The Story Behind SpecialtyAtlas: Why I'm Building the App I Wished Existed
There's a moment that changes everything. For some people it's a song, a city, a person. For me, it was a cup of coffee — though I didn't know it at the time.
Marcin Dziubak — Founder of SpecialtyAtlas
I was working at a chain café. Italian-style espresso, steamed milk, the usual. The beans came in big bags with no story attached. Nobody asked where they were grown, at what altitude, or how they were processed. It was just... coffee. Dark, bitter, anonymous. And for a while, that was fine. I didn't know any different.
Then a book landed in my hands. I don't even remember how exactly — it might have been a recommendation, it might have been chance. But somewhere in those pages, I came across the term specialty coffee for the first time. Two words that cracked open an entirely different world.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Once I started learning, I couldn't stop. I devoured books about extraction, origin, and processing methods. I spent hours on YouTube watching experts break down the science behind a perfect pour-over. I talked to baristas — not the quick "one flat white, please" kind of conversation, but real, long talks about beans, roasters, water chemistry, grind size, and everything in between. I wanted to understand.
And the more I understood, the harder it became to go back.
Standing behind the counter of that chain café, pulling shots from beans I knew nothing about, felt wrong. Not in a dramatic way — just in the quiet, persistent way that tells you you've outgrown something. The standards were low. The curiosity wasn't there. The coffee was a product, not a craft.
So I left. And I started looking for the places that did it differently.
The Problem No One Was Solving
Here's the thing about specialty coffee — it exists everywhere. There are incredible cafés in cities you'd never expect. Small, passionate, often hidden on side streets that tourists never find. The problem isn't supply. The problem is discovery.
Try this experiment: open Google Maps and search for "specialty coffee." What you'll get is a list of every café in a ten-kilometer radius. Chain stores, random restaurants, fast-food joints with a coffee machine. Maybe a McDonald's McCafé for good measure. Google doesn't understand what specialty means in this context. It treats "specialty coffee" the same way it treats "coffee" — as a generic category, not a quality standard.
Compare that to food. If you search "Italian cuisine," you'll get actual Italian restaurants. The filtering works. But for specialty coffee, the filtering simply doesn't exist. The burden falls entirely on you — the person standing on an unfamiliar street in a foreign city, trying to figure out which of these fifteen Google results actually sources beans from a known roaster, actually trains their baristas, actually cares.
I've been that person more times than I can count. Scrolling through reviews, cross-referencing Instagram accounts, asking locals, checking roaster websites to see if any nearby café carries their beans. It works, but it takes time, and it shouldn't have to be this hard.
There are a few specialty coffee apps out there. I've tried them all. Some focus only on Europe. Some cover only a single country. Most are little more than a glorified list with a pin on a map. They lack depth — no bean information, no community features, no real connection between the people who roast, the people who brew, and the people who drink.
And that's the part that bothered me most. Specialty coffee, at its core, is about connection. It's about the farmer who spent months nurturing a crop at 1,800 meters above sea level. The roaster who profiled that bean to bring out notes of stone fruit and dark chocolate. The barista who dialed in the grinder that morning to get it just right. There are people behind every cup. And none of the existing tools reflected that.
From Blog to Blueprint
Before SpecialtyAtlas was an app, it was a conversation.
Every time I met someone new — at a party, at a café, on a trip — I'd end up explaining what specialty coffee is. Not because anyone asked, but because I genuinely loved talking about it. The difference between commercial and specialty. Why the same bean tastes completely different depending on who roasts it. Why that tiny café around the corner is doing something genuinely remarkable with a Kenyan single origin.
At some point, I realized I was having the same conversation over and over. So I started a blog — kawatoowoc.pl — as a way to share that knowledge with more people at once. Writing about coffee was a natural extension of talking about coffee. It let me reach a wider audience and, slowly, start building a community around the things I cared about.
But a blog has limits. It's one-directional. You publish, people read, and that's mostly it. What I really wanted was something interactive — a space where coffee lovers could find each other, share discoveries, and feel like part of something bigger.
The idea for an app had been forming in the back of my mind for a while. But it crystallized during a trip.
Built on the Road
Almost a year ago, I started doing something deliberate. Every café I visited — and I visit a lot of them — I'd sit down with the baristas. I'd talk to the regulars. Not about the app, not yet. Just about their experience. What do they look for in a café? How do they find new places when they travel? What's missing? What frustrates them?
I did the same thing in different cities, different countries. And the answers were remarkably consistent. People wanted a reliable way to find quality. They wanted to know what beans a café was serving right now. They wanted to connect with other coffee enthusiasts, especially when traveling. They wanted a sense of community that went beyond a five-star Google rating.
I came home and started writing. What began as a rough outline turned into a 100-page specification document describing every feature, every screen, every interaction. The map. The filters. The digital passport with collectible city stamps. The bean-matching system. The social features. The event listings. The B2B dashboards for café and roastery owners. All of it, meticulously planned before a single line of code was written.
