We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ethan Mills a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Ethan, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
The two main reasons I started this company were first to help make coffee, good high quality coffee that is, more accessible and easy to understand for people and secondly to provide higher quality coffee in an industry full of drop-shippers. The idea behind the brand was to blend two of my biggest passions of gaming and coffee. Something I would often find in my game sessions with my play group would be comments from friends telling me how they loved the coffee I would serve them but when they would go to a cafe, they would get confused by the complexities of coffee but wanted to learn more. I wanted to change this so I designed my brand around the idea of using a fantasy gaming class, such a Druid, to help show the flavors of what that coffee might taste like. So the Druid coffee is more nature-forward with notes of berries where as my Barbarian is more aggressive with more smokey and spicy notes.
The second part of this was wanting to provide higher quality coffee to my community. I would often go to events and conventions and talk to other “coffee roasters” or people who were pretending to be and when I would ask them questions about their coffee and how they roasted it, they would never have answers. I had found that in the gaming industry there are a huge number of brands out there that are just drop-shipping, which isn’t an inherently bad thing in itself, but the problem is when they are parading themselves as a higher-end brand or lying about making their products in-house when they are actually just getting super cheap products and reselling them. I was frustrated with people essentially taking advantage of a community that I am so passionate about, so I wanted to change that.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My background is in YouTube and content creation / gaming. I was a full time content creator for over 10 years and gaming has always been a core part of my life. Board games and tabletop roleplaying games, such as Dungeons and Dragons, have been staples in my life for more than 15 years now and it is something I am super passionate about. I have always been an entrepreneur and started my first business back when I was 16 doing graphic design services for clients. Business has always kind of been an important part of my life and I have always had plenty of “side-hustles” even at a young age.
As far as my coffee journey is concerned, coffee has ALWAYS been a huge part of my life. I have loved coffee for as long as I can remember and decided to start roasting coffee as just a way to learn more about something I have always been so into. When I started I actually built my first roaster out of a bingo cage, a coleman camping stove and a little motor to turn it haha. I became absolutely obsessed with the process and it took over my thoughts. If I wasn’t making youtube videos I would be watching them on roasting practices and coffee knowledge.
There are a lot of core fundamentals for my brand that I feel really set us apart from the rest of the industry I am in. When it comes to coffee, I often get asked “What makes your coffee better from (insert other roaster here)?” and my honest answer is always “there isn’t a lot I can do to make my coffee ‘better’ but my coffee is more fun.”. Coffee is something that so many of us drink daily, it is actually the second largest consumed beverage behind water, and I want my coffee to be something that puts a smile on your face every day when you go to make your cup of coffee in the morning OR as something exciting to bring out to your game nights. As a specialty coffee roaster as long as you are using excellent quality beans and professional equipment, there is a cap to how good your product can get but the difference with my coffee is that it brings an extra level of joy to you when you make it versus my competitors out there. How many other coffee brands can say that their product is a conversation piece when people come over for game nights?
Another thing that I think sets me apart from a lot of other “CEOS” out there is that I just love people and am passionate about the human race. It might sound corny but I really do love the people living on this silly little space rock we are all on. This core belief of mine is seen in every business decision and practice that we make as a company. It is a major driving force behind how I source my coffee and all of the products we use. The coffee industry still unfortunately is built on some really unethical practices and human rights issues, even though it IS getting better, and I have worked really hard to make sure that all of the farms and companies I work with are providing livable wages and ethical working environments to all of their workers. I feel so passionately about making sure that the people growing the coffee we use can feed their families and afford to live a life, even if that means we are making a slightly lower profit from each of our bags of coffee.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
When I originally had the idea to start the business I took a few years to just save some money for the initial investment needed. This included our initial small roaster we bought, our initial investment of green (unroasted) coffee, the website we built, packaging, and all of the other stuff we would need to get started. Something else we invested in from the get go is all the equipment we would need to make our own merchandise. This included all the printers, presses, laser engravers and such so that we could make all our own mugs, tumblers, shirts, and everything ourselves. I also needed a space to put all of the equipment in so I actually built an addition to my house in the back yard to be the roastery location. The cost of all of that together was just around $12-15k or so to get started and I had fully self funded this all from my own savings.
We very quickly began to grow and as we started to look into conventions and as I outgrew the roaster I bought so we needed to grow and scale after only a few months of starting the company. This required another $20-25k if we wanted to be able to grow at the speed we were seeing. I didn’t want to take out any loans so to make this happen I actually cashed out my 401k to be able to afford it. I know debt isn’t a bad thing but I have always been afraid of taking on loans and debt and to this day we still have been fully self funded without any business loans, even as we keep growing. We have essentially been putting almost all of our revenue back into the business in order to keep growing and expanding.
What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?
For me, I am extremely passionate about connecting with people on a personal level and the power of “word of mouth”. Our main marketing has been going to in-person conventions and events. I have found that when I can get in front of my main target audience and share with them my story, show them my love for what I do, and let them get their hands on our product itself, that we always see a huge level of success. Since we spent so many years (it was about 4 years from concept to launch) developing a STRONG quality product, I want to let as many people see it for themselves in person rather than just seeing an ad online for it.
We have seen a huge amount of success with events and have a large recurring customer base from those who buy from us in person. I have found that our customers are so much more excited about the brand when they meet me face-to-face and become advocates for what we are doing rather than just something they buy at a grocery store to keep them awake. We have been able to build a passionate community around our brand as we all grow together, which makes this entire journey feel even more rewarding. At every event we go to, we take time to interview other vendors and give them a platform to share the awesome stuff they are doing as well as developing partnerships with different businesses within our niche space. As Dragon Roast Coffee continues to grow and succeed, I want to be able to lift up those around me who are on this journey with me!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://dragonroast.coffee/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dragonroast_coffee
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dragonroastcoffee/
- Twitter: https://x.com/DragonRoast
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DragonRoastCoffee
- Other: Tiktok – https://www.tiktok.com/@dragon.roast
Bluesky – https://bsky.app/profile/dragonroast.coffee
