A cup of tea will help you solve the biggest problem in entrepreneurship

Tasseography is the process of predicting the future using tea leaves. It originated in China a long time ago, but the present version most of us are familiar with (most likely because of scenes from Harry Potter) stems from 1500s Arabic coffee culture. In reality, according to Wikipedia, tasseography was conceived by the concubines in harems as they sat around drinking coffee and being bored.

Quick tangent: I wouldn’t have previously connected the words “coffee” and “bored” with the words “concubines” and “harems.” However, now that I’m thinking about it, I find myself wondering how concubines in harems spent their time when their conquerors were off attempting to… umm… extend their harems. Anyway… let’s get back on topic, as none of that history is what is truly important for the purposes of this post.

Instead, for the sake of this post, ignore everything you ever thought you knew about “reading the tea leaves” in a spiritual sense, and let’s focus on learning what the same tea leaves can teach entrepreneurs about successfully developing startups.

Life Before the Teabag

My wife is English, so I’ve spent more time around tea than I ever thought I would. Before I met her, it never occurred to me that tea didn’t always come in tea bags. To be clear, I’m sure I could have figured this out. But I never thought much about tea until marrying an English person and being introduced to a shockingly more complicated world of tea than I’d previously believed.

hat world is packed with lots of various varieties of teas—way more than you’d ever expect—and most of the good stuff comes in unpackaged, loose-leaf form. More crucially, the world of tea has been utilizing unbagged tea for a long time. In fact, aside from apparent innovations around things like technology, marketing, and logistics in any modern company, the major difference between the tea industry in 2024 and the tea industry in 1824 is that some teas come in individual tea bags.

Yes… tea bags. They were invented in the early 1900s, meaning they’ve only been around for a little more than a century. I bring this up because, even though the modest teabag doesn’t seem like a big thing, it was actually a tremendous advance in the tea market.

The Teabag’s Unexpected Invention

To grasp why, remember that people brewed loose-leaf tea using the same fundamental method for thousands of years until someone finally came along and asked, “What if we put a small pile of leaves into little serving bags so people can easily brew individual cups?” That someone was an American tea importer named Thomas Sullivan.

And, the reality is, he never actually asked that question. Instead, he invented the teabag by accident. Thomas Sullivan’s development of the tea bag is a wonderful reminder of what most people misunderstand about how the entrepreneurial process starts.

Lots of entrepreneurs think the entrepreneurial process starts with sitting about and thinking really hard until they come up with a wonderful concept. Then they build whatever it was they invented, share it with the world, and, if it genuinely was as revolutionary as they thought—POOF!—entrepreneurial success!

But Sullivan’s version of the entrepreneurial process is far closer to the truth. He didn’t spend his time sitting around thinking about ideas that may transform the tea industry. Instead, starting about 1908, in an attempt to sell more tea, Sullivan started putting little samples of different teas into separate silk bags and delivering them to potential consumers.

The folks who received the bagged tea samples thought they were expected to utilize them in the brewing process, and, as the saying goes, the rest is history. Sullivan’s clients began clamoring for more; Sullivan realized there was a large business opportunity in mass-producing single-portion tea servings, and he founded a firm to start manufacturing individually bagged tea. In doing so, he accidentally ushered in a multi-billion dollar tea bag market.

The Challenge of Consumer Adoption

Eventually, Sullivan’s form of individual tea bags found their way over the Atlantic to England, where businesses anticipated it would be a tremendous hit. However, when English people originally saw individual tea bags, they didn’t comprehend their genuine use.

Instead, they concluded the bags were just a quirky way of packaging loose-leaf tea. As a result, rather than utilizing the bags as intended, early English consumers of tea bags would individually cut each bag open and pour the contents into their regular loose-leaf tea tins until they were ready to make tea. At that point, they’d scoop individual portions and prepare individual cups of tea just as they’d done for hundreds of years prior, all while having no knowledge that the initial bags they’d emptied had individual servings and were supposed to be poured directly into boiling water.

In other words, unlike Sullivan’s original customers, who came up with the use of separate tea bags themselves and grasped their function, English consumers, who’d never considered the concept of individual tea bags, just didn’t “get it.”

While this mistake was relatively minor and eventually fixed, it’s a fantastic reminder of the basic challenge entrepreneurs have to overcome not just in the tea sector, but in every industry entrepreneurs seek to enter.

The Entrepreneurial Lesson

Simply put, customers are creatures of habit, and they don’t sit around contemplating better techniques for doing things. Instead, they usually just do whatever they’ve always done. As a result, even when something better comes along, they don’t necessarily recognize it as being superior.

Often, as the example of individual tea bags in England indicates, customers will actually see a new innovation as being worse than what they’d been doing. This issue turns out to be the primary challenge entrepreneurs need to solve in order to have people utilizing and liking their products.

Great entrepreneurs don’t only produce fantastic things. Great entrepreneurs help clients grasp the value of what they’ve developed by telling them how it’ll improve their lives.

Sure, this might not sound hard because… well… who doesn’t desire something better? But it’s considerably more complex than most people assume because consumers are usually perfectly content with what they’re already doing.

When people aren’t actively exploring better solutions, you won’t need to read any tea leaves to know that persuading them to switch to your product in the future is going to involve tons of hard work.