The name and the mark
The ember is the heat in the drum, and the color of a good drop. The lot is the green you bought, and the unit everything traces back to. Together they cover the job the software does: heat applied to a lot, and a record of what happened.
The logo is a single rising line, like a roast curve, ending in one ember dot at the drop. It draws itself once when the page loads and then holds still. We kept the motion to a minimum.
It started as an internal tool
Dana Whitfield ran the drum. Before Emberlot she was head roaster, then production manager, at a wholesale roastery in Richmond. She was the one who turned a weekend of cafe orders into a Monday roast plan, week after week, off a whiteboard and a green spreadsheet that only she fully understood.
Then came the Thanksgiving-week miscount. The spreadsheet said there was enough Colombia to cover the holiday orders, and there wasn’t, not by a long way. She found out the night before the holiday, on the phone with accounts, renegotiating deliveries she’d already promised, while her family waited on dinner.
She built the first version of Emberlot as an internal tool so that wouldn’t happen again. Green was tracked by the lot, drew down as she roasted, and warned her before she ran short. Other roasters saw it and started asking for copies. In 2023 she stopped emailing spreadsheets around and incorporated it.
Why it doesn’t draw curves
People assume a roastery software company wants to own the whole roast, curve and all. Dana didn’t build it that way and won’t. She profiles her own roasts on the same tool a lot of you already use, and she never wanted Emberlot anywhere near that part. The profiling is the part of the job roasters enjoy. The record-keeping is the part nobody wants to do, and that’s the part Emberlot handles.
The way Dana puts it: it’s for people with a stack of invoices they haven’t sent, not people shopping for another dashboard.
The team
Four people
Dana Whitfield
Founder
Roasted for nine years before she wrote a line of this.
Theo
Builds the product
Came from logistics software, learned to cup so he’d stop shipping things roasters would never use.
Renata
Onboarding and support
Ran a two-drum shop of her own, so when you email support there’s a good chance you’re talking to someone who has done the job.
Sam
The books and contracts
The boring parts that keep a bootstrapped company alive.
There are no headshots on this page. That’s deliberate. We’d rather show you the app than our faces, and we didn’t want stock photos standing in for real ones.
How we run this
We’re bootstrapped, four people, based in Richmond. We answer our own support, and we’d rather ship slowly and get it right than grow fast. The plan is month to month because we’d rather earn the renewal each month. Your data is yours, and it leaves with you if you go.
Richmond, Virginia
That’s the whole address, the city and not a street. We’re a software company, so there’s no shop to walk into. Everything happens over a screen and a phone call, which is how our customers prefer it anyway.
Come see what she built.
Book a demo. It’s thirty minutes, on your own data or a sample roastery.