James Hoffmann’s Process of Turning a Passion for Coffee Into Thriving Businesses

0:00I hate failing publicly, but I had to just accept that that's part of the process of making video. And the good thing about YouTube is, despite the fact that billions of people use it, YouTube won't show your video to them unless it's any good. Hello, welcome to Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. I'm Shuang Esther-Sham. James Hoffman has done just about everything related to coffee. He's won the World Barista Championships in 2007. He opened a roastery in London. He helped design espresso machines. And through it all, he chronicled his life's work, first in a blog, later in a book.

0:40These days, you might recognize him from his videos on YouTube or TikTok. James is joining us today to talk about starting a business around your passion and how content creation has remained a constant throughout his career. Thanks for being here, James. Thank you for having me. Super excited to chat with you. I've learned so much from your channel. I wanted to ask you about your relationship with coffee. It's sometimes a transient career where people become a barista for a few years and move on to something else. But you've definitely dedicated your life and career to this industry. So how did you first interact with coffee?

1:20It's a good question. No one means to have a career in coffee. And that's probably still true today. But it was very true 20 years ago when I started. And I got into it like most people do, which is just the need of a job that ideally paid frequently and paid OK. And that was it. I started working in coffee before I started drinking coffee, which is kind of weird. But I was demonstrating the little espresso machines in like a nice department store in London. And I had no idea what I was doing, but I figured I should learn something. And the more I kind of read and kind of discovered about coffee, the more interested I got.

1:56and it became a, I guess, a full-blown obsession in that, you know, pretty quickly. And that obsession has actually turned into a few businesses before you came onto YouTube. Tell us about a few of the businesses you started. Well, I suppose the biggest one was back in 2008, which was Square Mile Coffee Roasters, which was a coffee roasting company. When you go through the kind of coffee competition scene, which is a weird thing that definitely exists, but is weird, you kind of come out the other side, not really sure what to do with your life. And most people sort of think you should just start your own business.

2:28And I did that without truly understanding the implications of starting your own business. It just seemed like the next step in a career in a weird sort of way. So that was 2008. In terms of other businesses after that, we started working with a Japanese manufacturer on an importing business to distribute their products, a company called Hario that makes very nice kind of pour-over stuff and other things. We sold that business a few years ago. we acquired a cafe at one point, which we still have, called Proof Rock Coffee. So we kind of have our toes in physical bricks and mortar retail as well.

2:58And aside from that, just other little bits and pieces. I started a magazine for a while, and that was one thing. I ran a jobs board dedicated to coffee jobs for a good long while. So there's been a few different things over the years, and there's probably some I'm forgetting. But yeah, it's been fun so far. It's crazy cool to hear so many different touch points relating to coffee. So you co-founded Square Mile Roastery back in 2008, and you were actually one of the early adopters of Shopify. How did you find out about us and why was selling online so important for you? It's a good question. Look, it's a long time ago, so some of the details might be a little bit fuzzy, but we were kind of weird in our setup.

3:39We had started a business in London, but myself and my business partner felt probably more connected to a global coffee community that was happening because London didn't really have a coffee scene yet. And so we felt there was more interest, especially after the kind of competition stuff, from outside of our immediate neighborhood than there was within the neighborhood. Which meant online was inevitable to some extent. So early on, I think we just wanted to be able to connect and sell to people. As for Shopify, I suspect more than anything else, it was word of mouth. And it would have probably been someone in North America who was ahead of me in the game.

4:15And I would have chatted to loads of people and be like, what are you using? And everyone was, you know, just dipping their toes in stuff. But yeah, I remember August 2008, turning on the online store and being astonished that orders kind of came in almost straight away. And that was the beginning of what's become a much bigger, more complex business. Still, obviously built on Shopify. But yeah, it's been kind of fun to see it scale with us and see all the changes and the evolution it's gone through. It was a simpler system back then, but it worked so well for what we were doing. And you also have a merch business that associates with your channel, which you also run on Shopify, which is Tens, Hundreds, Thousands.

