When Gordon Bockus and Patty Cifra (pictured) started working at Spanning Cloud Apps in Austin, it was still a tiny company making its way. And then it grew and grew. Pretty soon, following a 2014 acquisition by EMC Corp., they were in new offices and had advanced from having just a coffee pot to a small kitchen.
And that's when a rather common problem started. People left dishes in the sink. No one consistently brewed coffee for the crew to fill up on at their leisure. Something spilled and there were no paper towels out to clean up. They had achieved the type of company success that gets you the kitchen -- but not the staff -- and no one was really responsible for their shared kitchen space.
E-mails came sporadically with photographs shaming people for leaving a mess or bemoaning that supplies had ran out or, perhaps worst of all, no one had made coffee. Sure, these are perhaps something beyond first world problems. But they were real, nonetheless.
"I'd say over about two years, we probably saw about four or five emails go out," Bockus said. "People would take pictures of the dirty dishes and say 'I'm not your mom' or 'your mom's not here...' It was always this really negative tone."
Bockus said he was kind of embarrassed and he didn't want a new employee to come in and see that on one of their first days.
So Bockus and Cifra started working together on the side, after work and on weekends to build a solution to get away from the mild controversy and annoyance that comes with sharing a kitchen at work. Then he saw that the open domain for whomade.coffee was open, and he was stoked and decided the project had to happen.
Here's how it Who Made Coffee works: You -- and other employees -- make a simple profile. When you complete a chore (making coffee, doing dishes, restocking paper towels, cleaning counters and any other task you want to add) you walk over to the iPad stationed near the kitchen and tap the icon for the chore you completed. Then, it awards you points (you customize the points depending on the value of the chore). Employees compete to have more points, and winners can be awarded with whatever the company agrees on. It could be a gift card, a random prize or, as they've discussed at Spanning, a golden coffee mug trophy that the winner has on their desk.
Bockus, who was the company's fourth employee when he was hired about five years ago, and Cifra, the ninth hire, built the app over the course of about nine months in their spare time.
Since its launch with about 50 employees at Spanning in February, it has gained a little traction with other companies and entreprenuers who they reached out to via social media. And they've been tweaking it ever since.
"Almost every single person I talk to says 'we have that problem,'" Bockus said.
He said it's essentially for those mid-sized companies that are big enough or lucky enough to have a kitchen but don't yet have the staff to take care of it -- generally, companies with 70 or fewer employees. Now, the duo are talking about integrating it into Slack, which their company uses for a lot of communications and seeing if, perhaps, it would be useful for people living with several roommates.
"There's that competitive nature of certain people who care, and we've seen a lot more people showing up," Bockus said.
"And I feel like some people are just good samaritans and see other people doing things and they'll do it even without the points," Cifra said.
