In a city where the specialty coffee scene is run by people who call anything approaching chain status a “sellout,” the words of Brandon Sardi feel like blasphemy. “We’re inspired by Blue Bottle and Starbucks,” says Sardi, who runs the social media sensation pop-up Poorboy Coffee along with his partner Alexis Howard. But Sardi is unabashed about his ambitions, which put profits before bean worship. “We wanted to start a grassroots business,” he said, “and see how big we can build it.”
Thanks to its highly watchable, warts-and-all reels on Instagram, Poorboy Coffee has become one of the buzziest pop-ups in town, having built a following for creative cold brew drinks during residencies at Bodega in North Beach and the former Queens space in the Inner Sunset. But it was only eight months ago, way back in February, when the couple found themselves nearly broke after two other failed business attempts, including selling fresh pasta and vegan pizza. They were looking for their next thing.
With just $500, they bought a commercial cold brew maker — “basically a 5-gallon bucket with a spigot on it,” Sardi said — and a few bags of Saint Frank beans. With no prior brewing experience, they read everything they could about making great coffee, leaning on industry friends, including Reef Bessette of Coffee Movement, for advice. They’ve since invested in an espresso machine and have expanded their menu to include shots and iced rose lattes. Poorboy’s drinks, like the North Beach, which blends cold brew with nonalcoholic rum, and the iced rose latte wouldn’t be out of place at any top coffee shop in town.
However, their true secret to success has had less to do with achieving the perfect extraction, than mastering the art of social media — including a lot of transparency. Poorboy Coffee’s Instagram account is closing in on 60,000 followers — in the range of far more established brands like Sightglass and Ritual.
They provide some recipes for cold brew drinks, but mostly, Howard, whose full-time job is in marketing and social media, shoots videos of Sardi giving viewers a tutorial on bootstrapping a coffee business, even sharing Poorboy’s gross revenue and net income — $85,393 and $36,746, respectively, as of August 8. The couple says they never intended to turn Sardi into an influencer, but these days he also generates income through partnerships with brands, including Square and Fiverr.
So are they more serious about coffee or about becoming influencer–entrepreneurs? “People make it seem like you can’t do both,” Howard says. But they point out that most customers aren’t particularly concerned with the integrity of their cold brew. “They’re putting milk and sugar in nice coffee,” Howard says, “so we try to keep that in mind.”
In mid-September, the couple began raising money to open a brick-and-mortar shop. Using the crowd-funding site SMBX, which lets individuals invest sums as small as $50 into small businesses, they gathered $57,590 in just a few weeks. While they hunt for a permanent space, they’ve put the pop-up on pause. But they’re confident that once they resume, customers will come — both for the coffee and the story.
“We’re very aware of how people see us,” Howard says, admitting that some customers had doubts about their coffee bonafides. “But then those same people came to our pop-up and totally changed their opinions about us.”