The Solo Founder Reality
I need to be honest about something: building SpecialtyAtlas is one of the hardest things I've ever done.
I'm financing everything out of my own pocket. There's no venture capital, no angel investor, no safety net. Every decision carries real weight because there's no budget for mistakes. The scope of the project kept growing — what started as "a better map for specialty cafés" evolved into a full-blown platform with a mobile app, web dashboards, a bean discovery engine, social features, and a B2B subscription model.
There were moments of doubt. Late nights staring at the screen, wondering if anyone would actually use this. Wondering if I was building something the world needed or just something I needed. The difference between a passion project and a viable product can sometimes feel paper-thin.
Two things kept me going.
First: the people around me. I'm incredibly lucky to have a close circle that has supported me unconditionally through this process. Not just with encouraging words — with real belief. The kind that makes you feel accountable, not because of pressure, but because you don't want to let down the people who bet on you.
Second: Bartek Szcześniak joined the team. Bartek and I had collaborated on projects before, and I knew he was someone I could trust completely. When he came on board with SpecialtyAtlas, it was more than just gaining a teammate — it was a massive boost of energy and validation. When someone you respect looks at what you're building and says "I'm in," it changes the weight of the whole thing. There were two of us now. And two is always better than one.
What I Bring to the Table
By day — well, by every day for the past eight years — I'm a graphic designer. Visual communication, video production, branding. It's what I know, and it's deeply woven into how I approach SpecialtyAtlas. This isn't a developer's side project with an afterthought UI. Every screen, every animation, every micro-interaction is designed with intention. The app needs to feel premium because specialty coffee is premium — not in a snobby way, but in a "we care about every detail" way.
I also travel. A lot. And not the resort-and-sightseeing kind of travel. When I arrive somewhere new, I skip the tourist spots. I find a café, order a pour-over, and watch the city from a barstool. I walk the side streets. I talk to locals. I look at how life actually works in the places tourists don't go.
That mindset — curiosity, openness, the willingness to get lost — is baked into SpecialtyAtlas. The app isn't just a tool to find coffee. It's a companion for the kind of person who wants to experience a city through its coffee culture. Someone who'd rather discover a tiny roastery in a back alley than check another monument off a list.
What SpecialtyAtlas Actually Is
Let me explain the product in plain terms — the way I'd explain it to a friend over an espresso.
For coffee lovers: SpecialtyAtlas is a map that only shows you specialty cafés. Not chains. Not random restaurants. Only places that work with quality beans from known roasters, where baristas actually know their craft. You can see what beans each café is serving right now, match your taste preferences with specific coffees through our Atlas Lab feature, collect digital passport stamps as you visit cafés around the world, share your brew recipes, find coffee events near you, and connect with other enthusiasts through Coffee Buddy when you're traveling.
For café and roastery owners: SpecialtyAtlas gives you a dedicated platform to showcase your work to an audience that already cares about quality. Manage your profile, highlight your current bean offerings, promote events, and access analytics — all through a clean B2B dashboard designed specifically for the specialty coffee industry.
The key distinction is curation. We don't list every place that sells coffee. We list places that meet a clear standard: venues working exclusively with specialty-grade beans, conscious sourcing, known roasters, proper training. That filter is the entire point. It's what Google can't do and what existing apps don't do well enough.
A Note on What Specialty Coffee Really Is
I want to address something that comes up in almost every conversation I have about this project.
Specialty coffee is not coffee for snobs. It's not "just expensive coffee." It's coffee that cares. Behind every bag of specialty beans, there are real people — a farmer, a processor, a roaster — who put in real work to produce something exceptional. The higher price reflects fair wages, sustainable farming, careful processing, and skilled roasting. It reflects craft.
When you buy a bag of specialty coffee, you're not paying for a brand name or a fancy package. You're paying for transparency, traceability, and quality that you can actually taste in the cup. That's what makes it special. And that's what SpecialtyAtlas is here to celebrate and make accessible to everyone, everywhere.
What's Next
SpecialtyAtlas is almost ready for launch. The mobile app — for both iOS and Android — is in its final stages. We're launching with curated café data from key cities around the world, with plans to expand rapidly.
This is just the beginning. The vision is a global coffee community — a place where enthusiasts find their next favorite café in any city, where roasters connect with the people who drink their coffee, and where the whole chain from farm to cup becomes visible and valued.
I've been building toward this moment for almost a year. Every conversation with a barista, every late night refining a feature spec, every moment of doubt followed by a moment of clarity — it all led here.
If you love coffee the way I do, SpecialtyAtlas was built for you.
Join Us
Download the app — coming soon to iOS and Android. Be among the first to explore specialty coffee the way it was meant to be discovered.
Follow the journey — we share behind-the-scenes updates, coffee tips, and city guides on Instagram @specialtyatlas.
Own a café or roastery? Create your free business account and put your brand in front of an audience that's already looking for exactly what you offer.
SpecialtyAtlas — Discover. Taste. Collect.
