Carlos Aguilar, Founder of Mestizo Coffee

Basically as an artist, my coffee is my album, my coffee is my mixtape. And the cool thing is you can drink it, you could put this in your mouth, you can actually get something material kind of into you, you know, in the process. So I was very intentional. So there were things that I knew I didn't want to do. One thing I wanted to do was say a couple of things with the brand messaging. One, Mexican Americans appreciate and produce high quality craftsmanship. You could see it in the pyramids.

You could see it in our law practices. You can see it when we order Top Chef Miskell and when we pay for the most expensive strain of weed like we do this year. I'm saying like we will pay for you see it in our three hundred and eighty dollars sneakers. We will pay for it if it's good. Now, most Mexican American coffee drinkers aren't even up on the fact that there's this thing called specialty coffee, that most of the coffee that they're drinking is bullshit, industrial grade trash.

So I'm coming in kind of as an evangelist saying, hey, there's good news out there. We like good shit, but we're drinking that shit. But I got the good shit, you know, like essentially like as simple as that. So that presents its own challenges, too, when I'm trying to convert people into a more expensive kind of category. But I'm with it because, again, I know we spend the money. That's such an important part.

Right. I think that, you know, especially we saw the census and we continue to see the rise in Latinos, Latinas, Hispanics, whatever we can get into that whole thing on, what do we call ourselves. But, you know, the United States has always been multicultural. But what we're seeing more and more in the last couple of decades is the disposable income of people, of color, of people, of different races and ethnicities. And so a brand like yours is

important. How does that play into it in terms of the rise of the disposable income, the rise of our ethnic group to kind of have more purchasing power in the United States now? Well, one thing I'm recognizing is the value of the data just off the top. Like, one thing I need to constantly do is to check my instinct and impulse against

data. And so one way I do that, in fact, there's a great research firm headed by a Mexican-American called Think Now Research who had some great research around Mexican Americans and premium alcohol and the data around that demonstrated that Latinos prefer high end products to have higher end package. OK, all right. All right. So that that was like that's really valuable data. I don't know who else is asked. Like, not a lot of people are asking that question to our audience.

You know, I'm saying and the fact that they're asking that question and that I was able to find that piece of data is going to inform what I do moving forward because I'm in that category. So my impulse most of the time, you know, that's that's that's part of the equation. Right. Of course, with anything, you kind of got to go with instinct. And I want to do what I want to do or not what other people tell me to do or whatever. So you kind of it's a it's a soup, you know, and then of the day.

But I will try to kind of look at behavior generally. And then more specifically, how are the people who are buying my coffee, behaving, you know, and then kind of just getting more granular, like in terms of. So it's going to be easy for me to get lost in trying to chase this huge Latino market. Yeah. And trying to do all this things to say, hey, I'm over here when I have three hundred people who've already said I fuck with your brand, here's my money.

I'm turning my attention to them to kind of build it kind of organically is super smart. And I think what we're seeing, especially with would you call your brand a direct consumer brand?

Is this kind of recognition that you can go deeper, right, like a brand can be deeper and have have more to it and still vibe and people will still want to buy it and still want to go and grow from that versus, you know, what we've learned in the advertising world is, you know, before quadron or what is the biggest total potential demographic that you can have there. So I love that your data and not data driven. So you have the brands, you have the insights. How do you get the product?

Do you have your unroasted? Are you collaborating? How do you actually make the coffee? Most of specialty coffee is a white boys sport, you know, so and I'm not even in the front. I do. I do like the white boy, Pacific Northwest specialty coffee esthetic. It is a lie like I Karak with it, you know, I'm saying. But that's it's not my it's not my native kind of vibe. But I could get I could get down. I like it. So most especially the coffee is is a white man's sport.

I'm friends with the most prominent Mexican-American roaster in the U.S. His name is Angel Medina and he's out of Portland, Oregon. And so I work with him to develop profiles to fit my audience. So the cool thing about that is, of course, that I'm doing business with another kind of Mexican-American entrepreneur in the coffee space. And the work he's doing in Portland is kind of making a difference in how people view the Mexican American coffee drinker. So it's relative.

