About

Behind Pulled

I’m Rashad, founder of Pulled.

For about a decade I have been obsessed with coffee shops. Not just the drinks. The places themselves. The way a good shop can change a block. The way a real barista pulls a shot like they actually care about every step in the process.

I always thought I would open my own one day. I had spreadsheets. I had locations scouted, three different cities at three different points in my life. The math never worked out. Commercial leases in the cities I love start at numbers I was not going to pretend I had lying around, and specialty coffee margins are tight even when you do everything right. I sat with that for a while. Years.

What I could not let go of was the rewards programs. Every single one is a scam. You hand over your data, your loyalty, your morning routine, and they give you a free drink on your tenth visit. Or 50 points that translate to nothing. Or a punch card you lose in your wallet within a week. The math is always rigged in their favor and the payout is always trivial.

So I kept thinking. What if you flipped it. Instead of points that mean nothing, what if the reward was real money. Real PayPal cash. The kind you can actually spend. And what if you were not locked to one chain or one app. What if you could check in at any specialty coffee shop anywhere in the world and have it count.

That is Pulled. Live on iOS and Android.

Check in at any specialty coffee shop. Complete real challenges. Earn real PayPal cash. The bigger the challenge, the bigger the payout. Tea houses, matcha bars, boba spots, chai cafes, anywhere a barista hands you a drink, it counts. Your local bagel or donut shop is on there too, and counts.

1,000,000+ shops indexed across 175+ countries.

Coffee is universal. The reward should be too. I am not pretending this is going to take down Starbucks tomorrow. It will not. But for anyone who has ever felt that the loyalty programs out there are an insult to your intelligence, this is what I built instead.

Why I write about coffee

If I could not own the shop, I wanted to build the layer above it. Pulled is the rewards engine. The Pulled Journal is the part where I get to nerd out on the coffee itself.

Everything published here comes from real time on the bar, real trial and error at home, and a decade of paying attention to the differences between a great cup and an ordinary one. When a post touches on health or nutrition, it gets reviewed by a registered dietitian before it ships. When it is about gear, I have either used it, measured it against an alternative I have used, or interviewed someone who has. I do not write about products I have not actually had hands on with.

Who writes what

Most posts here are written by me. Anything tied to coffee culture, the bar, gear I’ve used, or my read on the industry, that’s mine. The byline reads Rashad Naouchi when it’s a post I wrote.

Health, nutrition, and wellness pieces are written by Sara Naouchi, RDN. She’s a registered dietitian nutritionist and the only person on this site who should be writing or vouching for content about your body. When you see her byline, it means she wrote it. When you see her name in a “Medically reviewed by” line, it means she reviewed it before it shipped.

City guides, comparison posts, beginner reference, and the broader catalog are written by the Pulled Editorial team and credited as such. Data work runs under the same byline. The Pulled Coffee Density Index 2026 ranks coffee cities worldwide from our operational shop database.

Outside the coffee thing

I live in Colorado. The outdoors is where I reset. Camping in the high country, snowboarding when the snow is good, hiking the trails closer to home when it is not. I am the oldest of three. The mountains are the off switch. Coffee is the on switch.

Reach me

If you are a coffee shop owner who wants Pulled in your shop, a journalist with a question, or someone who wants to swap notes on espresso, the inbox is open.

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