This is part of an ongoing series of essays to deconstruct the past startups that I’ve tried or worked at. Part 1 went over how the first startup I joined, Jobr got acquired for millions. Part 2 was how I failed to build a concert ticket flipping operation. Part 3 was my one year stint at Nextdoor.
There’s a time in every founder’s life where they embark on executing their worst business idea. In 2023, when my startup was collapsing and my girlfriend had just dumped me, I decided this was the perfect time to build a Vietnamese coffee supplement brand.
Two years later, there are still 300+ bags of that coffee sitting in my friend’s basement.
Let me tell you how they got there.
In January of 2023, I was watching my startup, Interview Query, tank from the worst tech job market recession in near history. Companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon, had all subsequently over-hired during Covid and were laying off hundreds of thousands of workers at the time.
So as I was losing sleep from the business slump, I gravitated to supplements to cure my sleep problems. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and podcaster, was growing exponentially while simultaneously shilling the benefits of new supplements every week. Tongkat Ali makes you T-levels go up. Lions Mane has memory benefits. I don’t know who was clipping together these Youtube shorts, but they convinced me of their benefit in a state of desperation and experimentation. I ended up trying multiple supplements including the infamous AG1 to cure my insomnia.
This kickstarted an idea one day when I noticed how both supplements and Asian American consumer packaged goods (CPG) were independent but growing markets. If I could build a business within the niche of “Athletic Greens for Asians” aka “Athletic Yellows”, then maybe I could capture the interaction of both markets. All of my friends who I pitched the idea to found it funny, which reinforced to me that it was a good business model. And so in my spare time, I started researching CPG brands, toured supplement factories, and continuing to self-experiment on myself with various Huberman approved supplements.
In studying supplements, I learned a lot that actually invalidated my belief in Athletic Greens*. And turns out the only reasonably scientifically backed supplements were ones like L-Theanine to counter the jitters from caffeine, Lions Mane, Cocoa, Ashwagandha, and Rishi to help with sleep and stress. And with the scientifically backed supplements in hand, I eventually landed on a product that would sell Vietnamese coffee mixed with these supplements. The supplements were meant to reduce the jitters from the high caffeination content of the Robusta beans in Vietnamese coffee to create an extremely smooth and focused daily coffee drink!
I ended up buying supplements from a US based company in bulk and over a hundred pounds of Vietnamese Instant Coffee from Vietnam. And over a course of a week, I implemented an amateur Breaking Bad operation of measuring and pouring out both supplements + coffee powder into a huge storage container while vigorously shaking it to mix all the ingredients. At the end of the week, my Airbnb in Seattle where I was conducting the operation was unfortunately fully covered in powder, but I had successfully scooped and sealed 400 bags of coffee that was now ready to ship.
That part was fun. So was the financial modeling showcasing how I was going to generate $3 million a year in revenue in the next twelve months. Yes, in my haste to mix and scoop 400 bags of coffee by myself, I had to spend time to financially model my business operation. I was so confident in myself, which is probably where it all started to go downhill.
In 2023, e-commerce was noticeably also not in a good state, not that I cared to notice. A combination of high inflation, return to retail post-Covid, and Facebook ad tracking issues through Apple created a downturn in almost every e-commerce brand.
On the first day of launch, I filmed a video on Instagram announcing the launch and emailed every single person in my personal contact list for the past 20 years. This was, after all, my next big venture right? The Asian tea company that used as a launch template went on a podcast and talked about how early on, they immediately sold out of their initial batch.
My launch didn’t turn out as great. About 15 of my friends had sympathy for me and bought the product to try it out. And in hindsight, posting on LinkedIn, where I was known as a data science influencer, was also not the right demographic for this product.
So my next attempt was to now run influencer outreach. This, I believe HAD to work. There was no way it couldn’t work. If I gave influencers free bags of coffee, they would promote it. I sourced 100+ Asian American lifestyle influencers and ended up sending a sample bag to around half of them. And surprisingly around 20+ of them were quite receptive to immediately post it on their story once they got the package, while the rest of them were like “alright, well it’s $100 for one story posting, $200 if I dance with the bag, $500 and I’m smiling and wearing a bikini by the pool drinking your coffee”.
The videos from the initial campaign were all better than what I could have imagined. The coffee making videos with the condensed milk I sent them looked amazing swirling through the brown iced coffee.
But after it was all said and done, only one person bought it from all of those influencer Instagram posts. She, for all I knew, wasn’t even Asian, according to the name she used on Shopify for delivery. And three days later she wrote to me “Why does my bag of coffee have dog hairs in it?” That was weird. I guess my mixing operation was not up to FDA standards. I sent her another free bag and she amazingly ended up ordering three more. But this was the last good sign I had in the product.
The rest of the summer, I ended up traveling around and nomading for a few more months but slowly lost interest in selling the coffee. The reviews from friends in person when I would give them samples and bags was positive. But did it truly replace their existing coffee habit? Did they enjoy the extra focus with a lack of jitters from the L-Theanine and Ashwaghanda supplementation? Their actions spoke a bit louder than their words when almost none of them actually wanted to purchase it after trying it.
What did I learn from this? Well for one, building a startup from a joke will likely result in the product ALSO becoming a joke. But also here’s the thing: E-COMMERCE IS INSANELY HARD. You see, I started in business in a world where I would just write things on the internet about my experience in intense interview situations and then people would flock to my website and beg for more help because they wanted to land six figure jobs!
E-commerce comparatively was like getting slapped around with a rotten fish. As I saw from my influencer outreach, I couldn’t even give away these bags for people to try because there was so much brand doubt to overcome.
What I came to realize was that 99% of the work in any CPG e-commerce idea is really just marketing. And not just the fun marketing in crafting the product, packaging design, and overall brand, but rather the grind it out marketing of filming and editing videos, continuously begging influencers to work with you, and becoming a Facebook paid advertising expert. This, was inevitably, something that I did sign up for doing, when I was fantasizing the business success.
At the crux of it, I realized I started down this path from the stress of my business Interview Query going downhill at the time. That stress gave me insomnia which led to the poor decision of building a SECOND business that was completely different. But this was the logical equivalency of being a professional tennis player, suffering a string of losses, and then deciding that you’re true calling is actually pivoting into crafting pottery instead: AKA SOMETHING COMPLETELY NOT RELATED. And once Interview Query bounced back during the end of 2023, I stopped working on Yo! Focus entirely.
The product however still exists, because I curated it into existence. So far two years later I have 300+ bags of coffee still to go through and drink. And it’s actually quite good, because of course I now have an acquired taste (and an incentive to finish them all). But most of them are in my friends basement still as he was my original supplier.
Which brings me to my final lesson: at least when you fail in a digital business, you can easily shut it down with one click. With real products, they still exist gotta exist somewhere.
[1] Most studies that found significant effects of supplements require dosages that are far greater than what AG1 puts into their product