Aaron Hubbard drove 3,000 miles on $300 of gas to run a bohemian café in Berkeley with no coffee experience, working 7 am to 5 pm seven days a week. He argues that competing with Starbucks is like comparing a boutique to Walmart. Real competition comes from local peers who can actually meet your neighborhood's needs.
Chapters
So then I got an opportunity to work for a startup in Atlanta. It was a tech company. And they were like, yeah, come down. Check it out. It'll be awesome. So I go down there, and I'm interviewing for this job. And this guy had mentioned that he had a cafe in Berkeley. And he's like, oh yeah, I've got this cafe in Berkeley. I'm not sure what we're going to do with it, but it's just working. But it was a stepping stone for him. He needed to move on and do something a little more fulfilling. And little did he know, I'd been dreaming of owning my own business for, you know, the last 5 years before that. What is it going to be? Is it going to be a food truck? I knew it was going to be in service, like some sort of customer service. And an opportunity presented itself. I'd had opportunities present themselves in the past, but I hadn't gone after them. Well, when I finally found one that came up and it was right in my face, I jumped on it. I got on a flight, flew to Berkeley. I checked out the café. I was like, what is this? This is awesome. And it was a bohemian-style café, just like any other café, coffee shop. Served food, cereal, weird stuff. And I just decided, this is what I want to do. So, packed up my car at about—
19?
$300 in gas, which is like 3,000 miles. I don't know how I made it. Like, but I made it from Indiana to California. I got on another flight. I flew back and drove another car out here. And I got to work. I started working 7 days a week, 7 AM to 5 PM. I'd never worked in a coffee shop before. I'd never— What was your first job? really worked in a restaurant. And— but I knew how to set up a team. I knew how to innovate and excite the team, keep them motivated. So, I thought that would take me far enough. Well, it didn't. So, it was— there was a lot more I needed to learn. But a cool thing about that was I had an opportunity to learn in an environment where the liability wasn't It wasn't all the way on me. All the pressure wasn't on me. I had someone else who was running the show. He was offsite, but he was there if I needed him. And I was just waiting for shit to hit the fan. I don't know what's going to happen. Are we going to make enough money to survive this month, pay our bills, pay our vendors, pay our employees? It was like that every single month. And we were just waiting for things to go wrong. And they never did. Just kept getting better. We got a better staff. We did some improvements to the space. We changed the menu. We changed the food. We did everything we could to make this a better environment. And luckily, it worked out. But I knew there was an end to it. And basically, we had a lease that was coming up. Said, hey, 2 years from now, you can't be here anymore. That's how things work. You sign leases and at the end of it, especially out here with the environment, like real estate environment, rents go up and a lot of businesses don't— aren't able to continue doing business. Well, luckily, there was a company that was buying the building that I was in. Where my retail space is. And they wanted to make some changes. Well, luckily for them, I wanted to make some changes too. I love this neighborhood that I'm in. I live there. This is my block. It's my hood. It's my— yeah, it's just a cool place to be for me. And I decided I want to stay here. I want to try to make an impact on this neighborhood. It needs cleaned up. It needs a place for people to gather and build community. And so I decided to work harder to make that dream continue. So is anyone interested in doing any kind of retail brick-and-mortar business? Or is it all tech? Retail brick-and-mortar. What kind?
I'm actually— to be honest, my idea was to create a Awesome.
Yeah, absolutely.
It would be like, you know, giving them opportunities by making that work, and then, you know, I would make money by serving them.
Absolutely.
You know, make it integrate them all into the right platform. Absolutely.
That's awesome. And that's thinking bigger. It's not only— it's like 2 businesses in one, right? Yeah.
But I want to know, I mean, because you see that coffee, when you think about opening a coffee shop, it seems like very ordinary or usual because there are always big competitors in the market and lots of investment like Starbucks.
Absolutely.
So, I mean, when you actually thought of starting your own content business, how did you find the niche, first of all?
Absolutely.
The second thing is this, I mean, how you keep yourself motivated all the time, given the fact that there are already big giants in the market?
Absolutely.
And you have to make your space and always be on your toes to Absolutely.
I think the question is like, how are you going to, you know, set yourself up being so small and independent to compete with, you know, larger companies who have, you know, the resources and the money and, you know, the people? And I think number one, it's like if I— I wouldn't have started my coffee company if I had a place in my neighborhood that had good coffee. or in my city that had good coffee. And I think that was number one. It was like, there has to be a need for where you are. And luckily for me, my need has— it was really just, it needed a community space in the neighborhood. But then my passion was coffee. So how could I blend the two? And having a community space is a really important thing. Bigger than me, bigger than anyone. So, when you have your community space and you have your thing, just realize it's bigger than you. And you just have to work harder to make sure everything works out. But when it comes to competition, it's like you go to Starbucks. Some of you might be happy with Starbucks, but Starbucks is a coffee company. But they also do basically milkshakes and fill it with other kinds of—
Ice cream.
Sugar and all kinds of awful things. Their business practices are cool. They do pretty good stuff for good people. They're the 2nd largest coffee company in volume. And number 1 is a doughnut company, which is weird. You go back and forth. It's Dunkin' Donuts, one of the largest coffee companies there are, which is wild.
But—
Those people, like, those companies are so far out of my view. Like, I don't even think of them. Like, not even close. It's like, it'd be similar to like someone having a boutique clothing store and then like comparing it to like the retail section at Walmart. Like, there's such a major difference. And so competition on that level is like, I don't even think about it. Now, Being in the SF Bay Area, there's competition that are literally my peers that have that money and have that experience and have those people who can— they have the resources, basically. But still, I don't get a great cup of coffee at those places always. And that's what always drives me crazy is you'll see a coffee company— I won't name them, but—
Tim Hortons.
They have a great team. They've got the resources. They have great equipment. They have, you know, great distribution channels. And you try their coffee and it's not good. And I always try to figure out where in the chain does it go wrong. I can talk about coffee better than I can talk about anything else, but I won't bore you with a lot of it, but— Well, one more thing. Yeah.
