This week marks 1 year of Barista Hustle. A good opportunity to look at what has happened so far, and talk a little about what the future holds. Thanks so much for tagging along, reading, sharing, and commenting on everything. This is turning into a wonderful little community that sums up the best of coffee people and the internet. I’m really looking forward to another year!

Here’s some numbers:

– I’ve received over 2,500 emails with questions and lovely hellos/intros (these often make my day).
– BaristaHustle.com has served 250,000 humans over 1 million pages of coffee geekery.
– The email list has grown to over 13,000 people and a large majority of you have been opening it every week (thanks!!).
– I’ve written 66,000 words and your comments make up nearly 100,000 words!!!!! (I’m really happy about that one).
– The Slack group has 1766 members, and has already seen 40,000 messages posted. Crazy.

Here’s what I’m hoping to achieve in Year 2:

– Digging into some more difficult questions. This will require much more time, and will likely mean that I won’t be publishing a full post every week. Quality in exchange for quantity. I’m sure you’re all OK with that. The email will still be weekly, and will have…

– Better Curation. I want to give you fewer links each week. Instead, I’ll talk a little more about why it’s interesting and what I think about it (If you ever see anything interesting on the internets of coffee, please send it my way!).

– A platform for long-form, serious, professional discussion/debate. This is still sorely lacking. The Slack is fun, but too fast-paced and transient for this kind of chat. Subreddits/forums/medium/disqus/facebook are all options. Ideas for this are very welcome! (CoffeeHustle was a foray into this space but hosting my own thing was effort>return.)

– Begin translating to other languages. A lot of individuals have put up their hands as translators which is *extremely* generous and so, so appreciated. However, I’m looking for partner websites with existing audiences that can commit to turnaround times and 100% translation of the site, in exchange for hosting rights (I really don’t want to manage a multi-lingual website if I can avoid it. I also don’t want to be rushing/critiquing kind volunteers). If you are, or know of, a site that’s interested in this please get in touch!

– Launching New Products and Tools. I’m in the process of finalising an EK43 alignment tool, and have begun talking to some manufacturers around Melbourne about making some other really exciting things. These will be coming your way sooner than you think!

It’s going to be a busy year! If you have any ideas or comments about the above, I’d love to hear it below.