I really love to boast about the legendary €84,000 we earned in February 2021. That feeling—that you can actually hit such numbers—is so powerful that it still affects me today, almost two years later.
It’s worth noting that this figure was nearly repeated three times in a row, with only a few thousand euros difference. At that time, Fenster had three baristas working, including me, and we were also training two new staff members. The workload was insane, to put it mildly. We worked weeks on end without a single day off, 10–12 hours every day. Remember—Fenster itself never takes a day off.
I once counted over 100 people in line. The longest wait time was around half an hour. On average, there were about 50 people in line, and the last person would reach the counter in about 15 minutes. One of the most surreal things I ever heard was: “This is the first time I’ve stood in line for 30 minutes, and it’s only for coffee. But it was absolutely worth it.”
Records from that time: 1,100 coffees in a single day, more than 200 per hour, about €5,500 in daily revenue. With just three people. Three.
Back then we were sourcing our cones from a Slovak company and had to drive almost daily to pick them up—box after box after box. Hundreds of Fensterccinos per day. I don’t remember the exact record, but it was somewhere between 500 and 600 cones. And then there was the milk. Other cafés were forced to close, but we were ordering thousands of liters a month. If I’m not mistaken, around 2,000. Don’t quote me, but that sounds about right. We even joked that we weren’t really in the coffee business—we were in the milk business. That was our main expense, and also our main revenue source. Who knows, maybe one day we’ll buy a dairy farm instead of a coffee farm.
The question people always ask me is: can this be repeated? Of course it can. And of course we will. But not as a record—more like a regular statistic. Let me explain why it happened, and why it can become our norm.
It all started with a strange but totally logical coincidence. This was during the second lockdown. Everything was closed. All cafés, all restaurants. We were already seeing strong growth in visitor flow, but then something unusual happened. A popular Instagram blogger from Vienna’s Turkish community posted about us. That community is huge. And then it began. The impact of that one post lasted at least five months. Every single day, people from that community came to us. We were beyond grateful. Each new visitor posted their own photos of Fensterccino, which amplified the effect. Suddenly, crowds of people wanted to try our coffee. From morning until night, non-stop. At least 50% of all our coffee sales were Fensterccino.
We also got lucky with the weather. Mostly dry, lots of sunshine. Yes, sometimes it was cold, but walking through the city was pleasant, and plenty of people were out and about.
This was the moment Vienna locals really discovered us. Before that, more than 70% of our customers were tourists. But during the lockdown, tourists made up less than 5% of our visitors. Locals didn’t just save us from the pandemic—they made us successful, profitable, and famous right here in Vienna. My team and I are endlessly grateful to them. It’s partly out of that gratitude that we built our coffee-ordering app, which gives a 20% discount. The goal was simple: make sure our regulars didn’t have to stand in long lines, and let them get their coffee a bit cheaper.
To this day, those were the golden times. I can’t imagine another café, especially one that only sells coffee, hitting numbers like that.
These days, our average monthly revenue is about €60,000. Our best month this year nearly reached €70,000. And that’s without the same kind of factors—no lockdowns, no mega-popular influencers posting about us. Instead, we have something else: countless ordinary people sharing photos and posts. Not as explosive, but more steady and reliable. We’re growing more slowly now, but also without dramatic dips. And that’s comforting.
It’s also important to note: this is the first somewhat normal post-COVID year. We’re still a long way from the growth rates we saw before the pandemic. Tourism will take a few years to fully recover. And that gives us confidence that demand for our coffee will continue to rise.
Meanwhile, we’ve prepared ourselves for higher demand far better than before. We’ve built additional production capacity that allows us to double our output. We’ve streamlined workflows for maximum speed. We developed our own software that cuts down service time. We set up our own roasting and packaging production, including making our own legendary waffle cones for Fensterccino. Most importantly, we gained experience, expanded our team, and made work processes smoother and more enjoyable for baristas.
So now, with all that experience, we’re positioned to serve even more customers, more efficiently, and at higher quality. Subjectively, I truly believe we could double our old record and make more than 2,000 people happy with our coffee in a single day. Time will tell.
And now for the less pleasant part. Our winter 2021 success shook us so much that we made a series of mistakes that almost cost us Fenster itself. We started planning and spending as if that growth would last forever. We didn’t want to believe that a steep rise would inevitably be followed by a drop.
The only thing that saved us was the fact that we didn’t “burn” the money. Instead, we reinvested it into growth and capacity building.
Do I regret that our finances became so stretched at one point that we were playing catch-up with our balance? No. Not at all.
Of course, it would have been smarter to set aside some reserves, to spend more slowly and cautiously, and avoid ending the year with an empty account. That would have been better. But the truth is, we made massive, meaningful investments that now force us to use the new capacity to its fullest. I mean our roasting and packaging facility, and the huge volume of coffee we purchased last year and this year. Now we must use all of that effectively, at scale. And if we do, all those investments will return with even greater profit.
Our spending allowed us to accelerate our growth dramatically, skipping unnecessary pauses and delays, and move to a much higher level. In equipment, in roasting, in developing our own software, and in many other ways.
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