Hey, starter! Read on for…

—Danny (tell me your biz dreams: [email protected])

👋 Thousands of business-builders around the world read For Starters every Friday. Thanks for being one of them.

For one summer in 2019, the most interesting room in New York’s photography scene was a storefront at 55 Delancey.

You could walk in off the street, buy a disposable camera, go shoot it, and bring it back to get developed – the whole loop for under $25. There was good coffee and a wall of zines curated by Dashwood Books (one of my favourite shops in NYC). Young photographers got solo shows on the walls, and hundreds of people showed up to them.

All this goodness was run by a small brand called Manual. “Normally when you go to a development spot, there’s a counter, you drop off your film, and you leave,” its founder Malcolm Dia told Vice that autumn. “We thought there could be a space where conversations could develop.”

Malcolm had moved to New York to work in media, and started hanging around photoshoots with photographers who shot glossy ad campaigns and mag covers, and then shot film for themselves on the side. He started Manual to tap into that world – to sell disposable cameras to his friends or, as one interviewer put it, “reintroduce film to a generation of kids who were being raised by the internet – surrounded by finstas, deepfakes, monthly app subscriptions, and constellations of perfectly curated image grids.”

By the end of that summer, Malcolm kept building. Manual made its own film, worked with brands like Nike and A24, and last year created a $95 clear-shell digicam called Holo. This week, eight years into the journey, Manual announced it’s opening its first permanent shop on Allen Street, just a block from the original pop-up. This one’s not going anywhere. 🫡

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Starter Stack, in partnership with Hostinger

Every starter hits the same wall. You’ve got a brilliant biz idea and a perfect name. Then comes the less fun part: nailing your tech stack. Suddenly you’re 25 tabs deep, Googling tools you didn’t know you needed, trying to stitch them together… and the biz you’re trying to start is still very much a Notes draft.

I’ve hit this wall (repeatedly) over the past year building For Starters. I wanna spend my days making a newsletter, not wrestling with code, APIs, or logistics. This is the wall Hostinger is knocking down.

The idea’s simple. You describe what you want and Hostinger’s AI Builder makes it. No code to deal with, and everything sits under one roof: web hosting, your domain, a site that looks great, user accounts, payments that work. Hostinger also grows with you: start with a simple site, then layer in bookings, ecommerce, memberships, or your own custom tools.

Why am I telling you about it? Because the problem Hostinger solves is real. I’ve interviewed so many starters – I’m building a biz myself right now, too – and the stack is where a lot of us get stuck. You end up living in a place I affectionately call spreadsheet land. It’s not a fun place, friends. Any tool that lets you get on with the real work is worth your attention.

→ Over the next few Fridays, For Starters is teaming up with Hostinger. We’ll meet a starter who’s using the platform to go from biz idea to build-mode. Keep an eye out! 🚀

One would think Italy does coffee well. Yet others say the land of strong espresso kinda falls short when it comes to specialty coffee. (I’m just the messenger…). In Rome, one American starter is trying to change that. And it involves nuns.

In June, Caitlin Zaino opened the doors to Run by Nuns, her hilariously named, beautifully designed specialty cafe and wine bar a few streets from the Vatican.

I’ve known Caitlin for years. Back in my Monocle days, I interviewed her as she was building Porter & Sail, the travel platform she went on to sell to Luxury Escapes. Since then Caitlin’s worked across tech, media, property and hospitality, with long stints in Singapore and Australia. She’s spent years designing spaces for other people. This one’s hers.

It’s also the opening move of Six Ten, her equally new hospitality group – named after the birthday she shares with her co-founder.

→ So, are there actual nuns? And what’s Caitlin’s generous proposal for For Starters subscribers? Keep reading, people…

💬 Hey Caitlin, you’ve worked in tech, F&B, media, property, hospitality. Now you’re building your own group and running your own cafe. Tell us about it.