4:55Tell us about some of the apps or services that have really helped that business. I understand for one, it's Print on Demand, which integrates nicely into your Shopify store. We started Tens, Hundreds, Thousands, well, maybe five years ago, maybe not quite that. and it was a kind of fascinating moment for me. I'd come up with a product idea for kind of YouTube-led stuff and it was a set of dice that would help you make a recipe for coffee brewing and it was like I'd forgotten every lesson I'd learned with Square Mile and I was there sat at a desk stuffing a thousand envelopes by hand and I was like, this is miserable work.

5:29What am I doing? This doesn't have to be this way. I know it doesn't have to be this way. From that point onwards, we're like, we should be smart about this and integrate third-party warehousing into this. We integrate sort of print on demand outside of the development phase of a product. We don't need to be the ones touching it. We don't need to be the ones putting in boxes and doing all that kind of stuff because other people can do that at scale far better than we can. And so, yeah, after that first terrible experience, which is entirely my fault, we very quickly transitioned to integrating with third party warehousing.

6:01And that's changed over the years. We've used a few different ones and in different as we've expanded to have an LLC in the US versus the kind of UK business here and a European registration as well. Different partners fulfilled different needs for us, which has been important. And I think the flexibility of having a core that I know really well inside and out and I'm very familiar with, but being able to bolt in any aspect of it, both to improve the store itself or more analytics. But ultimately for us, the big piece is really easy, simple warehouse integration. That's been game changing and is utterly essential.

6:38I could never go back to shipping thousands and thousands of products by hand. That would no interest in that. Sounds like relying on expertise or third party integrations, whether it's apps or services, has helped your business in different ways. Through all the different businesses you've started, what are some of the other similar lessons you've learned that, hey, this is like kind of a reincurrent theme and that you take to the next business? There's a couple, I suppose, that I would think about. The first one, as you start to grow a team, this is going to sound bad at the start, everybody leaves.

7:15At some point, everybody leaves. And a brilliant business with real sustainability and longevity can survive despite every single member leaving. It might be that they move on to a new role in their career. It might be that they retire. A business owner may die at the end of it and they leave. You know what I mean? Like everyone will leave a business. And if you think about that, then it's about, okay, well, how does the business itself retain knowledge and information and structure sort of separate from the people that work within it? You know, there's kind of liberation there. In an extreme example, coffee shops get this totally wrong a lot of the time.

7:51A new coffee shop will open and they'll hire someone who's really great at making coffee. And that person will help them, you know, get going, launch, set up the kind of coffee menu, do all that stuff, do some training. But when that person leaves, all the knowledge goes with them. And what I worked at pretty early is you need to be capturing the information, the knowledge that the team members have and building systems around it so that new people can come in and have a great time doing it. You know what I mean? Like not suddenly be working below the best or feeling like they're not producing the quality that they should or doing the job right.

8:25It's about helping people do the best work they can. And I feel like that's been a big piece of that. So like systems and structure are still shockingly underrated, I think, amongst a lot of people who start businesses, especially passionate people. I think that's the most common place that it kind of goes sideways where they have the passion and they have the knowledge and they don't work out how to feed that into the business. I think the other thing has always been just investing in what's necessary to scale. Like every time that we've bought, say, equipment for the sort of production line at Square Mile, I've often felt like we should have done that six months ago.

8:59Do you know what I mean? Like you'll often hold back and without really realizing it, either hold back your growth or just you'll have a miserable time. And that investment, it's hard to do it up front because you just feel like the business is growing. I don't want to rip the kind of cash out of it. But investing in that stuff has been really, really effective. And every time I've done it, I wish we'd done it earlier. Speaking of change for yourself, you also found an interest in 2010 to actually share some of the coffee knowledge initially with your blog. And then you decided to experiment and write more pieces for the community, which led to the video aspect.

9:39but initially when you started writing were you targeting specifically for this niche coffee community or were you wanting to kind of share that knowledge with the masses i suppose my original writing goes back quite a long way further it's like 2004 was when i got my first coffee related blog going and that point i felt extremely isolated in terms of i was a person i didn't know anyone else who really cared about coffee at that point except people on the internet And so what I thought I would do is have a little blog that charts of was a diary of things I was learning that might be useful to other people.

