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.
- Welcome to Learn with Shopify.
I'm Shuang Esther Shan.
Find your niche;
you probably heard this advice before
for growing your YouTube channel or business,
but how and how do you do this right?
Today, I'm joined by the go-to coffee expert on YouTube:
James Hoffmann.
And let me tell you, he's doing something right.
James has close to 2 million subscribers on YouTube,
he's won the World Barista Championships
and started a coffee roastery back in 2008.
James is here to now talk about how he turned
his passion for coffee into a thriving online business
and how his experience can hopefully help you do the same.
James, welcome to Learn with Shopify.
- 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?
- That's a good question.
I feel like 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.
I got into it like most people do,
which is just the need of a job
that ideally paid frequently and paid okay,
and that was it.
I started working in coffee
before I started drinking coffee, which is kind of weird.
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
and it became I guess a full-blown obsession pretty quickly.
- And that obsession has actually turned
into a few businesses
before you actually ever came onto YouTube.
Tell us about a few of the businesses you started.
- Well, I suppose the biggest one
was back in 2000 and I guess 8,
which was Square Mile Coffee Roasters,
which was a coffee roasting company.
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 Prufrock Coffee,
so we kind of have our toes in
physical bricks and mortar retail as well.
And aside from that,
just other little bits and pieces,
I started a magazine for a while, 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 touchpoints
relating to coffee.
I wanted to ask about Square Mile
because you said it started in 2008
and very quickly you actually built a online store
for the roastery which happened to be on Shopify;
and you were actually one of the earliest
adopters for Shopify.
How did you find our platform
and why did you think to sell online back in 2008?
- We were kind of weird in our setup.
We 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.
As for Shopify, I suspect more than anything else
it was word of mouth.
And it would've probably been someone in North America
who was ahead of me in the game
and I would've chatted to those people and been like,
"What are you using?"
and everyone was just dipping their toes and stuff.
I remember August 2008 turning on the online store
and being astonished the 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 hundred thousands.
- Yeah.
- Tell 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, well maybe five years ago,
and it was a kind of fascinating moment for me.
I'd come up with a product idea
for kind of YouTube related 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.
"What am I doing?
"This doesn't have to be this way.
"I know it doesn't have to be this way.
"We should be smart about this
"and integrate third party warehousing into this,
"integrate print or 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 it in boxes
"and doing all that kind of stuff
"because other people can do that at scale
"far better than we can."
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 really easy warehouse integration,
that's been game changing and utterly essential.
I could never go back to shipping
thousands and thousands of products by hand,
no interest in that.
- 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.
Did it feel somewhat intimidating to enter into YouTube?
Because I find you were not
quote unquote the typical YouTuber to be entering the scene
and you weren't vlogging your life,
you're sharing about a specific topic.
So how is that entrance into this new platform at the time?
- My very first video, some which are gone now thankfully,
were 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,
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 to 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,
and 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 think 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.
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, 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.
- After all these years creating content
in so many different ways,
what is your advice now for people wanting
to get into content creation?
- There's a couple of different things.
I mean, firstly, you have to have something to say.
Spending time to develop expertise is really important.
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,
and 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 gonna be immensely frustrating
'cause you're just not gonna find an audience
because there's no point 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 wanna start making videos
those will be useful to a much wider audience of people.
I suppose the second piece is just like
it's okay to be terrible at the start
'cause no one's gonna see it.
That's kind of it from my point of view.
They were definitely terrible at the start and that's okay.
People are always so reluctant to share anything.
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.
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.
And 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.
- Sure.
I feel like in principle there's a fundamental difference
between a personal channel and a brand channel.
And 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 an individual;
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, 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.
I'm not showing you this stuff so you'll buy the coffee;
that's not the point.
I'm showing you the stuff because I want you
to love coffee more.
And if you're really interested,
you might go and look and see what I do and some people do
and they go and find the other businesses and that happens;
but that's not the purpose of the content,
that's not the purpose of the videos,
that's not the purpose of the whole channel,
and that kind of stuff.
So for me, I think it's important to keep them separate.
I think I want a relationship that is more direct
and has more trust in it
than you would ever really normally have
with a kind of brand social media presence.