FAQ Series: Part 1

Believe it or not, I’m still fascinated when people, companies, and media want to talk to us about Nirvana Soul. 

We intentionally told our own story right here on this blog and on our social channels – in part because I’ve always been a better writer than speaker, and in another part because Jeronica shines so bright behind the coffee bar. Her work has always done the speaking for her.

When we started our business, we knew who we were creating it for: other dreamers. We figured if we could go through the craziness of it all – and document it too – it’d be easier for entrepreneurs coming behind us. We were actually pretty slow to do interviews when the requests started rolling in, not that we weren’t grateful. What happened was: we did a couple, and one of the publications minced our words so badly, we thought about never doing another interview again!

But, we kept going. And we’ve gotten much better at speaking our story, not just writing it. Over time, we’ve also discovered that there are really just a few common questions we get asked all the time. 

With that, we’d like to welcome you to our FAQ Series! We’ll collect and answer questions as we go. And if you have any you’d like us to throw in the mix, please let us know! We’re at hello@nirvanasoulcoffee.com. Here we go!

Why did we decide to start a coffee business?

Jeronica has been in the coffee industry for 20 years. She started as a barista at Peet’s Coffee & Tea in Willow Glen, then continued to advance to lead and manager positions at cafes in San Jose and Sacramento. Early on in her coffee career, she knew she wanted her own shop. (In fact, she had the name Nirvana Soul for ten years before we opened! See the next FAQ.) She loved her teams and saw what coffee could mean to more people.

After a couple of starts and stops over the last 15 years, she and I joined forces to make the dream a reality at the end of 2018. We both love the feeling of coffee. It’s sentimental and comforting for us since we grew up drinking coffee with our late great grandmother as kids. Grandma would make herself a cup of Folgers, drink it almost to the end, then give it to Jeronica, our little brother Stefonn, and me to add more water and way too much sugar to enjoy together.

There’s just something special about coffee. It has the power to bring people together, which is our entire mission. Nirvana Soul is intentionally inclusive, kind, joyful, transparent, and community-driven. We all built this together.

(You can read our full pitch and story here.)

How did we come up with the name Nirvana Soul?

About ten years before we opened up shop, Jeronica sat in the living room of her shared apartment with a notebook, thesaurus, and her best friends brainstorming words that meant a perfect place or paradise. She stumbled upon Nirvana, which actually meant transcendence, or a state of perfect happiness (according to Google). 

Jeronica always says the word Soul just sounded right. Like, it just came to her. I think it was divine. Nirvana Soul. A perfect place or paradise.

What were some of our challenges getting started?

This answer is long and pretty anticlimactic, as evidenced by the many dropped faces and glazed over eyeballs when we share it…

Getting money was the hardest part.

We started with a dolla’ and a dream! Jeronica had an equipment list with costs that she had put together a few years before, so we had an idea how much coffee stuff would cost. Then we kinda guessed at what we believed everything would total with an actual space using real estate prices. We landed on $300K and, as you can tell, there was very little rhyme or reason. (Doing a full build was always a last resort as we felt it would be cost prohibitive. Like, a million dollars, right?)

Once we had that number in our minds, we hit the road to get money. Our first stop was a friends & family pitch party where we shared our story and asked directly for thousands of dollars, which was a challenge in itself. (We don’t come from money, and asking for it is extremely difficult, but we did it. We still use that presentation to this day to tell our whole story.) By the next day, we had $500 from a friend. We were in it!

We eventually raised $27,500 through connections of that party. From there, we just started piecing it together. We saved about another $15,000 ourselves from work and side gigs, we borrowed probably another $5K-$10K to just have in our accounts for the bank to see we were good for it, and we eventually secured a SBA loan.

That last part is not as easy as I just wrote it out to be. We were rejected by 3-4 banks first and given no feedback as to why. (Apparently it’s against bank policy to disclose.) But after a frustrated rant to one of the final bank agents, someone cracked and told us what our issue was: one of our student loans was in collections because of a failure on the federal government's part to update their records.

With that cleared up, we were off to the races. Kinda. 

With our equity injection saved (20% of the loan amount, which maxed at $250K, if I remember correctly, so our initial number wasn’t too far off), Jeronica’s coffee experience, my well-paying job (that’s not me saying that; I was accidentally cc’d on an email from someone who said, “Where does she work to be pulling in this kind of money a year!?”), my house (an unexpected addition, but YOLO), and a last minute co-sign from our mother, we were finally off to the races.

We’re sure there were more challenges, but the truth is we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We were completely naive. We did expect things to be hard though, which probably helped. Beyond getting money, nothing really came up that we found particularly noteworthy. 

(FAQs for another day will include topics of finding our first location, race, the pandemic, and current challenges operating the business.)

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That’s it for today! Becoming better storytellers – both written and verbal – is part of our personal/professional development, and for all those dreamers out there, you should consider adding this skill to your plans too. We have no doubt the interview requests will be coming your way soon! ;) 

We’ll be back with more, and please feel free to email us or comment with any questions you have. 

Thanks for reading!

TTYS, b