We recently connected with Brian Zhou and have shared our conversation below.

Brian, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

We want to open a late-night cafe in NYC.

The drive to do this started close to 10 years ago when I still lived in the bay area (CA). My routine then was after my 9-5 job, I’d go home, eat dinner, and would then head to the neighborhood cafe (suju’s coffee) to read, work on my side projects, or pretty much just not be at home. Suju’s coffee was my little sanctuary. After a while, I noticed that it was the same people at the cafe during those 8-11pm hours. The 8-11pm crowd became its own little community.

Then around 2017, I left the bay area for NYC. I realized that NYC city cafe culture was much different than bay area cafe culture. NYC was more “grab-and-go”, and cafes weren’t inclined to be productive work spaces for people. In NYC, after 5pm, most cafes skewed more to being a bar rather than continuing to be a productive space. Places would instill no laptop rules, they’d dim the lights way too low, or start playing loud music.

I missed having a night-time cafe spot like Suju’s. After a year, the idea of opening a cafe here that mimicked Suju’s started to form. It wasn’t until 2021 that I decided to execute on it and start to figure out how I was going to make it a reality.

The vision has changed a bit with us bolting on offering high-end specialty coffee, but our core idea is still having a late-night cafe.

Brian, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Brian Zhou. I’m a software engineer by trade, and a specialty coffee roaster by hobby/interest.

I got into coffee roasting by trying to be unique when starting out on the cafe journey. I knew I needed to stand out from the other local cafes, so I wanted our differentiator to be that we’d sell locally roasted coffee. I financed an Aillio Bullet home roaster, and that kicked off the coffee roasting journey. Had I not been so naive and ignorant, I don’t think this project would’ve launched. At the time, I didn’t know about regalia, bean and bean, or any of the many already-established local nyc specialty coffee roasters.

I’m most proud of our coffee club offering. Our coffee club is a box where we curate three different coffees. This is our best-selling offering, and we’ve been slowly growing it. This is a very high-touch product, and has kinda grown to be more than just a box with coffees. Last year, we’ve turned it into a subscription, and next month, on the day people come by the apartment to pick up their coffee club box, we’ll turn our home into a homecafe. So our buyers can come by to pick up their box, meet other coffee club buyers, and enjoy some high-end specialty coffee. This product started just as a product, but it has kinda grown into something much bigger.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

I think writing.

During our initial start, we tried to blog often to share our thoughts along with details behind our processes. This became an effective way to pick up our first few customers. I think the depth and transparency we provided behind the project (pricing, sourcing, etc.) helped gain trust from our customers.

Our customers often bring up points we talk about in the blog during conversations.

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

I’m not sure near death, but there was a point when my gut was leading me down the wrong path.

When we were doing V3, we were leaning towards killing the coffee club format and just offering the coffees as single bag offerings. I put out a survey to get more clarity from my customers on what I should do, and they responded that I should keep it with very valid reasons why. And that’s why I kept going with that format.

Had I killed it, I don’t think we’d be here today. This coffee club box helps us stand out within the local coffee roasting space. It’s a ton of work as we are forced to constantly source new coffees, but it’s been strategically super fruitful.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thoughtfulcoffee.co/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thoughtfulcoffeenyc/
• Other: https://thoughtfulcoffeenyc.substack.com/

Image Credits

Antonio de Jesus
Gabriella Mangino
Malik Fakiri