And so we've been telling our story up until that point. We had started our blog and our social channels about a year and a half earlier. We had no idea that we had that sort of reach. This community just showed up for us in a way that was unbelievable. We were only allowing six people in at a time, and we were understaffed because we didn't want to overhire and have to let people go.

So we had a three-hour line down the block outside our shop. For a lot of people it was the first time they had even left their house. Tell us what it was like opening during a pandemic.Īshaolu: That was wild. Your business opened its doors on September 26, 2020. And eventually we just started piecing it together bit by bit until we had enough for our 20% equity injection, which is all new language we had to learn. How can we get an SBA loan? That's something I'm sure we had just heard around or on TV and looked into what resources might exist. We tried to figure out how much money we would need to make this happen. And we're like, 'OK, now that we're really in it, we really have to make this happen.' So we just sort of went online and Googled our way through. We went back to our apartment and a friend of ours came over and gave us $500. And after that, we had our pitch party with our friends and family.

But we pitched them our dream and just told them, this is what we want to do.

We had zero dollars and we don't come from money, so our friends and family also had zero dollars. What were the earliest and highest hurdles for starting your business?Īshaolu: The biggest hurdle for us was financial. Jeronica had the name for 10 years, and about three and a half years ago, she moved back home from Sacramento to San Jose when we decided we were really going to do this together. Related: 5 Ways That Coffee Affects Productivity You learn all about coffee, and pretty early on in that experience, she was like, 'I want to have my own place like this somewhere where people can come where they feel like they belong.' It's almost like a place for misfits, you know? She wanted to create her own space that would be that welcoming, inclusive and a place where people could kind of find a home. Ashaolu: Peet's has an awesome training program.

If my grandmother had wheels