So it gets roasted up in Portland, although I did do a collaboration locally with the roaster named Brian Gomez, Mexican American roaster out of Southern California, you know, I view it as collaboration's, like, who's doing the work that I want to be associated with and then partnering with them to put out excellent product. It does feel like the early days of kind of craft, right.

Where it seems like there's some originality now in the United States and there's different vibes, different tastes, different textures that are going on. The do is a similarity there. Absolutely. No, I'm actually taking a lot of cues from the craft brew scene and there's a lot of interesting stuff happening around collaborations, artists and beer brands. And then even in California, it's like it's Latinos who are at the forefront of doing some of these interesting collaborations.

So I'm watching what's happening there. I recently put out two collaborations that were inspired by what was happening in the industry. Let's talk about this. The first collaboration was with the rapper Alemanno, who's in a group called The Visionaries, who's a kind of legendary underground group in Los Angeles. Alemanno has a passion for coffee. So we put out an album that's connected to the bag of coffee, scan the QR code, get the coffee.

More than anything, it was a marketing experiment to see if street where culture, rather to see if kind of the tactics around streetwear and hype this culture might be applied to coffee. OK, which is to say, if we put out a limited crop of these bags. Yeah, that's a collaboration. Limited drop the cost of the coffee, if it was just coffee, would have been twenty three dollars. Well twenty five

maybe. But because it has the album on it and you get this bundle and you get to be part of this one hundred and twenty three people who got it, the cost is forty dollars. And so it was an experiment to see whether people would actually pay pay more for this thing and people have. So I was like, OK, interesting, let me do this again. So I doubled down and released a second collaboration with the producer, a beat maker piece by video. And this collaboration is called Black Love.

This bag of coffee scanned the code again. You get an album whose music is inspired. By the theme of black love music, and there's a whole there's a whole bundle that goes along with it, too. Let's talk a little bit about the come up of QR codes. Right. So I love it. Right? You told me. Check out the bag. A particular code got beats almost instantly. You know, we both have been in advertising for a while, five, 10 years ago, QR codes recording. Nobody was using them.

They weren't happening. But they're actually useful now in my life, especially. I've been at restaurants where like, here's the menu or pay with the QR code. Can you talk a little bit about your experimentation with QR codes and the value that's brought to your brand? Sure. I mean, the cool thing about coffee is the thing that attracted me to it as a product is the fact that we one of the things that we touch on a daily basis that we drink, it is like the bag is like part of our our ritual.

And it actually opened up opens up an avenue for a lot of ways to maybe deepen our connection with our consumers. And so that was my thought around, including a QR code on my bags. If you by my standard Rosta QR code will take you to what I call extraction and online coffee shop, which is only available if you have the coffee. Right, so you can get fat content there, video and music content.

And then with the albums, with the collaborations with the hip hop artists, those QR codes take you to a site where you're able to play music and I'm able to deepen the storytelling around the product. So, you know, I've treated it the QR code as a kind of special wristband that gives you access to this cool content. And you're right, some people still are slow to, like, adopt usage even though it's sitting on their bag, which is why I sent you

the message. Just say, you know, don't forget to give it a try, you know, because some people are like, oh, shit, I forgot my gum has a QR code. I was I was tempted to scan it, but I was like, I don't need a fucking scandal gum QR code so I could understand why people are like, I'm having a scandal copy code. So like I get it and it's gum. I don't need it started. Yeah. You also outside of the coffee world, you also have a block.

The grandad talk to me a little bit about the genesis of that, the work you're doing there and what's it all about. Big Brother. Dad, I started that blog maybe five or six years ago when I just wanted to do some writing in public, as it were. Like I had some funny stuff I wanted to reflect on around parenthood and I wanted to share it. And it's really as modest an ambition is that.

