Coffee Experiment: why a tech YouTuber decided to open a coffee shop

For the past eight months, David Cogen has been leading a double life. Noon: YouTuber and creator, the face of TheUnlocker, reviews phones and test ebikes and explains how food smokers really work. Nights and mornings and all the time in between: a coffee shop entrepreneur, working to get a Brooklyn place called Coffee Check up and running. It all started late last year and quickly escalated. He needed a new place to work after his previous lease ended, he had a business idea that didn’t work out so well, he decided to buy his new place from a coffee roaster, then he noticed that there was a street front door. Why not open a cafe, too?

Coffee Check has been open since late August, and on the morning I visit, it’s surprisingly busy for a new location tucked away down a non-residential street in Greenpoint. The space is airy and spacious, with a long counter and bar on the right and a large wooden table on the left. A customer is sitting in a comfortable chair in the corner, taking a work call at an incredibly high volume. There are shops everywhere, Wi-Fi is surprisingly fast, and smart lighting setups are integrated to look good and keep houseplants alive. Your local coffee shop, designed for the tech giant.

Cogen himself comes in around 10:30AM, checks on the baristas, and gives me a tour of the place. He takes me to a coffee shop, and I walk through a locked glass door into the back part of the Coffee Check space, which is a full-service production studio that can be rented out by other creators and companies in Peerspace. (If you’re counting, that’s now three businesses she owns: YouTube, coffee, and landlord.) She’s especially excited about the kitchen, which isn’t something you usually find in a studio rental — and she’s set it up to be possible. easy to remove and add appliances, hoping to make a kitchen gadget review on YouTube. A bunch of ee bikes, from another video, sit in the corner, next to the awesome Samsung TV for the upcoming video.

Finally, Cogen led me to the podcast studio, a large booth with a couch and two chairs that he said he found in Finland — and got a discount by letting the booth double as the company’s New York showroom. (That’s four businesses.) Cogen sits in a chair, points me to the sofa, turns on the Logitech speakers, and begins to tell me his story.

In this episode of The Vergecastin the second of a two-part miniseries we’re calling “How to Make It in the Future,” Cogen tells the story of how a YouTuber became a coffee shop owner. We take a look back at how the phrase “coffee, check” became a part of his brand in the first place, and dig into how he turned his love of coffee into an in-depth knowledge of it and what it takes to get a Coffee Test. and running.

Cogen spent a lot of time thinking about the mix of content and coffee in his life going forward. After 13 years of living the creative life that’s always open, there’s something romantic and slow about running a local business. But he has also spent years filming his coffee for his videos; Do you aspire to be a coffee YouTuber, too? And can you create content for your business without becoming a content business and changing the entire purpose of what you created? Cogen struggles with the same things every creator faces – and has put his money and time into trying to make it better.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are the links to get you started: