Horizons // April '25

A new life awaits us.

I’ve been trudging through the thick forest for ages now. And there have been storms. There have been dark skies and long nights. I’ve played hide-n-seek monsters and danced with ghosts.

But I’ve also had the good fortune to lay amongst the flowers and play with the butterflies, and every so often, I’m graced with the glimmering rays of the shy sun.

As I clear the forest and run to the edge of the precipice, I see the Sun rising over the horizon.

And just below me, resting calmly on the deep blue, lies a small boat.

A small boat for my journey through the raging sea.

I take one glance at the vastness of the Earth before me.

and I set sail.

---

It’s been 6 months since I decided to take the plunge and embark on this crazy journey of starting a coffee shop.

That’s also when I wrote Seeking Aliveness, which took me just over 5 weeks to write.

On the day that I posted it, I remember thinking to myself that it makes no sense and that it was written very poorly and that there are so many things missing from it. The only reason I ended up posting it that day is because I was getting tired of rewriting it, and I figured that posting something is better than posting nothing.

Then I woke up to this:

Remember the video I posted that blew up? Same story:

Lesson: when it comes to evaluating the quality of my own work, I’m as blind as a bat.

Having realized that, I’m trying to stop beating myself up for “missing the mark”. This doesn’t mean that I’m lowering my standards or putting in less effort to ensure that my work is of the highest caliber, nor does it mean that I don’t care about getting better.

It means that:

• I’ve accepted that for a while, there will be a gap between my taste and my skills.

• As a result, I’ll always be dissatisfied to a certain degree with my output. But as long as I’m showing up everyday and putting in earnest effort, that’s ok - over time, the gravity of my taste will raise the level of my skills.

My focus should be on the process, not on the output. Consistency, attention, and honesty coupled with good taste and openness to feedback will take me where I need to go.

So, on that note, let me try to recount the story of the pop-up through a neutral, non-judgemental lens (no promises):

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Anecdote @ Verci - The Aftermath

I made a lot of mistakes, and a lot of things didn’t go to plan. Yet, I could not have asked for a better first experience. Failing in small, reversible ways when the stakes are low is the best thing that can happen to you, because you get data that helps you prepare for when the stakes are higher.

The Bad

• We spent 60% ($600) more than we had budgeted for ($1000). This was mostly because

  • We spent a lot of time and resources on tweaking the syrup flavor and dialing in the flavor of the espresso, but we didn’t track the costs of the supplies we bought for these experiments.

  • We ended up buying dairy from whole foods at retail price because Odeko does not offer non-homogenized whole milk. I actually learned this a few weeks before the pop-up, but I failed to take action on it promptly.

  • We ran out of coffee mid-way and had to pay a much higher price to buy more locally. Classic.

  • I severely underestimated how much my living costs (food, public transit, laundry, etc) would be during the two weeks I was in New York.

• We lost money. We made a total of $845 from the 3 days (the split was $120, $357, $368). After settling all accounts and paying back everyone who helped me, I made back ~ $300 🫠. The biggest reasons:

  • I did not communicate clearly that I expected people to pay for their drinks (in fact, I might have said the opposite in the previous newsletter lol. My expectation was that by operating on a donation-based model and providing a lot of value to people upfront, they would feel like donating on their own). There were no prices on the menu, and I was not consistent with asking for payments.

  • Thursday was reserved for Verci members, who are used to making their own drinks at the espresso bar for free. That, coupled with no prices on the menu means I’d be foolish to expect people to pay.

• I had planned a lot more for the experience than I was able to execute. I wanted to hand out personal welcome cards on which I would paint in the style of Mark Rothko using colors that represent the guest. These cards were meant to be a practical accessory and souvenir - they’d also have a thoughtful question printed on the back side that people could use to strike up a conversation with a stranger. I wanted to film a 30s promo video in 16mm in the days leading up to the event. My friend and I were going to build a wooden hand-out window. And I was supposed to personally introduce compatible people to each other based on their rsvp responses. Oh well.

Lessons Learned

1. Every meaningful endeavor starts by severely underestimating how challenging it will be. Hosting a coffee pop-up is no exception to that rule. When you undertake a new project, things will go wrong in ways you can’t predict. To minimize the likelihood and severity of ugly surprises, sort the tasks on your to-do list by degree of familiarity and estimated cost of failure. In other words: make sure you first figure out the things you’re least experienced with and the things that will cause the biggest problems for you if they don’t go as planned.

2. When starting out, limit your scope. Instead of attempting to do many things, do a few things well. Grow gradually.

3. If I want this project to be financially viable in the long run, I must learn to treat it like a business. I have a responsibility to ensure that I overdeliver on value to customers, but I am also responsible for ensuring that eventually, this project grows into a business that offers me and my team the means to live comfortably. As such, I must learn to master this delicate dance of generating sustainable profits while providing exceptional value to everyone involved in the process.