Hello! After years of being in tech, food and beverage, hospitality and property development, I realised that I wanted to take everything I’ve ever learned and done and create my own group. One that stands for the next generation of hospitality, that feels material, physical and real, yet is future-focused. We’re going to have cafes, hotels and wine bars. We’re going to make good neighborhoods better with places that make you feel joyful and happy and light. When we started, I couldn’t yet buy a hotel, but I could start a cafe! So this is our entry point.

💬 What a pitch. Take my money! Why did you choose Rome and specialty coffee as your starting point?

I come from New York and I was working in Singapore and Australia. Rent, operating costs and payroll in Rome are comparatively quite low, and I realised that for pretty low OpEx I could execute a very high-level concept. My cofounder Georgios [Vasileiadis] is an ex-professional footballer in Greece. He started his own F&B venues, ran his own cafes and cocktail bars, then got into leading wellness programs across luxury hotels. Together we realised there’s loads of coffee in Rome, but it’s mostly old-school. Specialty coffee is like 1%. The specialty cafes have lines out the door, but they’re mostly for students and they’re sort of underground, grungy spots. 

We wanted to create a place that’s joyful, feels good, and is an antidote to all the angst in the world. It would serve specialty coffee and a beautiful, design-forward concept in a city that is very dated in many ways, and caters to tourists mostly from a historical point of view. So we took a bet. We found an old Panino Napoletano place and decided to turn it into something fresh.

💬 Okay, now tell us about that amazing name…

Run by Nuns started as a joke. In the early days we said that all of Rome is run by nuns. We’re in this neighborhood right off the Vatican and I must see like fifty nuns every day. We were originally going to call the cafe Astoria, but we kept coming back to Run by Nuns. So we stuck with it. It was a nod to Rome.

💬 Can you explain the Italian coffee is good/bad debate? Some people say Italy is a coffee country, yet others say it’s a myth.

It’s so funny – you tell people you’re going to open a coffee spot in Rome and they’re like, “Why? You’re going to compete with Italian coffee?” But Italian coffee generally isn’t great. Valentina Palange, who’s well known in this scene in Italy, recently wrote a book called Il caffè in Italia fa schifo, which literally means ‘Coffee in Italy sucks’. But there are these young kids pushing back. We paired up with a second generation coffee roaster out of Puglia, this young guy named Luigi. He goes around the world finding small farmers and then does small batch roasting. He’s leading the next wave of coffee in Italy. We’re bringing that to Rome. 

💬 What else is on the menu?

Coffee-wise we’re also doing Greek-style coffee. I don’t mean thick coffee, I mean cappuccino freddo. A proper cold coffee. We’ve got beautiful beans. We’re also doing cold brew, and obviously all specialty coffee. We serve it in ceramic Japanese cups. We’ve got a cold kitchen too and we’re bringing in a lot of fresh international flavors from highly-curated producers. The service extends into the night, when we serve natural wines. There’s a bistro feel. 

The concept is global, quality food, from excellent artisans and smaller producers. We work with a lot of female entrepreneurs on the wine and coffee side. We wanted to create a space that felt good from the ground up.

💬 And has everything so far gone to plan? Has opening up your own cafe been smooth?

Getting here was a haul. It was really, really, really hard. I’ll give you the real story, not just the rosy version. I’ll start with the good stuff: it’s actually gone better than expected. We just opened the door. We have only eight posts on Instagram. We’re on Google, and we’re on European Coffee Trip, and that’s it.

💬 And now you’re in For Starters.

Yes! We’ve spent zero marketing dollars. I’ve paid attention to zero algorithms. And yet we’ve grown week over week, all from word of mouth. Tourists will tell their friends back home and then the friends will come and say, “My friend who was in Rome said I have to come.” We’ve had a lot of expats I didn’t count on. We’ve got a Canadian funnel right now! Whoever is talking about us in Canada is amazing. Greeks are coming too, because we do proper Greek coffee. Like, fifty Greeks will show up for espresso freddo. 

