They Made Ski Poles. Then They Opened A Café in San Francisco.
What the founders of Yardsale, Cristina and Kelly, understand about third spaces that most are still getting wrong
This Coffee Founders series is where I sit down with the people building café culture, to find out what actually worked, what nearly broke them, and what they’d tell you before you sign a lease.
A few months before our call, Kelly McGee and Cristina Ashbaugh were smashing out the facade of an abandoned pharmacy with a hammer, in full view of the street, with nothing screening them from passers-by.
People kept stopping to ask what was coming.
“Some people were like, oh thank god, the building has been vacant for too long! I was like, okay. Right. So yeah, I don’t want to screw this up.”
I love that answer. It’s the least romantic version of market validation I’ve ever heard and also the most honest. No focus group, no survey, just strangers on a San Francisco pavement telling two people with a hammer that the neighbourhood was ready.
Now, before we go any further, something you need to know, because it changes how you should read the rest of this:
Kelly and Cristina did not open a café the way most of you will open a café.
They already had a profitable business YARDSALE and thus, an audience paying attention. They also hired an experienced general manager a month before opening, and if their café lost money in year one, that was totally OK.
Very few of you reading this post has that.
So I’m not going to hand you their playbook and pretend it’s transferable in full.
What I want to do is separate the two piles: the decisions they could only make because of the safety net, and the decisions that cost nothing and would work just as well if you were funding this on a personal loan and stubbornness.
