The tech YouTuber who opened a coffee shop

For the past 8 months, David Cogen has been surviving a treble life. By day: a YouTuber and creator, the look of TheUnlockr, reviewing phones and investigating ebikes and explaining however nutrient smokers truly work. By nighttime and greeting and each azygous different disposable infinitesimal successful between: a java store entrepreneur, moving to get a Brooklyn spot called Coffee Check up and running. The full happening started precocious past twelvemonth and escalated quickly. He needed a caller workspace aft his erstwhile lease ended, had a concern thought for it that didn’t rather cookware out, decided to repurpose his caller abstraction into a java roastery, and past realized determination was a beforehand doorway to the street. Why not unfastened a cafe, too?

Coffee Check has been unfastened since precocious August, and connected the greeting I visit, it’s impressively engaged for a brand-new spot hidden down an different residential thoroughfare successful Greenpoint. The abstraction is airy and open, with a agelong antagonistic and barroom connected the close broadside and a large communal woody array connected the left. A lawsuit sits successful a comfy seat successful the corner, taking a enactment telephone astatine a amazingly precocious volume. There are outlets everywhere, the Wi-Fi is blisteringly fast, and the astute lighting setup is rigged to some look bully and support the indoor plants alive. It’s your section java shop, designed by a immense tech geek.

Cogen himself walks successful astatine astir 10:30AM, checks successful with the baristas, and past offers maine a circuit of the place. He walks maine done the java shop, past done a locked solid doorway into the backmost fractional of Coffee Check’s space, which is simply a afloat functional accumulation workplace that different creators and companies tin rent connected Peerspace. (If you’re counting, that’s present 3 businesses he’s running: YouTube, coffee, and landlord.) He’s peculiarly excited astir the kitchen, which isn’t thing you tin usually find successful a rentable workplace — and he’s acceptable it up truthful it’s casual to region and adhd appliances, successful the hopes of doing immoderate room gadget reviews connected YouTube. A clump of e-bikes, from different video, beryllium implicit successful the corner, adjacent to a monstrous Samsung TV that is for a forthcoming video. 

Eventually, Cogen leads maine into the podcast studio, a immense booth with a sofa and 2 chairs that helium says helium got from Finland — and got astatine a discount by offering to fto the booth treble arsenic the company’s New York showroom. (That’s 4 businesses.) Cogen sits connected a chair, points maine to the couch, fires up the Logitech microphones, and starts telling maine his story.

On this occurrence of The Vergecast, the 2nd successful the two-part miniseries that we’re calling “How to Make It successful the Future,” Cogen tells the communicative of however a YouTuber becomes a java store owner. We spell each the mode backmost to however the operation “coffee, check” became portion of his marque successful the archetypal place, past excavation into however helium turned a emotion for java into a heavy cognition of it and what it took to get Coffee Check up and running.

Cogen has spent a batch of clip reasoning astir the premix of contented and java successful his beingness going forward. After 13 years of surviving the always-on creator life, there’s thing romanticist and slower astir moving a section business. But he’s besides spent years filming his java for his videos; does helium aspire to beryllium a java YouTuber, too? And tin you marque contented astir your concern without becoming a contented concern and changing the full intent of the happening you’ve created? Cogen is wrestling with the aforesaid things each creator deals with — and he’s enactment his wealth and clip into trying to marque it better.

If you privation to cognize much astir everything we sermon successful this episode, present are immoderate links to get you started: