So, the idea of the café is ready. Now comes a tricky question most people don’t pay enough attention to: positioning. It’s a broad and powerful word, but I’ll try to explain.
By “positioning,” I don’t mean the technical side—I mean the front-facing side of entrepreneurship. In short: what are you offering, and to whom? It’s all about your target audience and your unique market offer.
Obviously, trying to compete with every other café around you is pointless. They’ve already built their customer base and reputation, and breaking through that would take either years or tons of money. Naturally, I had neither.
That’s why I needed to find my own “hooks”—things that make Fenster different—and then find the people who would care about that difference. And that, in my view, is what positioning is all about.
The biggest challenge for any new café is that no matter how insanely good your coffee is, to people walking by you’re just one of a dozen other coffee spots. Why should they pick you over Starbucks or the local chain on the corner?
That’s why you need a toolkit—something that makes your café stand out and makes it obvious to the right people why they should come in. That’s your positioning.
So, here’s how I thought about Fenster: what can I offer that no one else has, and that will attract the right people to me?
Premium quality and rock-bottom prices? Yawn. That’s a dead-end. We’ll talk more about quality later. But as for pricing—classic beginner mistake. Low prices don’t make you money. They make you broke. Profits come from justifiably high prices. Especially when your only product is coffee. (That’s a whole other topic.)
What I’m talking about is real uniqueness. A beacon. Something that draws people in without needing a pitch or an explanation.
For Fenster, that beacon was the Cornettoccino.
I’ll go into more detail on that in another post, but for now: it became the defining element of Fenster’s identity. Without it, Fenster wouldn’t exist.
Why? Because no one else had it—at least not in Vienna. It was interesting, it was unusual, it was delicious. It looked amazing on Instagram. It was a brand-new idea in an incredibly traditional space.
Cornettoccino’s success was so massive that I ended up creating an entire line of creative coffee drinks around it. It helped draw a clear line between Fenster and every other café in town. There’s Fenster—and then there’s everybody else.
What else do we serve? Stuff like Marshmallowccino, Oreo Latte, Espresso Orange, Chili Espresso… and later we even added boozy drinks: a coffee twist on mulled wine, summer cocktails, Lemon Cheesecake Cappuccino, even a Mozart Espresso—perfect for Vienna. And more.
So, one of the core features of Fenster became this big, fun, creative coffee cocktail menu—with the Cornettoccino at the top. And these drinks now make up nearly 50% of our revenue. But it’s not just about the money. It’s about the experience. The vibe. The look. The taste. People snap photos, post them online, and just like that—we’re getting free marketing.
But that’s not enough.
Having cool, trendy drinks is great—but not enough. Because 50 to 70% of our guests? They just want a regular coffee—espresso, americano, cappuccino, the classics. So those have to be absolutely spot-on too.
That’s why I put so much effort into getting the classics just right. So we could build a base of loyal regulars while still sticking to the quality I believe in. The idea? Traditional flavors, made with the most modern tools and techniques.
And of course, specialty coffee.
At first, I bought beans from my favorite Vienna roasters. But soon I started roasting them myself. Today, I believe Fenster is one of the best in the specialty segment. Because we use top-tier equipment (including for filter brews), we use the best beans in the industry, and we even created some of our own brewing processes.
And by the way—where else in Vienna can you get a Gesha coffee (yes, that Gesha), from Ninety Plus, in multiple variations, at the same time—served as both espresso and filter?
Fenster became a kind of coffee superstore. We had something for everyone: trend-forward drinks, the classics, and top-tier specialty coffee. Syrups? Marshmallows? Sure. Want a sharp espresso? Got it. Want the world’s finest coffee, brewed to perfection? We’ve got that too.
But only coffee.
At Fenster, you can’t buy food. No cookies. No snacks. No merch. No soda. Just coffee. In drinks and in beans.
We get offers all the time—people asking to sell pastries through us. They can’t believe we’re a coffee shop without food. But that’s exactly the point.
Fenster has a lot of little quirks that shape its positioning—and I’ll keep writing about them in this blog. Bit by bit, it’ll paint the full picture.
And me? You’ll find me, as always, with a coffee in hand.
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