A carbonara is amazing, but by the third day of your trip, it’s nice to have a little za’atar or something. We’re serving New York-style bagels on the weekend. I didn’t know if anybody in Rome would want a bagel, the New York Times and a drip coffee – yet we have people taking taxis directly to the cafe to have this bagel brunch. So, people are feeling the things we want them to feel. They’re having the experience we want them to have. Our thesis, at least for now, is holding, and that’s cool. 

💬 Alright, what about all the stuff that’s gone wrong?

Anyone who thinks technology is hard has never run a restaurant. We start the day with 6:30am pastry runs, and then we try to run an understaffed cafe. My cofounder is in the cafe 100% of the time. I pay invoices and measure our margins, then I’ll go and cook in the kitchen because I have experience there. I’ll do an eight-hour shift, close at 1:00am, and get up at 6:30am again to pick up our pastries. Doing that seven days a week is really rough, and often brutal. It’s more demanding than any startup I’ve done. It’s more demanding than raising my two children. You’re constantly nervous that someone’s going to have a bad experience, give you a shit review, and your entire business will crumble.

💬 You’re at the mercy of anonymous trolls. Well, I was just on your IG and somebody wrote “the service was impeccable, the food and drink were sublime, and even the water tasted incredible.”

Okay, about the water thing: one of the things we do, which comes from growing up in the US, is that when people come in from the 40C (104F) heat, we give them a glass of water with tons of ice. Not bottled water, not frizzante. We don’t charge five bucks to walk in the door. It’s literally just a free glass of ice water. But people can’t get over it. The smallest details matter in hospitality – in that one moment we pluck you out of the heat and exhaustion and you feel taken care of. We make their day a bit better with a small gesture. We’ve had people come back five times on their vacation.

💬 What else has been a challenge setting up Run by Nuns?

Ongoing challenges involve customer service, training 20-year-old staff, things like that. But the real challenge was the path to get here. It was a mess. Construction was a mess. We fired two teams. There’s lots of bureaucracy in Rome. Things move slowly. As a New Yorker, that was rough. We were supposed to open September, then November, then March, and we opened in June. We overspent on our renovation budget.

It took four months to get an Italian company set up, then we got rejected from every bank because we’re owned by a US entity and the banks are all afraid of money laundering. So we now have the tiniest bank from 1976 because someone pulled a favour. You end up running out of money, because you’re burning cash in this phase. Like, how do we keep going when we literally don’t have the cash to pay the construction crew tomorrow? 

💬 And yet, somehow you got it over the line…

You’ve gotta beg, borrow, or steal. Get personal loans, find investors at the 11th hour, try not to sound desperate when fundraising with $70 left in your account.

💬 “Yeahhh, I think we’ve got some space left on the cap table for another one or two investors…”

“I don’t want to be oversubscribed!”

💬 You could have gone down the street to the Vatican for a loan.

I mean, that was another thing: how do we not piss off the real nuns?

💬 Have any customers been confused about the nun thing?

Some people are confused. We had this family from New Jersey come in. She had the heaviest accent and was like “Where are the nuns? Are they here?!”

💬 That’s amazing.

We also have a lamb as an icon, so some people think we’re a butcher. That happens a lot. It’s been funny. Before we even opened, people were taking pictures of the logo from the street. A fun name, a cool logo, and great branding goes far. Product-market fit, too. You can pay all the influencers in the world, but if you don’t have product market fit, you’re done.

💬 Who designed your brand? Did you work with a freelancer? An agency?

I’ve been working with the team from Shuka since 2015. They did the rebrand for my business Porter & Sail, and I worked with them at Luxury Escapes, too. They’re brilliant. I went to them again for Run by Nuns. We went through more iterations than anything I’ve ever seen. We landed on the ideas of hedonism, discipline, joy and rituals. When they first showed me the lamb, they said, “It’s the lamb of God!” And I was like, “I dunno, man... it’s really on the nose.” But I just kept going back to that lamb. I fell in love with that weird little lamb. I had enormous trust for these guys and their vision, because to call a spot Run by Nuns in the middle of the Vatican takes some cojones.

💬 You don’t want to get excommunicated…

Exactly.