But what I've done to date, I've probably published a hundred articles for the articles, one driven by the impulse to just kind of represent Brown fatherhood publicly, like I'm a Mexican-American father living in Los Angeles. This is what it's like to raise a

kid. My experience as a Mexican-American, as a third generation Mexican-American who doesn't speak Spanish but who lives in Los Angeles, which is predominantly Latino, is going to be different than maybe people's immediate perception of what it means to be a Hispanic dad in Los Angeles. Some Hispanic fathers don't even speak English. So I thought it was important for me to be out there and say, hey, this is my experience, it's representative of others.

And then, hey, brands like if you're thinking about Brown fatherhood, consider this experience in the process. You know, I'm saying because we have different experiences, it's an important one. You know, I share some similarities there. I'm Puerto Rican, don't speak Spanish. Father Side didn't really grow up with them. So it's a weird vibe. When I come into these meetings, especially in the agency or the sales side, they want to kind of hit me with their you know, we did some Latino Hispanic

investigation. And here's what we're hearing and talk Spanish language. I'm like, oh, wait, wait, I don't speak Spanish. Why are you are you showing this to me? Can you talk about that? Difficulty of perception is reality on what it means to be Latina? Yeah, for sure. Like, I got my first after I got back from Mexico, I got my first job in television writing for Telemundo, English language network called Mundos.

So Telemundo in 2003 launched an English language network, kind of like a their version of MTV. OK, was it geared towards a younger audience? Was the idea there that this is not your grandmother's Telemundo? Exactly. And then they took another bit, which was that the biggest audience at the time was by a hundred percent American, one hundred percent Mexican or a hundred percent Latino. One hundred percent American.

So it was like and they want their programing to be Spanglish sized, like a mix of English and Spanish like that was the notion that that was the area we were in. And I think the data supported that notion at that time. And at that time, again, it was the notion that we are Spanish speakers, we adopt this American English language and we adopt American customs in the process of assimilating. Even at that point, I was third

generation. I represented this big a smaller share of the demography of Latinos as a whole, as English dominant. But in the last twenty years, I think. Well, the data. Showing that we have at least two thirds of Latinos in the U.S. prefer their media in English, one third are English, only one third are bi lingual, but consume the majority of their media in

English. And one third is that immigrant population that speaks Spanish and unfortunately gets most of the ad dollars and attention because the people in charge can't understand what's happening on the ground all the time. I love the writer room stuff. Can we dig into that a little bit? How how did you bring yourself into the writer's room? How are you how did you make sure that there was different perspectives inside the writing because it was reality television?

And were you doing some scripted as well or. No, scripted. All unscripted. But as you know, unscripted has scripted. It's scripted, baked into it. So, yeah. So I was doing so some of the cooler experience I had a chance to produce. Wow, this is cool or not, but produce Bristol Palin's lifetime reality series, which sent me to Alaska up to the Palin compound of funny spending time with Bristol and Willow and do it work in reality. Of course, again, the media is not a brown man's sport.

The difference I can tell you, though, I worked at a white owned media company for about 10 years and at this black owned advertising agency for five years. And I can tell you the difference between being at a minority owned company and being at a white owned company. Often you'll hear about this kind of burden around kind of code switching and kind of having to perform.

Yeah, me, I felt because I was one of the not only on most occasions brown people around, I had to do some sort of different justification, exploit like overexplaining the reason why yet I belong here. You know, I'm saying like and where I work now, all that shit, like, I don't have to worry about none of that. I don't know why or how that's true. But yeah, it's just so crazy, like it's just so crazy.

Like the difference is that the ownership or is that in yourself that you don't have to worry about that? I think it probably it's all probably it's all in my it's probably all in my head even in that first case, you know, and it's like I'm just doing it too much or whatever. But no, I think, of course culture or company culture does come from the top down in a lot of ways, or at least leadership does impact company culture.