10:15And I think a lot of people talk about the best way to understand something is to be able to explain it back to somebody else. And so, you know, my process of writing initially has always been about, do I understand this thing that I want to share? And one of the best ways to learn that you're wrong is to post something on the Internet because people will rapidly come in and correct you. So if you're genuinely interested in sort of learning and sharing good information, this was a really virtuous cycle where I would learn about something, share it, maybe get some corrections or ideas or new things, and it would kind of continue and continue.

10:44And it allowed me to be a part of a kind of global community of like-minded people. And that really kind of accelerated my learning as well as built connections. And, you know, some of those people might have been early customers of my businesses or in some cases wholesale customers of the business. But, you know, not everything was transactional. It was mostly about, I want to learn and share. I'll learn to write to do that. And yeah, eventually people stopped reading blogs the way that they used to. And the transition to video was the next step. I'm speaking with James Hoffman, co-founder of Square Mile Roasters.

11:18We're chatting all about building a business around your passion. I hope Shopify Masters is able to help you turn your passion into a business. If you haven't already, follow or subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And let us know what you think of the episode with a review. Thanks. So you started with blogging and writing and then added on video making. At the time, I don't think you were the typical YouTuber. So how did you adapt to this new platform to find your voice and style over time? I think my very early days were actually my very first videos, some which have gone now, thankfully.

11:57We're kind of vloggy ones where I think, like everyone else, I was just ripping off Casey Neistat. For me to just get the habit of like building an edit, get back into like shooting an editing video again. And I learned two interesting lessons at that time, which is one, whatever audience I had had outside of YouTube, be it Instagram or Twitter at that time or whatever it was, had no interest in coming across the YouTube. I thought I would grow my subscriber count pretty quickly because I had 10, 20 ,000 followers on Instagram that they would come and watch my YouTube videos. And they didn't. They really didn't.

12:30And that was a great lesson on like, you have to build a community locally within that kind of place. I think that was very true then. It's still, I would say, mostly true now. And secondly, I hate failing publicly, but I had to just accept that that's part of the process of making video. And the good thing about YouTube is, despite the fact that billions of people use it, YouTube won't show your video to them unless it's any good. And so you can get into the habit of making and publishing and building a small audience and kind of going through that process of learning and developing what you want to do early doors without really that many people seeing it.

13:04And I think for me, it took me a while to work out who I really wanted to talk to. That definitely informed the kind of videos I made and how I wanted to reach people. And I kind of formed a slow strategy around this stuff that I think allowed me to find the people I was trying to reach. And my purpose on YouTube is, to some extent, education and entertainment. But ultimately, I want people to enjoy coffee more. That's the purpose of what I do. I want you as a coffee drinker to enjoy it more. And that can mean a whole bunch of different stuff. But if that's my purpose, then it was kind of, I don't think I worried too much about the rest of the stuff, as long as I was sort of working towards that idea.

13:44There's a lot of iterating and finding your voice, your style. Looking back, what were some of the things you did to kind of help you through that process? I think I was fortunate to have had a job previously that was a lot of sort of public speaking and presenting. And so that part of it was an easier part of it for me. The lessons I learned pretty quickly is that passionate people in the nicest possible way are a little bit funny. because they're so passionate that it's a little bit, you know, ridiculous, but in a good way. And I think I accepted fairly early on that I'm a little bit ridiculous, and I can sort of acknowledge it and allow you, the viewer, to acknowledge it, and then I can get on with the more complex stuff that I want to do.

14:27So I feel like, for me, a big part of developing my tone or style was kind of learning how to be in on the joke of my own absurdity as a deeply obsessed coffee person. That took quite a long while. The rest of it is still, outside of that, I think very much a work in progress. I think we're still learning about how much hardcore information people want versus just entertainment, just have fun and watch a video and maybe learn something, but it not be like a lecture for 15 minutes. The sort of structures of videos we're looking to play with and evolve over time rather than, you know, some stuff is to camera at desks like this, other stuff is weird and expansive and odd.

