About us
We arrived in Sydney – two students from Germany, starting their exchange years – not knowing anyone or anything. Nobody to text for a recommendation, no idea which direction anything was in.
Which left exactly one option, and it is the most Gen Z option imaginable. We opened TikTok.
Search Sydney café. Save the good ones to a folder. Then walk thirty minutes across the city to a place we'd only ever seen on a screen, order the exact thing from the video, and take a photo of it. This folder ended up with more authority over our weekends than either of us had. Breakfast, dinner, the good beach, the bad beach. Was any of that our own taste? Couldn't tell you. What we can tell you is that the algorithm decided where we went, and we let it.
Then one evening, after one beer or possibly three, we accidentally walked home a different way.
Two streets from the flat there was a bar we had somehow never noticed. Four tables. A guy behind the machine who clearly knew what everyone was going to order before they said it. No queue, no neon, no folder full of videos. Out of curiosity we looked it up afterwards — and it wasn't even on Google Maps.
The absurd part: we'd been walking past that corner for months. It took a wrong turn and three beers to get us through the door.
After that we kept finding them. A bakery down a side street in Marrickville. A place with three stools and a hand-written menu. Always by accident: a wrong turn, leaving ten minutes early, following somebody else's shortcut.
Which is a lovely way to find a café. It's a terrible way to run one.
Then there was this café in Redfern that pulled it all together.
It was the same kind of place as the ones we'd been stumbling into. No website, barely any online presence, nothing you would ever turn up in a search. From the street it looks like a truck garage: no sign worth mentioning, a roller door, and a gap you have to walk through to reach a courtyard at the back. We stood outside for a solid three minutes, debating whether we were at the right place, whether we actually wanted this, and whether we were even allowed in. Then one of us said: “nah, come on — it looked incredible on TikTok.” Decision made, again.
It was one of the nicest places we'd been to all year.
And that's the part we couldn't let go of. Everything about this place said invisible — except thirty seconds of it had gone out to a few hundred thousand people, and that video was the only reason we were standing in the courtyard at all. Someone had probably filmed and cut it on the walk home. Five minutes, that's all.
The difference between this café and the quiet ones we'd found by accident was never the coffee. It was one video.
So there we were, two flat whites on the table, doing the maths.
The places that people post about get a queue around the corner, the ones nobody posts about don't. It has nothing to do with how good or bad the coffee is.
Meanwhile, at every table we sit at, the phones come out before the plate has properly landed. Is that nice? Debatable. Is it going to stop? Absolutely not. Hours of unpaid marketing, cheerfully handed over for nothing.
Two sides – two problems – somewhat related.
So we built HYVE
A café signs up and puts up an offer — a coffee, a pastry, two-for-one, whatever suits them.
A HYVIE (that's what we call the people on the app) activates it, turns up, and posts about the place. Their treat is on the house.
The café gets a real post from someone who actually walked in and actually liked it. The person gets a free flat white and a reason to walk down a street they'd otherwise skip. Nobody has to pretend to be an advertising agency.
Nothing to negotiate, nothing to keep an eye on. It's a way to be visible without running an account, filming anything yourself, or paying somebody for a partnership. While people are going to film their coffee either way — the open question remains whose.
An easy win-win with nothing to be discussed, nothing to be consistently monitored – just connecting the dots. Nobody's doing anyone a favour, and somehow everyone is.
Who's behind this
There are two of us, and we ran into each other within days of landing in Sydney — a welcome week thing, in a bar neither of us can name anymore. Two conversations in, it was fairly clear we were the same kind of restless — motivated, impatient, always mid-project.
Luckily, Sydney was making its own contribution to the process. Much as we love this city, it comfortably outperformed our cost projections — which meant finding an income, fairly quickly. Small complication: neither of us is especially good at being employed. We'll cheerfully push through a night on five coffees if it's our baby, but neither of us has ever been able to stay inside a task when somebody else is deciding what it should be. Employers have consistently found the second part less charming than we do – we think it is the best part about us. So we sat down to think of something instead. Twenty minutes later we had it.
Carl (20)
Our tech brain and spirit animal. Writes the code, usually before we've finished deciding whether to build the thing, which is how most of this got made. Never lets a bad idea past on politeness alone, which has saved us more than once. Always good for one more push before the laptops close, and permanently up for a side quest, which is how we found half the cafés on the app. Has not skipped a gym session in living memory, and hitting his protein target counts as the day's proudest achievement.
Philine (24)
Our ball of energy, the ideas half, and the reason none of them stay theoretical. Decides where HYVE is going and what it's supposed to become. Runs design and sales, never wanted to do marketing, but somehow ended up doing that too. Knows our customers, largely because she loves a good yap. Keeps everyone going on the days when nobody feels like it. Won't start a day without a sunrise walk and a coffee.
Where we're at
Right at the beginning. We're building our first spots in Sydney now, a few at a time, and we're being annoyingly picky about it.
Did you recognise your own place somewhere in all this? The one people love once they've walked in, that not enough people walk into? Then you're exactly who we're looking for.
And if you know a real hidden gem — a café that looks like a truck garage, a bakery that isn't on Google Maps, a place you only found because you took a wrong turn — please hit us up.