I think when you get people of culture working in a place where it's diverse and the leadership itself is diverse, the ownership is diverse, I don't know. It just feels like we don't have to explain a whole bunch of shit that we feel we'd have to explain otherwise.

Yeah, I mean, I feel you on the you know, sometimes there's that I have to speak for all Mexican Americans or all Puerto Rican Americans like where when it's more diverse, you're speaking for yourself and your right and opinion versus you're now on the hook for sixty five million other people and their tastes and what they're after. Well, see, like me, I have less a problem with that's problematic for sure. I have a lesser problem there. Like, hey, you expect me to speak

for everybody. That's silly for sure. But my problem was also like, well, you know, I have a right to speak, right. Because, you know, I went to college. Right. You know, I read books. Right. Like, you know you know, I know who these guys are, right. You know, I study well, you know, like it's like, calm down, bro. Like, you don't need to do that all the time except in environments where you feel like, fuck, I need to do this all the time. I don't know. It's, you know. Yeah, that's a big one.

Right. Is is always having to put up your credentials. Right. Your bona fides have to go up every single time that you talk. Do you still feel that way or do you feel like, you know, if that stuff's in the past and now I can I can just focus on putting pen to paper and making this work while, you know, I do want more out of life and I do anticipate having to demonstrate some credentials or whatever, like as long as you do more people go like I thought, I'm I'm going to trust you with more.

Show me that I should add or whatever. So I get that. And so I do think that will continue. But maybe I just need to. I guess what I get if I get wealthy or whatever I like, I guess I really don't give a fuck or whatever, but like, until then, I'll definitely I think this is all part of the game, like a trust me, because I've done this, you know, I'm saying thank you all the thing. And then trust me some more because I've done this bigger.

Yeah, and, you know, there's the wealth part of it, but then there's also the generational part of it, right? You have kids? I have kids. How important is it to you to kind of show your your kids, hey, there's a path for us, right? This we can make some generational wealth. We can go to college and do all these different things. Yeah, I'm surprised that my daughter, she savage with the roasting bro. Like, be careful.

Just the other day she said she said she looked at my hair line and she says, Dad, when I see your hairline, I think of the McDonald's song don't don't live in it. I was like, oh shit. The reseating that badly. That said, I'm also surprised that she's paying really close attention to what's happening with Misty. So coffee, she's like, oh, dad, I heard you talk about this person who bought so many bags. Oh, hey, Dad, how's that collaboration going?

Ah. So I see that they are watching and that's important, you know, and of course, like I am building Misty so, so that there is something, if they're so inclined that they can take the reins on or be involved with as they're getting older, I will integrate them into what I'm doing with Misty. So so it is exciting to see that they are paying attention, that they feel ownership over, too, over the success over the over the story of how this brand is going to grow. So it's cool.

Like I mean, it's hard. You can turn the pandemic. It's probably more a family project. Yeah, it would have been pre pandemic because it's all happening right here. Williams And it's all happening in the house. I'm learning about growing and cultivating an audience.

I'm learning listen, if I wanted and I have family who's in real estate and the crushing debt right now and I'm like, damn, I should be maybe putting this effort into selling a a loan or our house are like there's definitely more money to be made putting in the effort that I'm putting into what I'm doing here. But what I'm doing here fuels and allows me to express my passions, know I'm sandwiches, creativity, community comedy, hip hop, top shelf experiences.

And that's what matters, man, that you know, that you're feeling this and that, that the entrepreneurial bug that you call it is providing positive vibes for you and your family. Right. That that's important. Is this something that, you know, was passed down this? Is it something that you wanted to do as a little kid? Were you starting little companies as a kid or is this something that kind of came a little bit later in life?

There's something about negotiating, transacting, connecting that was cultivated as a child for sure, because I did have the job of junior careers. Hi, my name is Carlos Aguilar. I'm a Junior Careers. We're a nonprofit organization designed to help At-Risk kids like me stay off the streets. Would you please buy this can go door to door, bro. As a twelve year old, I was going door to door and strange. OK, how about this?

