How I started ☕️ Coool café

☕️ Coool café is exactly that—a project I built to combine two obsessions: technology and coffee. On one side, I spend my days tinkering with AI and IT horizons. On the other hand, I can’t resist wandering through cities and hunting down cafés that feel like hidden works of art. This project lets me do both at once.

I grew up in Pleiku, one of Vietnam’s major coffee-producing regions. Coffee wasn’t something exotic; it was part of the landscape, part of daily life. Later, at university, I studied Food Engineering and found myself drawn to beverages — the craft, the chemistry, the way small tweaks in process can change an entire experience.

Coffee also became my personal ritual. It’s my daily drink, my pause button, and my source of focus. Over time, it shifted from convenience to curiosity. I began exploring espresso, specialty coffee, and the stories behind them.

As a digital nomad, this habit naturally expanded into travel. Every new city became a hunt for good cafés — not just any place with Wi-Fi, but spots with character, craft, and care in every cup. Sometimes I’d spend hours researching cafés before a trip, often longer than I’d spend picking restaurants or accommodation.

During my reading on Vietnamese history under French Indochina, I stumbled on this line:

That image stuck with me. Across cultures and centuries, cafés have been more than places to drink—they’ve been spaces for ideas, art, and conversation. From the salons of Enlightenment Europe to the tucked-away coffee houses of Saigon today, coffee shops are cultural nodes.

All of this shaped my vision of Coool café: not just a directory of places, but a curated map of the cafés that matter — to me, to travelers, and to anyone who sees coffee as culture.

So I thought: why not map the coolest ones? Not just with coordinates, but with stories, vibes, and quirks (and most importantly, good espresso ☕🤌🏼).

I’ve been inspired by indie makers like @levelsio, Marc Lou, Tony Dinh—builders who learn by doing, ship quickly, and let users shape the product. The first version of Coool café was scrappy—data stitched together, lots of bugs lurking, and more questions than answers. But shipping early taught me more than waiting for perfection.

The first version of Coool café was literally stitched together from messy scripts, scattered schema spreadsheets, and trial-and-error with AI tools (3+ tools just for the front end). I broke things constantly (delete the whole database, docker, nginx,…). Pages failed to load, data looked ugly, and bugs were everywhere. But each failure taught me: how to preprocess café data, how search intent shapes SEO, and how to get a simple web app indexed by Google.

I used v0 to draft out the very first version of the app. This was a really fascinating experience where you can just channel your thoughts to a real UI, I mean, straight from thoughts ➞ visuals.

Google Maps is great, but anyone who’s searched for cafés knows the “hit or miss” problem. Results are shaped by SEO tricks, keywords, ads, and algorithms. Sometimes you find gold; other times you waste a morning. My goal with Coool café is to surface the gems—hidden spots where the barista is 70 years old, where pour-over comes in a champagne glass, or where the walls are built from recycled scrap.

Over months of tinkering, I went from:

It’s still a one-man show. Preprocessing data takes time. Launching features means juggling learning curves. Some days feel like hitting walls, other days like uncovering hidden gems. But that’s the indie-builder game: ship, learn, repeat.

☕️ Coool café isn’t meant to reinvent the wheel, or claim some rocket-science breakthrough. The idea of mapping great coffee spots already exists, and I’ve drawn inspiration from platforms I admire.

These sites reminded me that you don’t always need to chase the most unique idea. Sometimes the smarter path is to start simple, solve your own problem, and improve where existing platforms fall short in quality.

For me, that meant curating cafés not just by address or rating, but by the vibe, quirks, and stories that make them worth the visit.

Coool café is just the starting point. Beyond mapping cafés, I want to share the building process itself — the messy experiments, the tools that saved me, and the lessons learned while stitching this project together.

Over the next posts, I’ll dive into details like:

Think of it as an open build-log: not just showing the polished product, but documenting the process of going from an idea to something real and usable.

If you’re curious, check it out. Explore, enjoy, and if you have suggestions or hidden gems to add, let me know.