   For this pop-up, I was almost afraid to charge people, and I need to get over this fear. Much in the same way that no one will respect you unless you respect yourself, no one will value your services if you don’t value them.¹

4. This isn’t a one-man show. Several kind people stepped in and offered to help - if it weren’t for their incredible generosity, I would have crumbled. That’s not an understatement, this pop-up would simply not have been possible without them. I want to give a special shoutout to Elliot and Naz, and Anant!

Alright. ‘Nuff said. Let’s take a look at what did go well!

The Good

1. I met someone. Cool story:

   I’m at Verci, and this random dude - Joscha - comes up to fill his water bottle at the tap beside me. Asks me what I’m doing, I tell him I’m dialing in the espresso machine. What for, he asks, and I tell him about the pop-up. He loves the concept. Are you going to be here for a bit, he asks, to which I say yes.

   He comes back an hour later with a friend, Nick. Not a Verci member, just Joscha’s friend. The two of you should talk, Joscha says, you will get along very well.
   
   So I talk to Nick, I talk to him for 45 minutes, and not only is he super brought in to the coffee shop concept, it turns out we see eye to eye on a bunch of things. He also hosts monthly coffee pop-ups in his apartment. Cool!
   
   Just before he’s about to leave, he says to me, wait…do you happen to write on Substack by any chance?

   Why yes I do, I say. He goes:

   “You’re not going to believe this, but I read your essay four months ago and sent it to all of my friends!”, and shows me this:

   

   No. Fucking. Way! That’s serendipity for you, right there. Anyway, Nick might be the co-founder for Anecdote. Will keep you updated.

2. I met several people, actually. In the long run, I want Anecdote to be a magnet for interesting and (more importantly) interested people. People who care about things, about other people, about the world. Pretty much everyone who showed up to this pop-up matched that profile. It was very refreshing to see.

3. I pushed my limits and learned that they are (mostly) imaginary. Every day I was in New York, I woke up at sunrise with ~5h of sleep, and worked until midnight. I wasn’t exercising, and I often skipped meals (though I walked a lot). And yet, I was sharp as a tack.

   I used to believe that without adequate sleep, the perfect diet, and exercise, I won’t be able to function properly, but that week proved otherwise. What mattered more was the deep sense of meaning I derived from my work and being surrounded by people that inspired me.

   Now, ignoring your health isn’t sustainable, and I’m really not a fan of this approach. As you’ll read later, even one week off-track causes problems later. Kind of like a delayed-onset illness.

   But now I know that I have the ability to power through things in short bursts.

   Back at home in the suburbs, I take care of my health, but am in the wrong environment. In New York, I was in the right environment, but didn’t take care of my health.

   Imagine what a beast I can become if I take care of my health and put myself in the right environment.

4. I felt alive. I’d come home at 1 in the morning, physically exhausted but mentally energized. For the first time in my life, I did not feel like sleeping. I was on a meaning-fueled high, and I wanted to keep working playing.

5. Our coffee tasted better than most other specialty coffee shops I’ve been to. I know this is somewhat subjective, but I feel pretty confident in my palate, and I loved it. Shoutout to Elliot and Nick, y’all killed it.

So, What’s Next?

I’m going to continue to host pop-ups around the country until I converge on a) a repeatable, profitable process that serves as a concrete proof of concept for the larger project b) Anecdote’s moat, or sustainable competitive advantage.

Perhaps the biggest realization I had after this pop-up is that coffee should not be our core product in the long run. (It seems like) specialty coffee as an industry is a red ocean, the ceiling on quality (as reflected in people’s willingness to pay more for better coffee) is pretty low, and the ideal customer profile gets narrower and narrower the more you try to elevate your coffee game.

In other words, competing on coffee alone is probably not sustainable.

Instead, our core product(s)/service(s) should probably be much more abstract:

• The domain we operate in should not have many players & be relatively unexplored (blue ocean).

• Our edge should lie in something that can only be grown organically over time, and that others will have no value in trying to replicate.

Think: culture and community.

What this vision looks like exactly I am unsure of, and that’s what I’ll be exploring over the summer, which I’m going to spend in the beautiful city of San Francisco.

That’s right - Anecdote is coming to SF for 3 months :)

Why? I got accepted into a fellowship! They’ll sponsor my living expenses and give me the space and resources to work on Anecdote full-time for 3 months. Excited doesn’t begin to cover it.

Let’s see if we can bring the culture back to the tech-crazy city.

1. With that being said, I’m not entirely upset about the fact that I didn’t break even this time. This was only my first pop-up, and I’m playing the long game - at this stage, getting the Anecdote brand out there and having people experience it is far more important than turning profits.