A fucking twenty three year old rocker picked us up like 12 kids up in the back of a van with no seatbelt, threw us all in there, took it to a strange neighborhood. And we all loved around these boxes selling for dollar candies where we'd keep 90 cents. Wow. This was a legal racket, apparently, and probably still happens. But that's how I cut my teeth on the door to door vibes. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I did a little door to door myself

in college. I was in Lawton, Oklahoma, which is where Fort Sill military base is, knocking door door to door, trying to sell educational books. And it was a trip. It I think it's helped me throughout my life, but also scarred me for sure, because I was talking to military families who were like, what are you doing? Knocking on my door, man? This is 25, 30 years later. I still tell my wife. I'm like, I think I think I was I smell a familiar tree.

I think I was on this block as a 12 year old, like this neighborhood seems familiar. Like is weird PTSD for sure. Talk about some of the quick thinking that you have to do as a door to door salesman or pitching something like this where the response is always right. If they open the door, it's going to be I don't want it. How do you work with that? Walk me through some of your wrap there. Oh, man, I love it.

I actually recorded I recorded one of my most recent the audio of one of my most recent transactions with a with a with a burglary down the street, cause I want to see like I wanted to hear how it went and see what I could do better or whatever. But of course, like when I'm walking up I'm looking for a source of connection. Yeah. Can I get can I gather something about this person. And then I'm often thinking about my first kind of line, like then

getting deeper into it. Maybe I'm trying to ask the question. So first off the top, I see that you sell coffee here. Where do you get it from? Are are you looking to sell more premium coffee? What I did recently. So what I've decided to do with coffee. So you might suspect like the existing coffee shops don't want my coffee in their shop. So getting my coffee and coffee shops is what people tell me. Hey, bro, can I get your coffee? Put it in coffee shop. It's like nobody wants my coffee in

their shop. But there are probably coffee adjacent spaces that might consider carrying my coffee like a bagel shop, like a donut shop, like a Bundarra sells like. All right, let me find some spots locally. Are are a barbershop, which is I do have my coffee at a barbershop in Alabama. Yeah, that's good. That's smart. So it's like trying to buy these, these alternative distribution channels. I went to a local liquor store. The dude looked like a homey cool.

I said very likely that he at least listen to me. I mentioned the fact the coffee is roasted locally. One of the names of the coffee is the name of is Route 66, which is a popular, you know, highway. That is where we are. So I try to, again, just try to find the connection. Yeah, I'm familiar. Try to demonstrate the value. Hey, I bite the bullet on these early accounts. This is on consignment. Cool. Does it cost you anything? You get to keep whatever you like, so you get to keep and I keep the

rest. And easy breezy bro. You don't have to buy it or anything. I'll just I'll take the risk. We'll put it up here. We'll see if it sells and yeah. I don't know, that's that's kind of my approach to trying to convert people face to face. It's a great approach. And you know, what's funny is, you know, as I've been talking to a lot of these people starting their business, a lot of the first sale is cold call.

It sounds like it's the same for, you know, friends and family are going to support and help out and buy a couple bags or do that. But it really does come down to the cold calling. And, you know, are you seeing that? That's where a lot of the sales are coming. Initially, people talk about humility, are being humble as a goal, and it is of line a virtue. But we forget that humiliation is connected to humility.

And like there's nothing more humiliating than asking someone to buy something from you. Like, I don't know if that's true for you. And I mean, like, I guess if I had if I can borrow gold on discount, I wouldn't be. But like, I'm trying to convince people to come up out of their pocket and I'm asking them five or six times. And that's not a great feeling. But it's definitely part, I think, of the bitter pill that I need to swallow if I'm going to grow my business.

And that is both approaching strangers on the cold call front, which is humiliating. Like my first encounter with you is me asking you to buy something from me like that ingrate. I'm saying it's also true from friends and family. Like I don't want to ask people multiple times to buy my coffee, but I know I need to do that if I'm going to grow my business. Yeah. So we've been talking about the sales and the product and the branding.

