORE. The challenge is, small businesses don’t have the resources or the physical presence to match the convenience and consistency in experience as corporations. That’s where joe comes in. We bring independent coffee shops together to make it easy for people to choose small businesses.
How do you think your technology can address this?
As mobile order ahead becomes ubiquitous for out of home purchases the way home delivery has, there’s no reason people should have to settle for corporate chains. When you can order ahead wherever you are and trust it will be ready when you arrive, why settle for corporate? With our technology, people don’t have to. We truly believe that when shopping small is easy and convenient, they gain the upper hand.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
The experience Brenden and I had growing up in a family business and understanding the challenges and rewards that come with that experience was massively influential.
Additionally, the time we spent in independent coffee shops was incredibly impactful. Local coffee plays such a unique role in the world — it’s a space where every owner brings their own unique philosophy and vision for the community — they create spaces where people feel a sense of belonging. That’s more important now than ever. Local coffee brings people together, and we need that.
How do you think this might change the world?
We can create conditions that allow small businesses to thrive. Headwinds for small business are far stronger than they should be and it’s robbing people from the opportunity of building and growing a thriving business and also robbing consumers from diverse and rich experiences that funnel more money back into their communities. When a small business is thriving, our communities are healthier.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
Convenience and lowered barriers begets more frequent behavior, which might make for an even more caffeinated society. Moderation in consumption is always key. But other than that, I really can’t see any.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”?
- First, prioritize stakeholder benefit over pursuit of profit exclusively. We did this with joe by pricing our product to be the same or less than generic alternatives while also finding ways to apply technology and creative thinking to reduce the biggest costs in the category and carve out healthy contribution margins. Shareholders are still stakeholders, but not the only one we care about.
- Second, be people centric. One of our core principles at joe is “Consumer Obsessed, People Centric.” What we mean by that is that in technology, there is a spirit of obsessing over the numbers and optimizing based on data to optimize for profit. Continuous optimization is essential, but it should be a means of making life better for people. Without that tethering, you end up with tech that is great at driving KPIs, but might be destructive (e.g Facebook ads algorithms and the impact on politics). We want to make it convenient to order coffee, not hack your brain to consume more than is healthy.
- Third, recruit a mission-oriented team. There are a lot of ups, downs and ambiguity in startup life. You need the best talent possible and you need everyone to be resilient, proactive and energized. The right people will feel connected to the mission and intrinsically feel motivated to help solve an ever-evolving landscape of challenges in service of that.
- Fourth, hyperfocus on execution, not ideation. Great execution beats the perfect strategy with insufficient follow through any day. Attention to detail and embracing the not-so-fun bits of the business with the same enthusiasm you engage in the parts that you love is essential. That starts at the top and flows through to the rest of the team.
- And finally, set clearly defined goals with specific timelines. Then be ready to adjust on the fly. The only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. Chunking a vision into smaller achievable parts against a timeline and sharing those goals early and often with the team keeps everyone engaged and morale high. At the same time, context shifts and you have to be proactive in adjusting and refining as new information becomes available or the landscape shifts. If the plan changes, double down on communication and instill the “why” into your team’s DNA.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
We don’t have to accept the way things are as truths about how things should be. We have the opportunity to write the book on what makes a great business for the generations to come. But don’t do it for accolades or pats on the back. Do it because it has intrinsic value and because you believe in what you’re doing to your core. If you do it for the right reasons and have that belief, pursue it with passion and surrender the results.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
I’m going to say Lebron James, but probably not why you think. The projects he works on off the court strike me as incredibly smart in terms of making a positive influence systemically and culturally. His “I Promise School” puts school at the heart of a community to uplift everyone. His show “The Shop’’ models masculinity and healthy dialogue to young men in such a poignant way. Honestly, I used to be a Lebron critic, but his work off the court totally flipped me.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Follow me on Twitter @NickBMartin or follow the joe brand at and join the mission to give small businesses an advantage over corporate giants.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
Social Impact Tech: Nick Martin of joe On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.