15:04I feel like the core stuff of like, have good information, listen to your community, and also for me, accept your absurdity was the kind of base recipe. And once that was in place, the channel really started to grow and connect with a much, much bigger audience. I can definitely relate to that because I think we're also trying to understand how to balance educational versus entertaining content for Shopify as well. I wanted to ask about also finding your groove in this whole new world of short form video and what is your approach to short form content? I'm not sure if I'm going to get myself into trouble here.

15:40I don't make much for short form content because for me, I think it's really hard to do meaningful educational work and meaningful relationship building through short form. I think that's much, much harder than long form. Long form has a whole bunch of other challenges and it can be very slow and complex and annoying to make. But for what I'm trying to achieve, which is to build a relationship with an audience to the point that they trust me and I could take them on a journey to where coffee is better. That's really hard to do in short form. I can do entertainment as short form, but I feel like it's just, it's more like 80 % entertainment, 20 % education.

16:16And I'm aiming for more of a 50-50. And so the feeling I have after watching a bunch of long form videos is often kind of nourished by that. And short form, I just feel like I've kind of been chewing mental gum. You know what it. And that's just me. And, you know, that's not to say there aren't brilliant educators on short form stuff. I'm just not good at doing that. And I think I just accepted that pretty early on. I'll keep experimenting. But, you know, for me, for relationship building, long form is much more powerful. Which I guess begs the question of, is your favorite content that you've created similar to the content that has performed the best?

16:59And do you find that they're often the same videos or the different videos? It's a good question. The truth is I kind of hate everything I make and I need to do better at not feeling that way because it sort of steals a bit of the joy. I think some of the stuff that's done really well, I've been really pleased that it has somehow found an audience because we talk about niche as a word a lot in this and coffee's a weird niche because the idea that I could, you know, be a coffee related content creator, I don't really like the words, or a coffee-focused person, seems so niche, but it's something that everyone drinks.

17:35A lot of people drink. Most people drink. It's one of the most popular forms of psychoactive stimulation that we as a human species take is caffeine. And so, yeah, it's been surprising when I've done a kind of nerdier video and it's found an audience of millions of people. But at the same time, I see a lot of science creators reaching huge audiences with really complex, heavy stuff. So, yeah, that stuff's very satisfying. They've been weirder projects that we've put a lot more money and time into the production, and that hasn't always landed. But I think for me, it was a worthwhile investment in the process of learning to be a better filmmaker, which is weirdly something I am interested in outside of just being a better coffee video maker.

18:15I'm sometimes surprised and sometimes pleasantly surprised. But yeah, I don't play favorites too much. I just, I like to evolve what I make and improve. I think that's just part of the process of hating everything is that I want it to be better next time and better next time. is that kind of weird? I don't know. That's just me. No, I think anyone who has made anything creative can relate to that. The first step of trying to be creative is kind of hating the stuff you make. So I think that's totally relatable. Did you also find there was kind of a weird COVID correlation with the growth of your channel and also your content?

18:51Because I think a lot of people might've found you during COVID when they had to set up their at-home brewing stations. And then now that things are back to normal, how are you adjusting to people's content consumption patterns and making content that still fit into their coffee rituals? So definitely the channel going into COVID was maybe between one and 200 ,000 subscribers. I don't know how long we count COVID as lasting, but in that time it passed through a million and obviously it grew quite a lot. And yes, I think a lot of people suddenly coffee, a part of their lives have been taken away, going to a great coffee shop and they wanted the great coffee, but they knew that there's a bit of process behind it.

19:33And so I think I found a lot of people that way. I think what's interesting to me is that I didn't make a ton. I made some, but not like a ton of how to brew coffee at home content at that time. I think I made enough to kind of satiate those people. And alongside technique stuff, I do review stuff. And I think that definitely had an eye to entry-level stuff and people who want to get started making coffee at home, trying to help them out for sure. But then just other stuff, people seem to be sort of happy to come along for the ride and start to explore sort of more of coffee in that way. And so now post the sort of world coming back, I think there's still a lot of people who want to know how to get the best out of what they've got.

