Your S’pore Story: ‘Our long-term goal is for home businesses to be viable alternatives to traditional F&B’

Running a home cafe sounds simple in theory – brew good coffee, serve it with a smile and post a few photos online. But when 27-year-old Jonathan Tan tried to explore the idea last year, he found a bigger challenge – getting the word out.

“One thing I noticed was that it’s not very easy to search for existing home cafes or home food businesses. Even if you do find them, they might not be near you or sell what you’re looking for,” says Mr Tan, who works as a software engineer.

That insight sparked a bigger idea. Rather than launching his own home cafe, he decided to rope in his army buddy and marketing professional Tok Wei Cheng, 28, to build a solution for existing home-based business owners.

Watch their video here.

In November last year, the duo launched

Acuppa

, a web-based listing platform that works like a directory for home cafes and food businesses in Singapore selling everything from matcha lattes and acai bowls to home-made pasta. The goal: To centralise discovery, reduce friction for consumers and help home-based entrepreneurs thrive.

Mr Tok shares how the platform has grown from just 20 listings to over 300 in less than a year – and what they have learnt from the stories behind each home-based business.

“We started Acuppa last year, but the first couple of months were really slow. There were a lot of mum-and-pop HDB places popping up on Instagram, so we started going to them one by one and pushing them to get on board. But at the start, our view counts on social media were nonexistent even though we were churning out content week after week.

Then in March this year, something changed: We managed to crack the code on why people would want to try home-based cafes. TikTok was the key.

In two months, we saw a huge increase in the number of people wanting to try the food we featured on the channel – our reach grew from 300,000 to over 2 million. And this got people thinking, ‘If they can do it, I can do it too’, leading to more home-based businesses starting.

We’ve had a lot of new people telling us that a home cafe business is something they’ve wanted to do for the longest time. That’s where Acuppa comes in – not just with visibility, but with sharing best practices so they don’t hit the same roadblocks that other businesses did.

It’s really heartening to see how everybody has a different story behind their business – some started selling coffee because they had too many beans at home, some lost their jobs and are finding their passion again, while others just wanted something to do while their kids were at school.

I think the long-term goal for us is for home businesses to be viable alternatives to traditional F&B. There are so many good ideas that never reach traditional F&B because of different barriers to entry – like cost, time and licensing – and that’s just such a waste in terms of creativity.

Both of us see that there are a lot more problems that we could help solve. There are a lot more interesting ideas popping up here and there – that just makes this whole journey a lot more fun and exciting than if we were to just start our own home cafe, at least for the moment.

For generations, The Straits Times has told The Singapore Story. To celebrate our 180th anniversary, we’re putting the spotlight on our communities – for you to tell us yours, from all around Singapore. Discover the stories from your neighbourhood as the series continues at

Your Singapore Story

.