What are some of the the nitty gritty things of building a business that you were shocked that you had to do or that you were surprised were going to take up more of your day? Well, I was like I considered for a moment, as much as I love the mestizo name, I considered maybe changing my name to either.

Sticker mule coffee or USPSTF coffee, because as much money as I pay these motherfuckers for everything I do, it's like, let's go let's go in together guys like what have we got to do to work together? So like shipping, of course it's killing. It's like it's part of the bitter poison I need to swallow with the DTC business to I can make more money every time I ship out a package. And there are things I need to do to do that. We bag one bag of coffee off me.

It's going to cost twenty five dollars to get to your door, right. It's like nine dollars is a fifty to nine dollars shipping. So but if you buy two bags of coffee you only spend forty dollars and my shipping costs are still the same. If so, I make more margins. When you buy two bags than when you buy one and you save money when you buy two bags versus when you buy one. But most people I'm finding have a subscription fatigue.

People don't want to like, subscribe to another thing I'm saying, even if it saves them money or whatever. So that's part one of the challenges I'm trying to solve for is like how do I encourage people to buy more coffee each time they buy coffee? Are you bundling the coffee together? Kind of like to taste test bundles? I do have a monthly subscription, which is a two bag subscription, but I haven't done like anything about this.

But like do like a pitcher fruit balm in neon chocolate together for thing four for one. Yeah. I should probably encourage for those people who are going to buy mechanically each time I need to encourage them to buy two. Well one thing I did was make shipping free for thirty five and over, which is to compel you to buy a second bag. So it's like OK so if I get a second bag and free shipping I should do this. But yeah.

So that's one kind of shipping is one thing which is like I started this as a DTC and I'm not really, I don't want a coffee, I don't want a coffee shop, I don't want to operate on our own one. But it's making sense to have my product in different stores at the same time for sure. So I'm getting pulled in a couple of directions. I've got to figure out how to maintain profitability.

Yeah, you know, and one difficult part is the allure is going to be the taste, right, is how do you get them to take a little sip? And, you know, so it's a little bit easier for somebody to do a bluebottle or a Stumptown subscription because they're getting that at another story. That's one of the big hurdles that you have right now, right, is how do I get people to taste? And so they know that that it's high quality. Well, OK, that's that's a very good

point. Now, look at it from the other way, too, which is I've always marveled at my interest in Top Chef, where me, my wife will argue about who's the best. We've never tasted anybody's food. You're never right. I'm saying so like two or three hundred people said your coffee tastes good. Are I believe it. Taste good without ever having tasted it. What are they reacting to then? If they're not reacting to the taste, what are they reacting to? And I'm trying to figure that out.

Right. And then I'm a double down on whatever it is that set that convinced, because once they try it like it's going to, then we're good. Like, if they like the coffee and the coffee is good, then we're there. Right. So I wonder. So I don't know that. I should try to get as many people as possible, taste it before buying or something like that, that is part of it for sure. I'd love to do that. I think for you, it's the branding. You know, I think, you know, go to your website.

You create an immersive experience right off the bat, and especially now in this world where, you know, I think they call it the landing where all these brands look the same. Right. They all have kind of that millennial pink or that light blue and the same type of font. And you're coming up hard and rugged. So I think there's something to that to of looking at and going, OK, this this is not that soft.

Millennial brand that I've seen somewhere else, this is coming a little bit a little bit harder, a little bit rough. Sure, I think that's connecting with people as well. You know, and tell me if I'm wrong. And this it does feel like you thought a lot about that brand and you thought a lot about how all of this comes together, all these pieces that it's not just the coffee, but it's still the entire brand of mystique to what it means to you.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it comes out of my experience as a as a hip hop artist, my experience creating media. And I'll tell people that this is really a media lab fronting as a coffee brand. I like that.

