Bellwether
Tech-Driven Innovation in Coffee
Bellwether is a venture-backed startup in California rethinking coffee roasting with its zero-emission electric roaster. Traditional roasters often struggle with emissions and precision, but Bellwether's innovative technology uses insulation, thermal probes, and pressure sensors for consistent roasting across beans.
Additionally, Bellwether runs a marketplace for sustainable coffee beans, focusing on quality, traceability, and sustainability in all aspects of its business. This approach makes Bellwether a leader in environmental performance and coffee quality.
Bellwether's ecosystem had multiple connected applications, including marketplace apps, admin tools, and software that operated the roasters themselves. Still, they were built at different stages and lacked the coherence and quality that Bellwether's brand required.
The admin app's version 1.0 was functional but had usability limitations that caused daily friction. Building a 2.0 version that delivered seamless experiences while maintaining all existing functionality required careful UX thinking alongside technical execution. The challenge was to build a suite of connected applications that felt like a single, coherent product capable of taking the lead in sustainable coffee technology.
Capicua took on the development of multiple interconnected applications across the Bellwether ecosystem, using React for the front end and Node for the back end. AWS provided cloud computing infrastructure, MongoDB handled the database, and Redux managed state across the application suite.
We incorporated Atlaskit's UI library to bring visual and interaction consistency across the suite and used Appcues to build an onboarding experience for customer-facing apps, ensuring new users could get up to speed quickly without relying on manual training.
The 2.0 admin app received particular focus, with Capicua paying close attention to a seamless user experience throughout. This scope addressed friction points from the previous version and laid the foundation for ongoing iteration.
- Stack: React for the front-end with Node for the back-end.
- UI library: Atlaskit UI library for cross-application consistency.
- Onboarding: Appcues onboarding experience for customer-facing apps.
- Management: AWS cloud, MongoDB database, and Redux state management.
- Development: Multi-application development across its marketplace, admin, and roaster.
Bellwether's app became a quality product ecosystem that matched the sophistication of the hardware it supported. The 2.0 admin app delivered the seamless experience that teams needed, improving the day-to-day operational efficiency of tech in coffee industry.
The onboarding system lowered the learning curve for new users, reducing the time-to-value for customers adopting the platform for the first time. This edge was particularly important as Bellwether expanded its marketplace and grew its community.
Bellwether continues to advance its mission to make the coffee industry more sustainable, and the product infrastructure Capicua helped build is part of how it scales.
- Harmony: Coherent multi-application suite spanning marketplace, admin, and roaster.
- Usability: Improved admin app usability through a complete 2.0 redesign and rebuild
- Time-to-value: Appcues-powered onboarding reducing time-to-value for new customers
- Software: Zero-emission roaster backed by enterprise-grade software
- Scalability: Scalable architecture supporting Bellwether's expanding marketplace
Sustainability-driven products deserve digital experiences that match their ambition. With Shaped Clarity™, Capicua builds the software side of hardware-forward companies. Let's talk.
