VN Beans

It took me almost a month but I was finally able to clear and receive my large cargo of Vietnamese Specialty Coffee beans!

Importing requires a ton of documentation and coordination between your farmer and exporters. All this while communicating via FB in Vietnamese. Luckily a year ago i spent 1-month re-learning and honing my Vietnamese, so my written Vietnamese skills made my life so much easier.

Great lesson to be learned. When working with foreign countries, it pays off A SHIT TON to learn the language. I don't think I could've done this if my Vietnamese was poor.

Cheers

Received orders from Facebook ads!! Holy shit it was such an amazing feeling.

I've worked about a dozen projects, and this is the first business that converted a sale on Facebook. Althought CAC was higher my margin, this was huge psychological victory.

I validated my product. HELL YEAH

Next step. Finalize my supply chain from overseas.

Never expect things to go exactly as planned. Try not to hype yourself up too much. That's what I learned.

Last week I set a date to "release the kraken". Haha this was my fun way of saying I was going to launch my first Facebook ad to see what kind of clicks or impressions I'd get.

I hyped myself up for the day to release the kraken...however hahaha fucking facebook flagged me and disabled my account and ad.

Why? Who the fuck knows. The only reason they put was "it violated ad policy" and to refer to their "ad policy" page. Totally vague answer.

So off I go to scour the web and figure out the exact reason my FB ad and account was disabled. Well that policy page has fucking like 10,000 words on it, and I messaged Facebook support over 3 different tickets and they gave the same exact response.

"sorry it violated ad policy, you can request a review with this link"

Well, that fucking link was broken as hell, it didn't even let me select my FB ad account. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️

After realizing how bad the UI/UX for understanding that form was, I finally got facebook support to call me, give me the right link and directions for filing an appeal.

1 day after, "Your FB ad account has been re-activated. Sorry for the inconvenience"

Nice. Now I can release the kraken.

Hard requirement for success and finally found one. After talking to 6 roasters I was finally referred to someone that could help me. My friend also called like 5-10 other roasters.

This was a hard requirement for success, so I'm glad i found someone. Next challenge is import and dealing with coronvirus times.

pretty awesome i got my static pages down. Now i just need to hook shopify into the app. The website took 3 days to code and like...20-30 hours. Probably should've used square space and finish in a day but developer pride got the best of me. Ah well, at least i have the full power of ruby on rails behind my app

We just got up the website domain, email, and social media accounts. Also was able to file LLC online with California. Every day there's progress and it just keeps getting more real and real. Hope to make a sale in 2-3 weeks. Next steps, finding a roaster!

I decided that this was an amazing opportunity to begin working on connecting the two worlds, Vietnam and America through coffee. Everyone knows about Vietnamese Cafe Sua Da, but not many people knew about Specialty Arabica Coffee. Week 1 we started researching into the coffee industry and what the business side looks like

My friend introduced me to some specialty coffee beans from Son La region in North Vietnam. I didn't know anything about coffee, so when I returned to San Francisco, I brewed the coffee and started myself on an amazing coffee adventure. I went deep down the rabbit hole of "what is coffee" and "coffee doesn't have to taste like ass".