20:08So I think that's still a big piece. But at the same time, I think they're kind of more and more people are open to, well, tell me something else interesting about coffee. Like, what else have you got? And so, you know, because of COVID, we've really barely done any travel and a massive and fascinating part of coffee happens in the countries that it is produced. I've done none of that. So an enormous part of my whole industry, I just haven't touched yet, which is kind of exciting. But even then, there's still a lot more to explore outside of those areas. So yeah, I feel fortunate to be one of those people who doesn't really worry about running out of ideas.

20:41We have hundreds of them. It's a bit of a problem. But yeah, I think now we're just kind of interested in seeing, well, what else do people want to know? Where else are they open to being taken within the realm and niche of coffee? I was going to say, I loved your recent video going to Italy to try to find the best tiramisu. So that in itself relates to coffee, but you're also taking the viewer to somewhere new. So you going to a coffee farmer or like somewhere in Central America or Africa, that would be super fascinating. It would be fun to do. And I think just to jump in there real quick, that's kind of one of the fun things about coffee is that Italy is famous for coffee, but just about every European country has distinct coffee cultures and weirdnesses that you could talk about.

21:25And that's not just Europe. That's kind of the whole world. Coffee is everywhere, but it's different everywhere. And it's fun in different ways everywhere. So I definitely want to get into more of the global coffee stuff in the not too distant future. I kind of have to ask this question. I'm sure you get asked this a lot. So after all these years creating content in so many different ways, what is your advice now for people wanting to get into content creation? I mean, firstly, you have to have something to say. And I think spending time to develop expertise is really important. You know, I'd spent quite a long time trying to educate myself and learn a great deal about coffee and also to practice sharing coffee before I started making content.

22:05and that definitely made that bit easier. I think a lot of people see being a creator as a kind of great career path, but I think unless you have a voice and something to share, then it's just going to be immensely frustrating because you're just not going to find an audience because there's no point with which they'll connect with you or resonate with you or learn from you. So as a number one, it's like find a passion outside of this and go deep on it as deep as you can. Because one, if it's a passion, you'll have a great time doing that, even if you never make a video about it ever. And two, if you do want to start making videos, those will be useful to a much wider audience of people.

22:41I suppose the second piece is just like, it's okay to be terrible at the start because no one's going to see it. That's kind of it from my point of view. They were definitely terrible at the start and that's okay. You know, I think of people that are always so reluctant to share anything. And it's always worth remembering, most people will never see this. And by the time you grow an audience, you can always take it away. You can always just disappear at that point. You don't need to worry about this stuff. But that would be the first one for me is really it. Like the people I see frustrated most often haven't really worked out what they're trying to say and can't really summarize that neatly to communicate that to a wider audience.

23:14And so I think it's finding your passion first and foremost is the key. In relation to having your channel and also your businesses, I feel like you've purposely kept them kind of separate, unlike traditional YouTubers who might be promoting their merch or their products directly in their channel. It actually takes a bit of digging and researching to read all about the different businesses you've had. So, yeah, tell us about the decision-making process you've had to make sure to go with this approach of managing your YouTube and separating it from the businesses that you do have. I feel like, in principle, there's a fundamental difference between a personal channel and a brand channel.

23:54And there are plenty of brand channels I watch and enjoy. But a personal channel sort of makes a promise that you're interacting with me and individuals. and from my point of view again back to what i'm trying to do i'm trying to get you excited and interested in coffee the purpose of a brand channel would be to sell your product or to build a long-lasting relationship right if you muddy the two right if i'm looking like i'm here to build a relationship with you that's just about education and that kind of stuff but actually quietly trying to just sell your product i don't think that's being honest and i don't think that helps you build a real meaningful lasting relationship with your audience that way And so for me, that's not the nature of this.