Yeah. So it's like, you know, I've probably produced 25 video interviews, some involving comedians about their morning routine, others involving authors and other creatives, scholars discussing issues that seem interesting to me because this is my brand and this is what I want to talk about. I kind of going that route. I produced two comedy roasts. We did a coyote to fuck 20, 20 comedy roasts to launch Misti. So I had like nine comedians roast the year twenty twenty.

And then we did a fuck love comedy roast in February. So again, just creating creating comedy. And then my newsletter, the animated videos, the music can wait to get back into some real world shots. And yeah, it seems you keep yourself very busy with all these creative outlets. What's the one that gives you the most energy? Right. If you could spend all day in one area or do you need to be diversified like that?

One thing that's interesting is that in these collaborations is that I've almost started to run a de facto record label. And it's like because I've had to my collaborations, for example, two different artists I've worked with so far and I'm talking to four others. Right. So it's like I imagine this is what a record labels like. I get on the phone, talk to this artist. How are you? What's the promotional plan? What are the assets? What do you what's on your calendar? Who are you working with?

Who can we connect with on your part of the. All right, great. Go click three. Oh, a whole other person. Oh, a whole other personality. The whole other everything. Abreau What do you got going on that are not doubted it up that are all the while I'm over here. So that's kind of that's kind of cool. Yeah. I'm happy to do that. I didn't think I'd be that guy, but it's kind of interesting to to be able to bring people together to do this thing. It's kind of it's kind of fun.

So that that's that's what I'm doing at the core is bringing people together to put cool shit out into the world. And we just hope it catches on so that I can continue doing it, so I continue paying for this shit. You know, what recommendations would you give to people who want to start a business thinking about it but are still just grinding away at their day job and not doing it?

And, you know, for me personally, I was that guy, right, that if you grabbed a beer with I was like, I want to start my business. And it took until I was out of a job to do it. What would you recommend to somebody who's sitting there hoping to start their business? I would recommend two things.

One co-product overservice because of the product, of course, you can build a site and sell 24/7 and then connect with the community, whether that's a small business entrepreneurship community or its alumni group. Ah, it's a startup community. I recently connected with a cultural online cultural community called CASA, which has a bunch of entrepreneurs and creatives in it that gather on slack.

And when I got started, they were kind of the folks in that group were foundational in sharing, buying, talking about and bringing it up. And these are all people I most whom I've never met in person, who I've only gotten to know during the pandemic. And if I do some quick and fast math, probably a good 25 to 30 percent of my sales have come to this group of people who I don't even know like that. I'm saying so. And I think a lot of us are even today.

I don't know if you're like this, but I just interacted with this dude who has a new salsa brand out of San Antonio, and that seemed like a product to me. I was like and this is kind of maybe my messaging that I want to integrate moving forward in some way, which is there are a bunch of products that I buy that I'd much rather buy from people that I know are from brands that reflect my cultural values in some ways. Absolutely. And that's fucking deodorant. That's that's hair gel. That's coffee.

It's salsa. And so if this dude saw this hopefully is good because I'll keep buying his salsa. But I'm kind of as a consumer on the consumer side, I think more of us are looking are looking to spend our money in ways that better reflect our values. Absolutely. So build that product, build the community and buy from the people you know and love. I love that. So, Carlos, thank you so much. This has been a super fun time talking to you. If people want your coffee, where do

they get it? They go to Misti. So dark coffee. And if you're in the San Gabriel Valley, hey, you get it online because but you're going to see it popping up in tire shops, wig shops. I'ma try to get it in all these upscale locations now. I love that man. Yeah. I mean, to say it one more time, where can they get the coffee mestizo coffee with our coffee. And you can also find us on IG at Mestizo Coffee also. Carlos, thank you so much. Thank you, Matthew. Pleasure. Thank you for listening to the

change. It produced by Elena Wiedlin with original music by Rodney Heizer. If you liked what you heard, we'd appreciate your support. I like it sharing, leaving a comment and subscribing wherever you listen. Thanks once again until next time.