💬 It’s also so much fun to scroll up and down on your website and see the lamb logo spin around.

That’s what hospitality is: how do we always create joy?

💬 Speaking of hospitality, what’s next with your group Six Ten?

Well… I’m currently working on closing a hotel! It’s an existing B&B with 12 rooms in the Scandinavian countryside.

💬 Whoa.

Run by Nuns gave me the confidence and momentum to try and complete our first hotel deal. We’ve gotta go through permits, renovation, rebranding and relaunching, but we’re moving quickly. It’s been challenging, of course, to be full-on in the weeds at the cafe at the micro level, while simultaneously trying to build a macro-level brand and acquire an asset.

💬 You must have really strong resilience, or solid time management skills, or supreme confidence in your vision. Because that’s a lot.  

You need stamina. A lot of people don’t have the stamina. They give up, get worn down. As a starter, you have to assume the fires will come and then keep it together when they do. When you’re going through it, you have to shut out the noise, keep going and stay focused. I swear: stamina and resilience is 80% of this. The rest is confidence in your vision. And that’s something you get as a serial entrepreneur – you’ve been there before. Having confidence doesn’t mean you have to be cocky.

💬 You mentioned your co-founder Georgios is an ex-footballer. That surely gives him lots of stamina, too.

Totally. Athletes make exceptional entrepreneurs because they know how to get their mind around a big task. He’s excellent at managing the experience on the ground – training the staff, driving home true hospitality. He has a very high bar and we’ve imparted that to the team. He taught them very quickly: this is how you make the best coffee, this is how you give people the best service, this is how we make them feel good.

💬 Okay, and finally: who are you looking to get connected to in the FS community? Shoot your shot.

On the F&B side at the cafe, I’m so down for hearing from anyone who’s making an interesting beverage product – any indie, small producers who are coming up with innovative ways of putting a new spin on traditional food and drink categories. If there’s any way that we can support a small producer, I want to do it.

We also want people off their phones, so I’d also love to have notepads and cool pens at the cafe. And I want us to have a quarterly print magazine. If somebody wants to write that for the group…

💬 I like the sound of that.

And on a higher level, there’s a Philippe Starck hotel in Madrid called Brach, and they’re opening up in Rome. I’d love for Run by Nuns to be the hotel’s F&B partner.

💬 Let’s make it happen. Any final words?

I really love the For Starters community. If anybody is coming to Rome and they want to host a talk or event at the cafe, or do an activation around their cool product, I’m all for it. If you wrote a book, let’s do a book launch here. I don’t care if you’re on vacation – we can take half a day and showcase it! Anything that we can do for this community, I’m here for it. ☼

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You don’t always need a “good” reason… 💡 — …to start a business.

Work vs gym 💪 → “At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things. The same analysis holds for any task an AI can do for you.”

Forever chemicals 🧑‍🔬 → Sweden plans to ban them from 2028 in clothing, shoes, kitchenware, cosmetics and more.

Tarot ice cream sandwiches 🦀 → This Barcelona cafe is pushing out Instagram catnip.

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Dora — A new app: “Dora reveals the stories behind landmarks and places around you. No Googling. No Wikipedia. No endless tabs.”

Meet the Parisian designer making clothes out of 200-year-old fabric. GQ

The lost civic life of movie rental stores. MIT Press Reader

This journalist used TikTok to save her dad’s vintage shoe store – and now Gen Z lines up to shop there. Nice News

Are we being scammed by ‘craftsmanship’? Ken Sakata

The rise of million-dollar companies with just one employee. WSJ

60% → The share of Americans planning summer travel who booked a hotel specifically because of its restaurant, per OpenTable.

The ‘For when all hell breaks loose’ jacket from Vollebak.

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And a big congrats to For Starters subscriber Kat Oldershaw over in California. Kat’s got two companies to her name and is currently working on a third (!). Her first is kat&co: business operations for creative founders, with interior designers her main focus. The second is Benchwork Fabrication, which specialises in custom furniture and millwork for designers & build teams (the fabrication shop is in Napa). And the latest?

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