This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
What's up, welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, I am your host. Welcome as well to Throwback Thursday. This is our weekly segment where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. It's one of my favorite things to work on along with Failure Friday, which conveniently is coming up tomorrow, the day after Thursday.
Now, last week in this segment, we heard from a former HR manager who now sells matchsticks full-time. She is a full-time vendor of matchsticks. I actually ordered some myself. They just arrived the other day right in time to prepare this episode. So those are really cool.
Her website is strikeamatch2.com. Two is a number, strikeamatch2.com. And today in our latest feature, I've got something else I need to order. We're gonna hear from Eli Held, the co-founder of Muertos Coffee from Sacramento, California. And we first told the Muertos story back in episode 986.
It is all about better coffee that supports first responders, especially firefighters across the country. The name Muertos means death in Spanish. So this is coffee strong enough to raise the dead. It's actually part of their branding, which I think is really smart. So what's happened since Muertos has had a lot of growth.
Let's hear it directly from Eli and I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
My name's Eli Held. Current location is in Sacramento, California. The name of my side hustle is Muertos Coffee and I'm on episode 986. I decided to basically start a coffee company because coffee at the firehouse is terrible and it's something that is an issue always, but we need coffee to keep us fueled and ready to go.
And so decided to start a coffee company that was dedicated to supporting the first responder community and giving back, as well as providing a better and higher quality product for fire stations and first responders and consumers across the nation. Long story short, me and one of my partners, Doug Walker, decided to pick up a roaster in Tijuana, Mexico, and we smuggled it back across the border and put it in my parents' garage and started roasting coffee beans. We were taking it to our stations and giving it to our family and our friends. And that really is how Muertos Coffee was born, was just out of the ambition to take something that wasn't so good and make it a lot better and put a little hustle into it. My current day job is a firefighter paramedic.
I work for the city of Folsom Fire. I usually tell people that's where Johnny Cash in the Folsom Prison, a lot of people can relate to that or at least know what that is or where it's at here in California. So my current hustle is a firefighter paramedic and then this is one of my side hustles. We're really just focused on supporting foundations and associations with great causes that align with us so that we can better support the first responders in a community and then we can better support the communities in which we're serving around the country. I would say the biggest challenge we're currently facing in our business is really just getting the eyes on us that we want everyone to see.
I mean, there's so many people in the country and all over the nation that haven't even seen what we're doing yet. But every time that we have people see what we're doing, we're having great success and great growth. And so getting the eyes on us is definitely part of the challenge, right? There's coffee companies all over the country, social media is a challenge that we have to play into as well as running ads and different things like that. So being able to reach a bigger audience and get more eyes and envision into what our goals and our efforts are has really been part of the challenge.
But every single day we're coming up with new strategies and tactics to do better. We all gotta learn from each other at some point, right? And we learn from the errors and mistakes that other people make or that we make ourselves, right? You honestly always grow from the failures that you have. And so if you grab a mentor or somebody that's been in somewhat of a similar business or opportunity and you learn from that individual, you're less likely to run into mistakes or let's say spend money that you shouldn't have or work with a company that you shouldn't have.
And it's really about just kind of taking advantage of the resources you have or reaching out to other people that have been in that space so that you can use them as a resource to one, optimize your business or just execute on a higher level to produce a higher quality product or better performing ads or depending on whatever it is. So that's really what it's about is finding those people to support you, but then learning through your failures and dedicating yourself to continue to push through. [Music]
Awesome, Eli, thank you so much. Congratulations on the growth of Muertos. I look forward to more listeners.
I want to encourage you, check out their website at MuertosCoffeeCo.com. The word Muertos is spelled M-U-E-R-T-O-S. So MuertosCoffeeCo.com or follow them on Instagram at MuertosCoffeeCo. Now this was one of our most popular features of 2020. As you've heard, we kept it going all this year as well.
So let me know who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than 1,000 stories, well over 1,000 stories at this point, actually. If you have a question or an update for us, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions wherever you are in the world. Thank you for tuning in. I hope you'll do one thing for yourself today, one thing to get closer to something you believe in. And I also hope you'll come back tomorrow.
We're doing this show every day, seven days a week. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
