The Idea We Gave Up On—That Someone Else Made Millions With

While attending Gustavus Adolphus from 2013-2017, I took my first class in entrepreneurship, and immediately fell in love. It was one of the only classes where I felt like I was 100% attentive and was genuinely interested in what the professor had to say. One of my favorite parts was getting to listen to guest speakers share their entrepreneurship success stories of how they made it to where they are, and how they overcame the obstacles they had to face.

Gustavus has an Entrepreneurship Cup every year, where students can enter in their idea, give a full presentation in front of judges, with a chance to win $5,000 for first place, $3,000 for second place, and $2,000 for third place, to put towards your business idea and kick start its beginnings.

Me and two of my best friends decided to enter. We ended up with the idea of a coffee vending machine that didn’t use powders, but actual coffee beans pressed freshly for each cup, giving people a delicious cup of coffee in seconds, without the high price of a chain coffee shop and without the wait.

This was the most time I have ever spent on something while in college. I got the real taste of what entrepreneurship was. I got to see the trials and tribulations of working on something that I was actually excited about. I got to see the ups and downs of planning out an idea, getting far into our business plan and having to completely start over due to dead ends, bouncing ideas off of each other, getting excited about the possible success, only to run into more problems that we had to figure out to make it work. We got to see the full spectrum of what it really takes to bring a business idea to life.

Our goal was to win the entire thing, but to our surprise, we didn’t even place top three. We were absolutely crushed. The countless days we spent working on this, the calls to manufacturers, the many business plans we created, the hours practicing the speech, all felt like a waste because some judges said that it wasn’t good enough.

Fast forward 8 years, and I’m on TikTok and a video pops up of a girl and her brother talking about their success story of starting a coffee vending machine company called Vendibean. You guessed it, their vending machines use actual coffee beans instead of the nasty powders and syrups that current instant coffee machines use.

Hindsight is always 20/20 when you see someone else do an idea that you had, but this one hit differently because in my eyes, a lot of what kept us from continuing our idea was these judges telling us that it wasn’t good enough.

I sit here writing this thinking about what could’ve been if we didn’t let the opinions of others dictate how we moved forward with our idea, and I want anyone reading this to understand that if you want to do something, do it, no matter what anyone else says.

I want to say a big congrats to Vendibean for all the success on their journey and NOT listening to other people when they were told it wouldn’t work out.

Anything is possible when you just believe in yourself.