P!ng’s mostly automated trailer offers a variety of brews via a mobile app
After careers at tech companies including Amazon, iRobot, and SharkNinja, a pair of first-time entrepreneurs are trying to solve one of life’s small but annoying problems: the long wait at the drive-through coffee line.
Robotics expert Rob Whitten and experienced marketer Jane Lo started an automated coffee drive-through company called P!ng last year and built a prototype coffee making and serving trailer that’s up and running in an empty parking lot near the busy intersection of Route 3 and Route 4 in Lowell with a goal of serving beverages quicker than humans can.
Customers select from a typical array of coffee and tea beverages on a mobile app, which includes everything from an iced pumpkin spice latte to a hot chai tea latte.
Beverages aren’t made until a customer’s mobile app notifies the system that the customer is close. That means the drinks should be fresh when the customer pulls up, unlike rivals that may make drinks as soon as they’re ordered on a mobile app.
Once a driver arrives at the parking lot, cameras and a LIDAR sensor on the trailer assess the window height of the customer’s vehicle and raise or lower an automated serving platform. When a reporter pulled up in a midsize SUV on a recent sunny weekday, the system delivered a perfectly chilled iced coffee at just the right height.
P!ng’s prototype machine looks like something out of a Jimmy Neutron cartoon, built by Whitten with mostly off-the-shelf motors and sensors with some patent-pending integrations. There’s also an air of Willy Wonka’s factory as the bright green and black trailer with blinking lights sits surrounded by green traffic cones.
And like the fictional chocolatier’s factory, there are some invisible human helpers inside the trailer. A machine mixes the drinks from the various ingredients but a few steps are not yet automated, like applying a label with the customer’s name to each drink and moving beverages around inside the trailer, Whitten said. So he and Lo perform those steps by hand.
“We put it together to show that customers like this experience to the point where we can say it’s worth other people investing,” Whitten said. Once more funding is secured, “we can fully automate it and then release it next year for a 24/7 experience.”
While the startup’s mobile app tracks a customer’s location to trigger the coffee making process, the data isn’t retained and the company isn’t selling any customer data, Whitten said.
The idea for the startup came to Whitten while he was taking his three teenage daughters for snacks. “We were in these drive-through lines and we didn’t think it should take 20 minutes to get a McFlurry after soccer practice,” he said. Commiserating with Lo, who he met when they both worked on blenders at Shark Ninja, Whitten said the pair thought “between her customer experience and my automation background, we could come up with a way better solution.”
Whitten grew up in New Hampshire and attended West Point. After serving in the Army, he worked on automated defense systems at BAE Systems and iRobot and warehouse robots at Amazon, with a stint at Shark Ninja in between. Lo, a California native who moved to Boston 14 years ago, worked developing and marketing products at Samsonite and Shark Ninja and as an analyst at Forrester before P!ng.
The startup’s name is inspired by pinging, a fast marching style — now discontinued — imposed on plebes at West Point. But it also represents what the founders hope will be a brisk pace of business, with customers pinging the trailer with their orders. P!ng’s business model ultimately will depend on recruiting franchisees, but Whitten and Lo expect to own the first 40 or so stations themselves to prove that the concept works.
They aim to sell each trailer for about $200,000, which “allows us to open up the franchise opportunity for people that aren’t necessarily rich to begin with,” Whitten said. “Those are the kind of people that will engage with the community, will help tell the story, and will help [customers] for their first times through.”
Taking on goliaths like Dunkin’ and Starbucks may seem like a fool’s errand. But independent coffee shops have always been able to carve out successful niches. There are two Starbucks, a McDonalds, and a Dunkin’ outlet near P!ng’s initial location but that hasn’t stopped the startup from attracting repeat customers since the trailer opened two months ago.
“People are coming back quite often,” Lo said. ”We even have a super user who has been here 23 times.”
Starting a business mid-career doesn’t match the Silicon Valley stereotype of young founders dropping out of college but studies show startups with older founders are more likely to succeed. “It’s all the sorts of knowledge that people gained up until their middle age that they can put to use,” said Pierre Azoulay, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management and coauthor of a seminal 2018 paper that demonstrated the success of older entrepreneurs.
Azoulay’s paper found the mean age of the most successful founders was 45. Whitten is 47 and Lo is 44.
“Neither of us ever foresee ourselves going back to more of a traditional nine-to-five role,” Lo said. “Being an entrepreneur is actually very intoxicating.”