Getting caught in a 💩storm, and getting through

Well what an interesting last few days it has been. It’s been a roller coaster of emotions - started off good, then turned bad and ugly, and then there was good at the end.

TL;DR - Ming and I got caught in some back-to-back online hits. It sucked and hurt.

The first of the hits started with a segment on NBC Bay Area that we were invited to do on Thursday. When we were first approached to do the segment, we thought it was a great opportunity to share our project and vision that we had worked very hard for. They ended up doing what I thought was a pretty benign/cordial write-up and video on their website. The already short 2 minute segment was condensed into an IG Reel, which featured 20-30s of Ming explaining the now infamous, “mobile coffee experience platform”. Wow the internet immediately pounced on that. I mean, a platform is literally something that holds other things up… as in, the custom platform that Ming designed and built completely from scratch, holds the espresso machine, grinders, etc.

The second hit, came from the coffee news publication, Sprudge, also in the form of an IG post. Sprudge had also written a pretty fair article about our project, and we appreciated the nod to our upcoming shop.

However, people only took what they saw from IG at face value, and pretty much ripped us. It was pretty rough. We had expected that there would be people that would express their hatred for the truck, which we encountered some when the first IG Reel of the truck was released in February. We’ve been using the truck in our Farmers’ Market and pop-up services since then, and it’s been performing extremely well for our needs and priorities (which we laid out here).

Somehow, these last two hits reached two different audiences - those much more vocal than the initial reach our first Reel had.

There were some of the expected, “the truck is so ugly” type of comments. But then came a lot of personal attacks on our character, our mission, our approach to our coffee, etc. That was what hurt the most, because we indeed pour our whole heart and being into this mission.

We both quit our tech jobs to start the coffee business, which is much more than the Cybertruck (oh, I can’t forget “mobile coffee experience platform”, can I?), because we have a burning passion and love for serving people and all things specialty coffee, and the intersection of those two things. Our mission has been to bring excellent coffee experiences to people. It’s been a journey to get to this point, only after one year officially in business (read about it here).

We also have much bigger goals to help make an impact across the value chain for specialty coffee - upstream to our producer partners that we work with to validate the value of their work, across to building a business that can provide sustainable career growth for baristas who want to work in coffee, and downstream to giving our customers the best coffee experience that we can.

It hurt to have people make entire judgments of us based on this project alone, an incomplete story, and/or their personal opinions towards the car and the company behind the car. Seeing people absolutely misconstrue our intentions and purpose was painful, because there was nothing we could do to change anyone’s minds about us.

I also gotta be real, it really pissed me off that people that were attacking Ming (since he was the focus of the IG Reel). Nobody else has seen how hard Ming has worked for this business - while he was fully employed, he was designing and building the entire sliding PLATFORM, AND doing all things related to meticulously selecting and roasting the coffees we serve on bar and on our website, getting our Farmers’ Market booth set-up every week, and designing our upcoming coffee shop. Both of us come from immigrant parents who instilled in us values of hard work and consideration for others, by modeling it themselves. It’s something that we don’t take for granted at all, and we channel that energy into everything we do.

After letting this wave of anger and sadness happen, Ming and I just focused on the next thing we had to do — prepare for our Farmers’ Market service on Sunday. And I knew it would be exactly what we needed to remind us why we’re doing all of this, and encourage us to keep pressing forward.

And it definitely was exactly what we needed. Being able to serve our customers on Sunday — many of them familiar faces, but also many new faces — was the breath of air to lift us out from our sinking.

In the background while we were preparing and conducting our service, we also found out we also had people backing us up on various Internet communities on our behalf — discord (EAF, Briancord), reddit, advocates, allies on Instagram that we had never met before. Y’all are the realest. We received encouraging messages from our friends and family, and industry partners (coffee producers, equipment partners, peers, etc.).

Now that the fumes are settling from the 💩storms (although I have no idea, it could still be brewing. Nor do I care anymore, we stopped reading the comments 3 days ago), we’re grateful that we were brought through our amazing community of friends, family, allies, partners that we wouldn’t be able to do this without. We’re grateful for you sticking by us, and remind us why and who we’re really doing all of this for.

As looking forward to completing our first real café roastery, we’re not stopping anytime soon. We’ve got too much planned to slow down.

Thank you to those who have allowed us to share our mission with you, we’ll be giving it our best.

Concept Art by our friends Derptiles for upcoming fun merch to commemorate this moment.

Possums are special to Moonwake - they’re Ming’s favorite animal. They’re often misunderstood, and judged based on their appearances and misconceptions about them. But they can do a lot of good, including eating ticks and fallen or rotten vegetables.