This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Copy lovers brew quick fix into million dollar hustle. While training for a 24 hour obstacle course challenge and working full time, a GM employee turns cold brew into a money making energizer. GM, that is General Mills, not General Motors. I guess they're two big GM companies. But we're not focused on companies here, we're focused on individuals.
We're focused on people who are like, I want to make something for myself. That's what Side Hustle School is all about. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host. And this year in this particular segment, I'm bringing you some remixes of a few of our best stories over the years, especially the early years, 2017, 2018, long ago. So each one is being rerecorded, sometimes we have some updates.
And in today's story, we're gonna talk about, well, first of all, marketing a beverage is difficult. So we're gonna talk about this coffee business, but it's a tough category. Like we've seen it done before, but it kind of falls in the category of like, if you can do anything else, why would you not look at that category first? Just because food and beverage is tough. Lots of issues with storage, transportation, lots of legal issues, requirements, safety, licensing, et cetera.
But I guess, you know, if you have a calling to make cold brew coffee, like this General Mills employee/endurance athlete that you're gonna hear about in today's story, what can you do but answer that calling? And it seems like it's a good thing he did. Coffee lovers brew quick fix into million dollar hustle. That's today's story. I'm gonna bring you that story right after this quick shout out to our sponsor.
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Obstacle courses are fun. They offer exercise, a challenge, and a moment of lighthearted competition. 24 hour obstacle courses, on the other hand, are serious business. Alex French, a corporate worker for General Mills, was training for one of these insane day long courses. I guess it's day long and night long, 24 hours, right?
Between training and work, he basically had no free time and needed frequent energy boosts. Alex and his training partner, Andrew Healy, started brewing large batches of cold brew coffee, wherever they could find time. By immersing coffee grounds and cold water for 12 or more hours, they created a rich, smooth, cold brew concentrate that they could dilute with colder hot water whenever they needed a boost. It was simple, affordable, and much healthier than the energy drink alternatives they'd seen on store shelves. A few months after the race, Alex and Andrew were thinking, they're like, what if we could streamline our cold brew process to make the beverage accessible to other people who are low on time but still want to enjoy good coffee?
With jobs in the marketing department of General Mills, Alex and Andrew had access to data. In early 2014, they noticed that the cold brew coffee market appeared to be at the beginning of a huge spike of growth. Sales were picking up, new products were being launched, and they thought it was time to jump into the black gold rush. Black gold, cold brew, you get it? And they did.
In homage to how busy they both were when they were working full time and training for the obstacle course, they decided to name the company Busy Coffee, B-I-Z-Z-Y. To ramp up, Alex started looking at how they could source their coffee beans. There are dozens of coffee roasters in Minnesota. Alex had a pretty easy time finding one interested in partnering up. They also opted to use a co-packer, a company that would create and bottle the cold brew using Alex and Andrew's coffee to create the consistent cold brew they were looking for.
And this actually ended up being the most difficult and frustrating part of the process. They traveled all over the country on weekends, meeting with potential partners, looking at finances. It was exhausting and expensive. Some of the co-packers even charged them for a short consultation. By the time they found a certified organic co-packer that was willing to do smaller, more frequent production runs, they were almost out of money.
But they had a coffee source, they had a co-packer, they'd found a printer for their labels, they had established the LLC. What they didn't have was money for that first production run. And without money to actually create their product, Busy Coffee was on the verge of a major caffeine crash. Alex and Andrew applied to participate in a food and beverage accelerator called Food X. If they were accepted, the accelerator would invest money in the business and give them training and consulting to help get things started.
But there was a catch. Food X asked them to move to New York City. It was an incredible offer, but the timing just wasn't right to pick up and move their families. So they were disappointed, they declined, they started to consider shelving Busy Coffee. Fast forward a while though, and Food X calls back again, asks if they're still interested.
This time, both families were ready for a big move. They submitted letters of resignation, packed up and moved to New York. And with the support of Food X, they were able to create a fully functioning e-commerce store, hire some contract help to get things set up with other platforms like Amazon, and put in the order for their very first run of bottled cold brew coffee. They launched their own website and on Amazon with a 16 ounce bottle of cold brew concentrate priced at $899. With the might of Food X's marketing know-how, Busy generated a few thousand dollars the first month, and a couple months later, they reached $10,000 in sales.
By the end of that year, which was about six months into the business, Busy had generated $100,000 in sales, and they attribute their rapid growth mostly to Amazon. By targeting very precise search terms and their product descriptions, Busy was able to attract a ton of organic search traffic and a ton of sales. They also got mentioned in sites like Buzzfeed, and whenever they would, they would see nearly a 500% spike in sales for that day. Other platforms didn't go so well. They tried influencer marketing, but it just didn't seem consistent or profitable.
This was a few years ago, so maybe that's a factor, but still. E-commerce tricks weren't working out so well either. With the exception of Amazon.com, most people usually buy beverages in retail stores, not online, so that was hard. But they were figuring stuff out. And to fast forward a couple more years, Busy Coffee had generated over a million dollars since its launch, and can now be found in over 1,000 retail stores across the nation.
Perhaps even more at this point. Alex and Andrew aren't ready to just ride out the wave of their success. They don't want to spill too many beans, but they said they're brewing up new products and continuing to grow. We asked Alex about the long-term grow, and he's like, "I just want to be the leading cold brew coffee brand," which, of course, is a big challenge. But this is coming from a guy who runs 24-hour obstacle courses.
Well, just a little disclaimer here, Side Hustle School is not usually about quitting your job to take a big risk. The great majority of our stories are people who start without quitting a job, without taking that big risk. They might take some risk, but they're not investing life savings or otherwise seeking investors. But that said, in this story, I think these guys, Alex and his partner, took a measured risk. They worked on the project for a long time on their own.
They turned down the accelerator when they first asked them to move to New York, and it basically was just like, "Okay, this is the right time." And there's always a right time to do something. There can be the right time to quit a good job. You can have a good job, but if it's not what you really want to be doing long-term, maybe you should think about doing something different. So the right time came with the second ask for these guys, and busy coffee is still up and running. All right, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.
Hope you enjoy these stories. I hope they get you thinking about what you can do for your own side hustle, your first or your next one. I hope you'll take action on your goals, your ideas, even if it's just a small step, small step to get us there eventually, right? And I thank you for listening. Much more is coming up on the podcast.
My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
