I've never liked instant coffee. It always felt like a compromise: convenient, but never something you actually wanted to drink.
That frustration turned into an idea in the summer of 2025, during an internship at the State Bank of Pakistan on I.I. Chundrigar Road — Karachi's financial hub. I expected a business district that dense to have decent coffee options nearby. It didn't. Most offices were still running on the same bad instant coffee everyone already had sitting in their kitchen cabinet at home.
My first instinct was to open a café. But I was heading into my final year of university, and running a café would have meant constant clashes with class timings — it just wasn't realistic.
So I flipped the idea: instead of opening a place to get good coffee, why not build a genuinely good alternative to instant coffee that people could make themselves, anywhere? Two problems — no good coffee near offices, and no time to run a café — merged into one answer. That's how Ten15 started.
I chose freeze-dried coffee specifically because of how it's made — freeze-drying preserves flavor and aroma far better than regular instant coffee, which is why it tastes noticeably closer to real café coffee instead of the instant coffee people usually settle for.
There's a cost side to this too. Café coffee is expensive, and getting it costs more than just the price of the cup — the trip there, or the delivery fee and wait if you order in. Ten15 is built to make good coffee an affordable daily habit instead of an occasional treat.
I started Ten15 during my final year studying Economics at IBA. Coming from a Memon family, running your own business was never a far-off idea for me — it's something that's always felt built into how I was raised. I'd always wanted to build something of my own rather than take the conventional 9-to-5 route, so by the time I graduated, going full-time on Ten15 wasn't really a hard decision — it was the plan all along, just brought forward.
The name itself comes from that same idea: a proper coffee break that only takes about ten to fifteen minutes — one you can take anytime you need it, without the usual wait a proper cup demands.
If you've ever settled for a bad cup of instant coffee because a good one felt like too much effort, Ten15 was built for exactly that moment.
— Rabia Popatya, Founder, Ten15
