No One Would Rent Me a Café In Trendy NYC Neighborhoods, So I Tried Something Risky. Now I Have Three Coffee Shops. To get White Noise Cofee Co. off the ground, I had to believe that if I built my dream café, they would come.... wherever it was.

BIZ Experiencess can be impatient. When we have a great idea, we want to make it happen now. But I've learned that patience — taking time to convince resistant customers, or to prove your concept to dubious investors — can create an outcome much truer to your vision.

Seven years ago, I began trying to open a coffee shop in New York City. I had long worked as a barista, and imagined a café that treated coffee like a performance — the bar acting as a stage, where baristas would pull the espresso shot, weigh it, and heat it to a precise temperature, all while telling the origin story of the beans. I wanted the shop's sounds and smells and visuals to envelop each customer. I'd call it White Noise Coffee Company.

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The trouble was, no one would rent me a space. At least, no one in neighborhoods where you'd expect a "fancy" coffee shop to do well. I was only looking for a 200- or 300-square-foot shop — a closet, really — but I'd never started a business before. I'm a petite Korean girl, and I got a lot of shocked faces when I said I would be the owner.

After three years of noes, I began considering other options. My parents have owned a bodega in Flushing in Queens, New York, since the early 2000s. This wasn't an obvious place to open a café like mine because there isn't a lot of foot traffic, and it's about 90% Asian immigrants. People there go to Starbucks. Nobody drinks the "slow" coffee I wanted to make.

But I believed if I was patient, and took the time to win over customers, my concept would prove itself out. So I went to my parents with a proposal: What if they retired a little early, and let me turn the bodega into a café? It took some convincing, but eventually, they agreed.

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The space was so old you could see the basement through the floorboards. But it was also 2,000 square feet—giant compared to the 200-square-foot spaces I'd been looking at. And the rent was a lot cheaper, so I had more budget to remodel. I made it my dream café: a showroom for my vision.

The day we opened, our very first customer was a man my father's age. He asked for a shot of espresso, and we did our whole process. When he tried the drink, he obviously didn't like it. Our coffee is more subtle than what he'd get at Starbucks; it talks to your tongue with different flavors. We explained this. He listened. We asked if he wanted to try something else. That whole first year, it was like that. There are a lot of busy, impatient people in New York, so we got many reactions to our performance. But over time we learned to shorten our routine while still getting out the story. And our base of regulars grew.

About two years in, something shifted. Owners of buildings in busier neighborhoods noticed our concept and reached out. They were impressed and wanted us to expand into their vacant spaces.

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If I'd gotten what I'd wanted from the start — a tiny closet café in an expensive Manhattan neighborhood — this might not have happened. I wouldn't have been able to show what I could do with a bigger space. I wouldn't have had time to perfect our process, and learn how to win people over.

At the beginning of 2020, we opened in trendier areas in Brooklyn and Manhattan. We recently began roasting and selling our own beans, making us — to our knowledge — the first Korean-woman-owned coffee roaster in New York.

And that first customer, the one who didn't like his espresso? He's been asking to invest. He wants to help us franchise, because he thinks our concept would be successful in all kinds of places. Fortunately, we've already proven that.

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